On the short list of titles I’m adding to my skill set while traveling on the “Parent” career track, I’ve grabbed at some things like teacher. And wife and friend and writer and short order cook. Add bus driver, counselor, fashion merchandiser, good cop, bad cop, late night editor, crafty lawyer and stand in entertainer to the list and you’re getting the picture of who I’m shaping up to be.
Having children is just the most amazing miracle. Not only in the most obvious ways, like being able to kiss tiny little Chiclets toes or fully inhale the scent of innocence on a newborn’s downy head, but in the ways that teach, really carve into the soul what I really hadn’t expected to ponder: by learning to be a parent, I’d really learn lots more about being a child, especially on a “what does it matter eternally” scale.
There are just thousands of moments I’d like to record, relish, stretch into, explore, but I’ve been so intimidated to do it, and isn’t that silly? My children, my thoughts, my journey, my growth… I’ve used excuses both valid (I barely have enough time to change a diaper before I need to pick someone up from cross country and put dinner on the table), and not so valid (I’m just not sure where I’m supposed to go with these ideas) to avoid taking the deeper look into my soul that writing affords, whether someone else will read about them or not.
It’s happening in smudgy snippets. My fledgling successes and heartbreaking failures reveal to me, gradually and sometimes repetitively, who God, as a sovereign Majestic Parent, is. And somewhere in the middle of sleepy lullabies and chaotic dashes to soccer practice, I’ve seen glimpses of what it means to be the child of a Perfect Father. The juxtaposition of the two realities reveals how far I have to go in learning about both. I call the phenomenon, “rockabye grace.”
The “nurture” in my nature and everyday experience grasps the idea of a rockabye. Do what is needed to soothe the ones who hurt. My baby is starting to walk. He takes these headlong strides, arms wide open, eyes sort of startled, slobbery grin gasping. And he’ll try it anywhere–hard floor, asphalt, off the edge of a bed, near me or away from me. When he’s near me, and I can catch him if his aerobatics are too daring, I can laugh with him, smother him with kisses. But when he has speed-crawled into the other room, and I hear that awful thud, followed by a frightened cry, I leap over everything–other siblings, sit and spins, kitchen chairs–to get to him as IMMEDIATELY as I can, to scoop him up, check for signs of wear and tear, smother him with kisses.
Sometimes, my heart breaks for his misadventures. “Honey, don’t DO that. Stairs aren’t for Mac to climb yet,” mumbling sentences I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but I want the words to be there, hanging just outside his ears so that, when he’s ready, his heart will engage and listen. Sometimes, I’m a little frustrated… Really? Off the end of the sofa AGAIN??
And I wonder. How often have I barreled headlong, stupid grin flashing, into danger, when God isn’t waving His arms, “NO! NO! Not there, I told you!” I crash and burn and cry and beg for Him to wrap my scabby elbows and knees in His healing arms. The thing is, the amazing mind blowing thing, is this: He is always there. I step just outside of His love, just far enough to get into trouble, and He uses it. He doesn’t watch me hurting and cheer with godly laughter and rainbows. But He lets me feel, lets me turn back from danger, lets me know, always, that He has been waiting. And His word, when I take the time to listen, is a soothing rockabye that saturates my soul.
The grace part? That I’m learning about the hard way. It seems I have lots to learn about remembering when I’ve received it, so that I can better extend it. Like the Sugar Incident.
I was in the laundry room, my private oasis, early in the morning. I almost always have a load in the washer, one in the dryer, and a couple more waiting in line. Dirt therapy, I tell myself. There’s always a mountain of it, but I know how to climb it. I tell myself I actually like it.
“Uhhh…Mooommm.” I sighed. I’d been discovered. Someone knew I was awake, where I was, and that I could hear him. My then eleven year old, an early riser by nature, was in the kitchen getting things ready for school, which I realize is a blessing. I know friends who share tales of dragging their kids out of bed by their feet every morning.
“Yes?” I dragged the word out wearily, for effect. Sometimes it’s enough to deter them, and I thought I might finish my coffee in peace.
“You, um… You know that sugar?”
“What sugar, Son?”
He sighed. “The sugar, Mom.” He’s very bright, this son of mine. Really, I mean it quantitatively. But, he has this way of leaving out the important parts of things, you know: the rest of the story. And logic? Looking for something or finding something? These processes escape him. I’ve heard that Albert Einstein didn’t even know his own address when he lived in New York City. That he told someone it would be useless information to file away in usable brain space—if he needed to know what his address was, he’d just look it up in the phone book. I sighed.
“You mean the canister of sugar? It’s in the cupboard where it always is. I just filled it. Open the…”
“Yeah.” He interrupted me, which wasn’t typical. He’s the sweetest, most gentle, and polite of my crew. “Well, I know. I found it. But, well… It’s just that it was kinda heavy, and yesterday there was barely any in it, so…” This wasn’t sounding good, and I rounded the corner, picking up my pace as quickly as my fuzzy slippers would allow.
