praying the particulars: parenting a talkative child

A Prayer for Parenting a Talkative Child:

God of the Word,

This child never stops speaking. I cannot even hear myself think.

From sun-up to sun-down, he’s trying to figure out his world through words. Constant questions, endless repetition; the same books, the same songs. He wonders every blessed thought aloud, and I become his de facto audience. Or his spelling mentor. Or his number guru.

But too often I tune out and turn away, thinking radio’s music more beautiful or voices on the news more important. I long for adult conversation; I pass over the innocent wonder of a child’s chatter.

Help me to listen, really listen. To bend the ear of my heart to his needs, his wonders, his wants. Let me value his voice like you value mine: unique, worthy, loved.

When my mind spins too busy to hear, quiet my heart to a slower rhythm. When my ears grow tired, let me listen with your own. When my lips slip to let a harsh word pass, let me whisper forgiveness in his small, sweet ear.

And when morning’s bright chirps unravel into evening’s grating whine, let me remember the days when I longed to hear any sound of children bounce off these walls.

God of Scripture and song, you find me in words and I find you there, too. When your Word reminds me to ask and it will be given, to cry out when I am in need, to shout praise and sing thanks – all your words ring true to a toddler as to his mother. He is full of questions. And so am I.

Thank you for his words, his wonder, his life. Which has filled my own to the brim, spilling over with shouts and giggles, yells and cries, questions and challenges.

May he never stop speaking, asking why, or wondering aloud.

May I always keep my life open enough to listen.

May we both bring our words to you in prayer.

With ringing ears and spinning mind,

A tired, talked-at mama

tantrums in the arms of a loving God

My son is currently going through what I’ve dubbed a “contrarian” stage. Our conversations often consist of nothing but clashing over basic facts.

[Editor's note: the child is also stuck in a fascinating yet aggravating stage of linguistic development in which he reverses "you" and "I," thus speaking in rhetorical statements all day long.]

Upon greeting him when waking…

Me: “Good morning, sweet love! Mama’s here to see you!”

S: “Do you NOT want Mama to be with you?”

Mathematical inquiries over breakfast…

S: “What is 5 plus 8?”

Me: “13.”

S: “Do you NOT want 5 plus 8 to be 13?”

Spelling agonies over snack…

S: “How do you spell ‘Mama’”?

Me: “M-A-M-A.”

S: “Do you NOT want it to be spelled M-A-M-A?”

His refutations of my every statement are often accompanied by whining, whimpering or wailing. As if all the NOs weren’t already enough to grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.

These are the BASIC FACTS OF THE UNIVERSE, I want to laugh (or yell). 55 will always follow 54. Sacramento will always be the capital of California. Wednesday will always come after Tuesday. Why are we wasting our time arguing about unchangable truths?

After losing my temper over one too many similar exchanges, I found myself fuming as I washed my hands. God, help me to be patient with him, I prayed, my always prayer.

Then I added, Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to have someone say “no” to your every “yes”?

At which point I caught my own eye in the mirror. And heard God give a simple reply: Yes.

My toddler’s constant naysaying is all-too-familiar, if I’m honest. Because it’s exactly what I often say to God, wrestling away from a loving embrace with all the stubborness that free will and even wilder nature bestow.

I say no to moments to love, chances to grow, opportunities to serve. In choosing my own selfish pride, I’m arguing against a basic fact of the universe: the existence of a loving Creator, in whose constant “yes” rattle all my little “nos.” Maybe being contrarian isn’t just a stage of toddlerhood; it’s a condition of being human.

I get his frustration, sympathize with his desire for control. The world can be an exasperating place to figure out. Maybe I need not just more patience, but more empathy. After all, I still refuse to accept basic facts about existence. Like the inevitable mortality of those I love. Or my own limitations. To name but a few.

Karl Rahner called it the supernatural existential – that we exist everywhere and always within God’s free offer of grace. All our yeses and nos echo within God’s one emphatic YES.

This mama calls it theologizing the terrible twos.

stubborn alleluias

A few days before Lent, I sat my son down for a serious conversation over crackers.

“So buddy, Lent starts on Wednesday. Lent is a time when we get ready for Easter. And during Lent we don’t sing Alleluia. So we’re not going to sing Alleluia for a while.”

His sea-blue eyes sparkled up at mine. His milk-smeared mouth turned up at the corners, and he cocked his head full of curls to one side.

“Should we sing Alleluia?” he cooed.

