From Your District Executive: Some Important Thoughts on Parenting and Values

I have walked in a strange and disturbed state since the recent spate of shootings in Colorado and Georgia. Maybe we all feel as though we have heard enough of this to last a lifetime, but for me it brought home a need to dredge my understandings of what we, as religious people stand for, and how we take these disasters and use them to change the world our children are living in.

I watched one of the expanded news programs that was on the evening after the shootings in Littleton and I was able to tap into a sadness so deep and a rage so broad that I have not come back to myself fully since then. I experienced a powerful sadness and hollow feeling inside as I imagined the future that the families of all the students and teachers face. I found a gigantic grief at the thought of the families of the shooters trying to come to grips with the magnitude of the murderous acts of their children and the anguish of the eternal questions that will plague them about their roles in those tragic events.

I was drawn most powerfully back to thoughts of my own parenting, though. I am the mother of a now grown son whose uniqueness and inability to fit into the proscribed model for growing up in the all American way made him the constant object of taunting, ridicule, teasing, and physical assault. I watched his heart open up to others and get bruised more than once. As is true of so many parents, I died small deaths with each attack on this sweet child. The vast love and generosity in his heart was matched only by the depth of feelings he elicited with his sometimes inappropriate behavior. He saw squares where only circles would fit and he would push until he and we were all exhausted trying to change all of us to fit his idea of how the world should be.

I would love to claim that I parented the way I wanted to all the time, but that was not so. I had much to forgive myself for and much to be forgiven. I had much to learn and there was a panic inside me that I might not learn it fast enough to help my child grow up well or even grow up at all. I was one of the lucky ones to be able to chose to make parenting my son and my daughter my primary job. I worked when they were at school. I also faced the silences at parties when asked what I did for a living and told them I was learning to be the best mother I knew how to be. I was asked on more than one occasion whether I felt my life was passing me by? Did I feel stifled in the use of my talents? Did I resent not becoming a minister when I knew for decades that was what I wanted? From very few quarters did I get support for the decision to stay home with these two children. I remember talking to a parent of one of my son’s friends who had left her young teenage child home alone while she went to the beach for the weekend. I asked her what she was thinking to leave this thirteen year old alone and she said she deserved to fulfill herself too and she wasn’t willing to wait until he was grown to start.

It isn’t all about what we want. The hardest jobs stretch us and call us to use our instinct, training, wits and compassion every day. What more can be said of parenting than it fulfills those criteria. At the end of the day, what is it to have a successful career outside the home if our children are afraid, lonely, struggling and do not know where to go when they hurt. When will we really honor the men and women who spend time in a state of readiness for those brief moments in our children’s lives when they are confused about their next steps. When will we really honor those who are present for the first tentative steps that need to be applauded. I have never thought that quality time together was enough; we need to be present for those few moments when the window of opportunity opens wide, and we know how afraid our children are and how much they need reassurance. The are just a few moments when we are privileged to share the joys of accomplishment WITH our children, not in their later story to us.

Is it not time to take back our children to our own raising? For those who MUST work outside the home is it not time for all of us to support these parents with the highest quality care and support for our children this society can buy? Is this sometimes a sacrifice for fathers and mothers who choose this path? Of course it is. The is not the easiest path to choose. Sacrifice is not something that is coerced out of us, but a choice we make. Sacrifice is a concrete declaration of what we value. Sacrifice is not about bemoaning our fate, but choosing one thing of value over another.

My experience is that there will be few accolades for the choice until the job is done and your children are standing upright in the world they are making as adults. Along the way I wish more had asked in what ways the choice to parent full-time made me a better person? What had parenting taught that no other life experience could teach? What did I hope for my children as I struggled to meet the demands of this incredible work? A couple of offers of support along the way would have been lovely. Most of all I would have wished for a sense that people HONESTLY believed that parenting was a REAL job. That would have given me something to hang onto when I felt so inadequate to meet the challenges full-time parenting presented to me.

The voice of our faith cannot be silent or punitive in the sadness and fear that grips us in the face of tragedy. Hand ringing will do no good but may make us more cynical and isolated. How do we really live out our values to affirm the potential of all our children to grow up well? These are questions of religious people. How do we respond?

— REV. MARY CHULAK HIGGINS