One Piece of Parenting Advice

Wait for it, wait for it...

“Do you think the balloons will be okay in the car for 45 minutes?”

The nice young man at the grocery store, who made the towering balloon bouquets for our 16-year-old boys, looked long and hard at me. I might have suspected a slight hint of condescension.

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Last Thursday was a blustery day—and on the advice of the store clerk, I left the balloons, then returned for them after a short medical appointment. Once home, I hid them in the basement, then drug them upstairs the next morning, only then noticing the balloon towers were taller than our 9’ dining room ceilings.

I can nearly guarantee that our twin boys could care less about balloons. I know for a fact that they were not impressed by the four dozen cupcakes I also bought at the grocery store and insisted they take into school to share with their friends. We’re not five! they reminded me.

I know they’re not five. They’re sixteen—which is to say that our years with kids in our home, full-time, is growing short. In fact, it seems life won’t stay put for us. We have a wedding this summer, two college graduations, one blow-out anniversary trip planned for Banff in August. We’re entering a season of what my spiritual director has named for me as a season of “entrances and exits.” People off-ramping, wonderful people joining. By God’s grace, before you know it, we’ll have little ones underfoot again, and I’ll be deciding on names other than grandma.

I suppose you think about these things when it’s the year you turn 50. Yes, 50! You start to realize that you’re beyond some moments of “perfect possibility” that Jane Kenyon conjures in her poem, “Afternoon in the House.”

            The house settles down on its haunches

            for a doze.

            I know you are with me, plants,

            and cats—and even so, I’m frightened,

            sitting in the middle of perfect

            possibility.

Open-ended, “perfect” possibility is an occasion of the young. As Kenyon so astutely notes, it can be a frightening season of life. You’re deciding so much, wondering whether those decisions will turn out as you plan and hope and dream. At sixteen, you’re yet to choose a college, choose a career, choose a life partner, choose the shape of your family. (And then, as we learn, life chooses you—and you surrender yourself to God’s working of good in all that you might not have chosen, even come to regret.)

Regret is probably the biggest reason I don’t hand our parenting advice very frequently. I don’t honestly know that I’ve been a good mother, whatever “good mothers” may look like. (Oh, do read The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan—because it forces that question and exposes the exaggerated expectations we have of mothers today.) I know for certain I’ve had the best intentions—and prayed diligently for all my children. But there have been failures, regrets, mistakes, all of which are forgiven—and none exactly erased.

Of all the parenting advice I’ve read and heard over the course of these twenty-some years, it was the late Anne Ortlund’s that made the most sense to me. Become who you should be, and stay as close to your children as possible, so that they can catch it. (Was this from Children Are Wet Cement? Possibly, but I don’t even remember now.) But even this simply parenting advice from Ortlund proved difficult. My transformation lagged behind my desires; presence was harder than I imagined.

But here’s a bit of good news: I will say that parenting five children has proven that practice can make for progress in our parenting competencies. (Lord, have mercy on the firstborns.) I have learned some things along the way, and I can see that such learning might be an important thing to share with people wearied in the parenting trenches. I hesitate, of course—because see the above. I’m no parenting saint.

What I’m learning now is how important it is to stay hopeful for our children. To believe, in faith, that all things are possible by the grace of God which makes possible our children’s own faithful response. I’m learning that this hopeful expectation makes possible the posture and practice of blessing. They need to feelour support, and to actively engage the practice of blessing is one way to express it.

It’s Tina Boesch, author of Given: The Forgotten Meaning and Practice of Blessing, who has been teaching me about this practice. Given isn’t a new book, but in my ongoing season of “soberly restrained book-buying,” I’ve been revisiting books on my shelf, and Boesch’s was one. In her chapter on “Blessing a Child,” she reminds us that blessing is a practice of attention. It requires seeing: seeing God and seeing our child. It requires asking God for the eyes to see the promises, the possibilities. The possibilities possible because of the promises.

But it’s not just this. Blessing names, with hopeful expectation, the growth that is yet needed. Its mindfulness in this more corrective direction doesn’t allow for the hyper-criticism that has plagued my own parenting. But neither does it permit the cowardice that would refuse to speak a needed and necessary truth. Boesch brings her readers to see this in Jacob’s blessings of his sons, including Reuben, Simeon and Levi who receive what look like “’anti-blessings.’ Rather than affirming his sons, Jacob censures them, calling out volatility that threatened the moral and physical well-being around them” (60).

On the next page, Boesch clarifies further: “Blessing embraces the whole process of encountering God in prayer and worship, seeing and discerning nascent qualities in my daughter that could be developed, expressing blessing in words communicated to her, and committing myself to her spiritual formation while releasing her into God’s hands.” I’ve come to see how wonderfully rich and robust this definition of blessing is, how it invites me to see the reality of now and the possibility and promise for tomorrow. It is grace and truth at the very same time.

Learning about our call and capacity to bless (and don’t we need to recover this in a presidential election year?), I revised my rule of life to include the practice of birthday blessings. Our twins, in addition to cupcakes and balloons and gifts, also got a written blessing last Friday morning, folded and tucked into their birthday cards. For Andrew, our son who is “alive and awake to the things of God,” it was (in part) that God’s grace might be to you every day a source of empowerment and perseverance. For Colin, our son who, “by God’s grace, is tenacious and strong,” it was (in part) that the strength of your will might be used to grow—in cooperation with God’s grace—a life of deep roots, such as we see in the tree of righteousness in Psalm 1.

For both these sons, together from their very conception and tussling in that togetherness, it was that you may know that there is more than enough blessing for two sons.

I watched Colin open his card at the dining room table over a plate of French toast—then toss it quickly to the side. Thanks, Mom. I watched Andrew open his card at the kitchen island, over the ends of the bread which Colin had left for him when he helped himself first to breakfast. He read it slightly more carefully.

The immediate payoff was worth it. I got hugs from both—and as I rubbed their backs, I said with a catch in my throat, “Be blessed, my son. Be blessed.

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