“No,” I replied patiently. “I just said we’re NOT going to sing it for a while. Because it’s Lent. And we don’t sing Alleluias during Lent. We save our Alleluias for Easter.”

“Should we sing Alleluia?” “No.”

“Should we – ” “NO.”

“Sh-” “NO! I SAID NO ALLELUIAS DURING LENT!”

Snack and failed attempt at liturgical catechesis both met an untimely end. The cherub scampered out of the kitchen and raced up the stairs, warbling as he went: “AH-AH-YAY-YOO-YA, AHHHH-YAY-YOO-YA!”

The rest of Lent? You guessed it. Our house has been filled with Alleluias. Cranky Alleluias and cheerful Alleluias. New lyrics sung to Alleluia tunes. Alleluia lyrics slapped onto nursery rhyme songs.

You would think we were already stuffing our cheeks full of Easter chocolates the way Alleluias are resounding round here.

I was annoyed for a while. Ok, I foisted my Lenten disciplines on my child and it failed. I tried to teach a two-year old about the somber tenor of a solemn season and it was a total flop. I realize now that if I had never uttered the A word on Ash Wednesday, I probably would have had a Alleluia-free Lent. I get it.

Silly, silly new mama.

But in the dusty midst of spring cleaning last weekend, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor as I swept a pile across my desk. I picked up the small scrap, its edges taped and retaped, remnants of a journey from childhood mirror to dorm room wall:

Let nothing so fill you with sorrow that you forget the joy of Christ risen.

(Dear Mother Teresa. That little lady had a gift for summing up the Gospel.*)

I thought about the stubborn persistence of joy.

Scraggly green shoots that push up through concrete cracks. Bandaged children who squeal with delight as they play in bombed-out buildings. Cancer patients who crack jokes with their nurses.

Something small and resilient within the human spirit seeks joy at any cost. Alleluia is a stubborn word to purge from our vocabulary. Our tongues ache for it during Lent: the forty days seem too long, and we’re cranky and tired by the end. We need more joy. Which is precisely the point: to do without so we remember how to do with.

This year, we’re plagued with an abundance of Alleluias, courtesy of one cheeky toddler. But I’ve given up fighting with joy. I figure God thought we could use an extra dose of delight in our days, and I’m done complaining. Aren’t all our Lents supposed to be lived in the light of Easter joy?

*For a little Lenten inspiration, check out these quick reads from some great theological minds on the Gospel in seven words or less. 

And if you want my spin?

“See those people?” God asks. “Love them.”

(Coincidentally, it also applies to parenting.)

conversations with myself, 2:00 am & 8:00 am

2:00 am (after a night of naps):

My head is going to EXPLODE. How is that baby screaming again?

I cannot handle his yelling. I’m going to lose my mind.

Didn’t I JUST get up and feed him? Sigh.

I could sleep for weeks and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I am never going to have another baby.

How is his brother in the next room waking up, too? I wish they would grow out of this phase.

I can’t believe how this time drags on and on and on. These days are so dang long.

8:00 am (after a shower and a cup of tea)

My heart is going to explode! How can the baby be grinning like that?

I cannot handle his laughing. I am going to lose my mind!

Didn’t we just bring him home from the hospital? Sigh.

I could cuddle him for days and still not get enough.

God as my witness, I want to have a zillion babies.

How is his brother in the next room going to preschool soon? I wish they would stay little forever.

I can’t believe how the time flies. These years are so short.

on guilt, growing up, and (ira) glass

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re happily reading some mildly interesting article, when all of a sudden – WHAM-O! – the expert or the study or the news smacks you with The Finding That You Should Have Known And Now Means You Have Completely Failed At A Major Portion Of Your Life.

Case in point. Yours truly was idly surfing through the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, generally equal parts interesting-news-articles and opinionated-Manhattan-mommies-up-in-arms about the latest parenting buzz. And being the parent of a child who occasionally expresses his disdain for my insufferable rules by wailing at the top of his lungs, I clicked on this post: Seeing Tantrums as Distress, Not Defiance.

So there I was, all innocently reading about toddlers’ inability to self-regulate their emotions and how parents need to lovingly guide them through this challenging phase. When I got to this line:

Dan Siegel, author of the “Whole Brain Child,” gave me the science behind this. “During those early years, the ability to coordinate and balance your own subcortical source of emotion is dependent on a caregiver’s response to you,” he said. We freak out, they freak out. Our ability to stay tuned in to them literally helps their brains grow.