“So? What? What happened?” I was thinking calm, calm, but, when he backed up the stairs as I approached, the rhino mom instinct in me picked up the scent of fear. Not good. Not good at all.
“Well it came off. The lid. It just popped right off. But I scooped up some of the sugar and put it in the sink…” At this point, I edged past him, coffee mug first. Somewhere, I have forgotten my manners. I’m not sure why I think I’m entitled to forego them when it comes to interacting with my children. Rhino mom. Sugar was everywhere. Drifts of it spread across the kitchen tile and counter, outlining exactly where the sugar perpetration had occurred. The lazy Susan beneath the counter swung, well, lazily (as if ANYone in this house has a right to be lazy), residual motion from where the canister had crashed into it, dumping white powder into pots and pans on descent. “ …And I’m really sorry, Mom.”
“Go. Get. The. Vacuum.” You haven’t seen me first thing in the morning. Or, at anytime during a typical weekday I would presume. My four year old loves to take random, rapid pictures whenever she finds the digital camera lying about. Many of them, while blatantly honest in their looking-straight-up-the-nose while managing to catch the-circles-under-my-eyes angles, are not complimentary. Actually, the images make me gasp as I quickly delete them, and simultaneously pity my children and husband for having to witness my weekday-disarray. When I’m mad, my current fifth grader reports, my hair even stands straight up like the aforementioned Einstein. And I was livid. My poor son…
“Okay. Is it in the…”
“Closet. Yes. Now.” Snuffling, grunting, rhino mom sentences, wild hair, scowling snout…
A gritty, unfamiliar, sandy sort of sound accompanied my son’s hurrying footsteps as he shuffled down the hallway, across the house. “STOP!” I blasted. “SUGAR!” Communicative expression eluded me, the trumping, snorting, huffing Rhino Mom.
“Uhhm.” My son, too, had become a man of few words. I peek one bloodshot, hairy eyeball down the hall. Sugar had been trailed, pouring from my son’s pant cuff, down the hall, up toward my bedroom, through the living room, and now toward the closet, a Family Circle style map of his journey to find me. Find assistance.
“OHH!! You…. Ohh! You! Have! Made! Such! A! Mess!” I licked my lips to pause for calm. No exaggeration: they were coated in sugar dust.
“Mom…” I heard the plea in his wavering voice, but still my pulse raced on.
“This is a mess!” I jammed the vacuum cord into the outlet and began jabbing the hose at his pants. “Honestly!” I roared over the motor and sucking. “This is crazy! You’re going to be late for school!” Why not make him feel worse?
Just then, two of his siblings entered. Through a sugar drift. “Cool…” I thought I heard my eight year old say.
“Cool? COOL? You know, the sweet ants are probably going to come and carry me away while you’re at school today. And you think this is COOL?”
“Late for School.” He was mumbling, but was not foolish enough to correct me.
My daughter, in an effort ward off impending thermonuclear meltdown, began to run hot water into the sink where sugar had mounded. Of course, that side of the sink had lately been given to clogging. “Um. Mom?” Unknowingly, she had repeated the question that had started off the whole episode.
“That’s IT!” My emotions were beyond recovery, screaming, raging, glaring. “You know what, you guys? I. Have. Never. Made. This. Much. Of. A. Mess.” And with clarity and biting conviction, my own hypocrisy echoed around in my head, louder than the whistle, the gristle, the sucking, the slurping and puddling of my kitchen I turned off vacuum. Someone sniffed. Oh. My.
“That’s not true, though, is it?” My voice thickened, and my children, glistening with sugar and that eagerness to forgive which is just so characteristic of childhood, blinked. “I guess all of us standing here know about some of the messes I’ve made.” I took off my son’s glasses, wiped a sugar print away with the cuff of my bathrobe. “And I’ve not been repaid with yelling or putdowns. No, God has just heaped on the grace.”
I sighed. They exhaled. “Look, Guys…Can I try again? The sugar is not a big deal. Really.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I…” His eyes, those gentle, kind of slanty eyes that disappear when he laughs, were bright with tears.
“I know.” Suddenly, I couldn’t bear to hear him apologize. Rhino mom had been shamed, put away. “It’s okay. But, listen: I’m sorry too. ” His shrug was an understatement.
My son hadn’t dumped a Sahara full of sugar by handling it carefully. Nor had he purposefully created a mess in order to create an opportunity for me to extend forgiveness. Nevertheless, he was overwhelmed, and I was capable of helping, even though I wasn’t acting like it. But one honest moment’s reflection on how a Perfect Father has handled a wayward child’s mishandlings of lots of life’s blessings provided a clear solution to the problem, at a cost that would nourish rather than expend: grace.
Isaiah 30:18 says, “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.” Gracious, merciful. Attributes of a mighty, tender, comforting Parent. A reminder that I have so much to learn.