WHAM-O! And the whole room slants. My (now fully developed) brain screams, “I KNEW IT! I LOSE MY TEMPER AT MY TODDLER’S TANTRUMS AND NOW I HAVE PERMANENTLY SCARRED HIS BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND HE’S GOING TO BECOME A SOCIOPATH!!! COMPLETE AND UTTER PARENTING FAIL.”

Ah, parental guilt. It bursts into a calm mother’s mind as quick and sudden as a newborn’s wail, and it lingers in her heart as long and pitiful as a toddler’s whimpers.

Before calling child protective services on myself, I thankfully went back and read the entire article again, only to find that it wasn’t as drastic and dramatic as all that. In fact, it might actually help me handle tomorrow’s tantrums with a bit more love and grace. (Maybe.)

But the memory of that flash of mommy guilt lodged itself in my brain and wouldn’t let go.

I remembered other sinking feelings from my first year of parenthood. Doctor’s appointments when I feared my baby wasn’t hitting every single developmental milestone. Parenting magazines whose glossy photos celebrated children who neither slept, napped, or ate like mine. A fellow mother in a “baby & me” class who actually uttered the words, “I just can’t believe how easy this has been!” in response to the question of the biggest surprise of motherhood. (I’m still surprised that my unshowered, bleary-eyed, anxious, hormonal self didn’t lunge across the circle of newborns to strangle her.)

Motherhood brings with it a new and special kind of guilt. A guilt that screams to your deepest fears and insecurities. A guilt that terrifies you into thinking you are not only making a mess of your life, but a brand-new person’s as well. A guilt that rears its ugly head just when you think you’ve cobbled together some kind of confidence about the whole raising-a-kid thing.

Along the way, I’ve learned to handle the outbursts of guilt with slightly more finesse. The second year of parenting brought with it the ability to forgive myself for being a decidedly imperfect mother. And the third year has dawned with daily reminders that since the many ways I supposedly failed my first child did not – it appears thus far – ruin him for life, I may actually be able to successfully help raise a second.

But I still feel the mother guilt on an all-too-regular basis, as I imagine many of you do, too. How can we help it? We want to raise our children well, and when we start out, we have no clue how. Fertile soil for the rapid growth of guilt, if I ever saw it.

So when I came across this delightful bit from Ira Glass, I was cheered. Not only because I love his wry voice and his quirky story-telling, but because his wisdom speaks to me as both a hopeful writer and a hopeful mother.

Ira reminds me that we can’t help but start off frustrated in the early years of any good work we’re trying to do. We have a grand vision of what we’d like it to be – the family we’d like to have, the book we’d love to write – but the daily slog often falls far short. Many days we want to throw in the towel and declare we’re beat. But when we stick it out and make ourselves keep going, we start to close the gap between hopes and reality. We find that we might actually have a chance of becoming the parent – or writer or artist or minister or teacher – that we dreamed we could be.

Nobody tells this to beginners, Ira says. And maybe they should. So the more we remind ourselves – and each other – that most everybody goes through this, the easier we’ll be able to breathe. And perhaps the guilt, or the fear of failure, or the frustration of not living up to our high hopes, can even spur us on to more than we dreamed in the first place.

It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.

laughing at ourselves

A few weeks ago – during my last awful round of solo parenting – I came to an important realization.

I was sitting on the floor of our bathroom, simultaneously trying to nurse a screaming baby and cajole a wriggly toddler into using the potty, when I realized why the week had been such a terrible one.

Partly it was because my partner was climbing the Great Wall thousands of miles away. (No, I’m not still bitter about that one! What on earth would make you think that?!) Partly it was because I got knocked to my feet by 24 hours of a lousy stomach bug.

But mostly it was because I had utterly and completely lost my sense of humor.

Most days I get a kick out of laughing at my kids, my husband, my self. I’ve always taken to heart the wise words of a modern-day prophet who declared that if we didn’t laugh, we would all go insane. Self-deprecating humor is one of my hallmarks, but I couldn’t get by without laughing at others as well: the comics, The Daily Show, The Onion.

I remember my homiletics professor teaching us about using humor in sermons. While it must be done appropriately, jokes and funny stories provide a great way to connect to a group. Humor breaks down walls and it builds up camaraderie. He told us that the root of the word “humor” is the same as the root for the words “humus” (the earth) and “human.” Laughter makes us who we are, and being able to laugh with each other is a deeply human connection.

Sitting there, on the floor of my (uncleaned for weeks) bathroom, with my (unbathed for days) children, I met the eyes of my toddler over the ear-piercing screams of the newborn and I just started to laugh.

I laughed so hard that the toddler stopped squirming. The baby even stopped crying.

I laughed so hard that tears started to stream down my face. And the toddler started grinning at me. “Mama is funny?” he questioned. “Mama is LAUGHIN’!”

“Oh, kiddo,” I replied, in between gasps for air. “We have not laughed at all this week. That is our problem.”

“Dat is our problem, dat is our problem!” he sang as he bolted off the potty chair and raced to his room in a nude streak. I looked down at the baby whose saucer-wide eyes seemed to ask, once again, if this was seriously the family he ended up in?

“Baby,” I told him. “You have no idea.”

Of all the tools in my mothering toolbox, I am now convinced that a sense of humor is the most important. It supersedes even patience (thankfully, since I don’t have much). The ability to laugh as a parent is the only thing that gets me through the ridiculous situations in which I find yourself. Many days it is the only shred of sanity left when the head hits the pillow.

My dear monk of a professor was on to something important in that homiletics class years ago. We need humor to connect with each other. Which makes me think that humor is of our Creator as well. If we’re made in the image and likeness of God, then God must laugh as well. (I’d like to think it might look something like this, but then again, that’s just my twisted sense of humor.)

The times when I lose my ability to laugh at myself – my work, my days, my mothering – are the times when life feels bleak and unbearable. Everything drags and my spirit limps along behind. But when I realize what’s missing, it’s like the puzzle pieces immediately rearrange around me – I can see a way out of my funk, and that way is paved with bursts of belly laughs.

Wry wit, sharp sarcasm, pathetic puns – these are all balm to my mothering spirit. Especially when my patience gets tried and my attention wears thin. And I don’t know about your house, but those are near-daily occurrences in mine.

So if your mothering spirit needs a laugh today, try this. Or this. Or even this.

Or if none of those work, try my fail-proof recipe for laughter: at the end of the day, cast your eyes around your disaster of a kitchen – or living room, or bathroom – and try to explain to your 21 year-old self what has happened to the exciting, exotic life you expected.

Then go scrub the oatmeal off the window.

parenting in ordinary time: a new series

First, a disclaimer. Yes, I am breaking my own “gentle guidelines” for Sabbath by posting this today. (I told you they weren’t hard and fast rules!) Yes, this is coming later than I would have liked, ideally several days before Sunday to give enough time for reflection.

But that’s ok. The whole point of this new series – parenting & Scripture – is to offer busy parents of young children a chance to reflect on the Sunday readings outside of Mass (often known as a three-ring-circus-of-Cheerios-and-cry-rooms).

Something small to chew on as we’re chasing the little ones and wondering, “Did I even hear the readings today?” Or, in today’s case, something to muse over after we’ve put the babies to bed. 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (click here for the readings in full)

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested him by asking,”Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

My toddler tests me all the time. Tests my patience. Tests my boundaries. Tests my parenting techniques and my very confidence that I should have procreated in the first place. (I kid. Kind of. Depending on the day.)

The twos are a time of testing, to be sure. The books tell me that; fellow parents-of-toddlers confirm it. The emergence of a will and the language to express it are wonderful developments in the unfolding of a child’s personality. But for those who have to live with them, day in and day out, the tantrums and testing can push us to the limits.

We often read about Jesus getting “tested” in the Gospels. Tested by those tricky Pharisees. Tested by wary scholars. Though he was never a parent with a toddler testing his patience or a teenager testing the boundaries, Jesus was tested by friends, followers, and foes alike.

Sometimes I imagine Jesus growing as weary with the testing – the incessant badgering, the obvious set-ups, the conniving questions – as I can become with the toddler’s constant whines and questions. Why? Why? Why? How? How? How?

But today’s Gospel offers an example of testing as teaching moment. Jesus turns the scholar’s question into an opportunity to speak profound words on the nature and truth of love: how we are called to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourself.

Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes at the question. He doesn’t sigh at being tested yet again. He doesn’t fly off the handle or lash out in anger. Every time he is tested, he rises above any selfish motives the tester might have and responds with love, giving the benefit of the doubt.

How do I turn the testing moments of parenting into teaching moments? How do I respond with patience and kindness? How can I see the times of testing as opportunities to rise above and grow in love?

How about you: what tests your parenting? Your patience?

How do you respond?