Holy Snuggles

January 13, 2022

When I see the school administrator lighting up my phone Tuesday morning, my heart fills with dread. Since early December, when we left for an early holiday family visit, we’ve had one blissful day of all three kids in childcare. There’s a direct correlation between number of days in a row the kids are at home and how frequently I yell. The sanity breaks afforded by my childcare sponsored work day are critical for extending the interludes where I bring my children my kindest self, before my impatience and desire for calm burst into a series of barking commands to pick this up NOW or I will throw it away I’m serious don’t push me and stop fighting this MINUTE why are you always screaming at each other! Finally, after a month of near constant togetherness, for two glorious mornings in a row, we’ve bundled them up in layers of shoes and coats on, gloves tucked in pockets, water bottles in backpacks and escorted them off to school and daycare. When I return to the house after drop-off my relief is palpable. Visions of productivity dance in my head. You think I’m good at multitasking? You should see me when I have the space to focus!

But now I’m getting the call. Despite the rapid tests everyone passed to return to school after the break, someone’s tested positive this very morning–the capriciousness of Covid is like that. In pre-K, one Covid apple ruins the whole barrel. Everyone’s in quarantine for ten days. “Would you please come pick up your daughter now, and take home a tablet for virtual classes?” Virtual classes for three year olds! 

Like parents everywhere, I bravely shepherded my then three year old son through a gauntlet of virtual Pre-K 3 classes at the outset of the pandemic. Fresh with determination and ignorance, I jumped to the challenge, becoming a pre-school teacher with Montessori style centers, gamely dancing along to movement class, making hand-motions to songs greeting the other rectangles on the ipad at circle time, sitting through several thousand repeats of La Vaca Lola. I set up bins of water for science experiments and made numbers out of painters tape on our living room floor to practice gross motor skills and counting at the same time. Felt pretty good about that one. I kept up a moderately convincing veneer of enthusiasm to persuade my reluctant toddler that it is really truly FUN to practice writing that tricky letter S several times in a row. I bought coloring books and guided him through stacks of the worksheets sent home from a frantically improvising school. 

And as the weeks wore on, my relationship with my son became increasingly more tense. I wasn’t just the mom who occasionally called on him to pick up toys, but also offered snacks and infinite snuggles. Now I was a coach, teacher, occupational therapist, always prodding him to do something he didn’t want to do. I couldn’t push him to learn all those skills, to focus through distractions, to persevere through initial failure, and also save sufficient space to just enjoy each other. I made a good, long-suffering effort–and so did he-but when it was safe for school to be school and mom to just be mom again, we both rejoiced. We get along better with a little space. 

Those early days of Covid confirmed my conviction that I am not cut out to be a stay at home mom, let alone a pre-school teacher. God bless those who are, but playing these roles for a season with my son was damn near traumatizing for both of us. When we sent both kids off to a fully in-person school this fall, it didn’t occur to me I might have to repeat March 2020 with my Pre-K 3 daughter. And yet, here we are, putting the schedule of morning meetings and specials into our Outlook, logging into the school tablet. I feel paralyzed, despairing. The thought of shuffling between pre-K and professional modes for the next ten days is so daunting, I briefly but seriously consider throwing in the towel with paid work. I’m not even available to be the designated parent this week; I have work commitments I can’t easily drop, or fulfill while sitting to the side of my daughter’s class singing nursery rhymes. 

My husband steps in, and I agree to take the post-lunch to pre-nap shift. When we reconvene at lunch time, he cheerfully reports she’s an eager, compliant student. Totally unlike our son at that time, she’s happy to do as she’s told, has no apparent ego to be bruised in failing and having to try again. I wish you could have been there, he tells me–I think it would have been redemptive for you. 

After lunch she plays quietly in my office. She gradually, and entirely without prompting, makes her way to the guest bed, crawling inside the sheets, layers of blankets tucked up to her chin. “Mama,” she coos quietly, with more wisdom than she knows, “I think I’m ready for my nap.” And just like that, she allows her eyes to close and surrenders to rest. I wish I could join her, but I have to work.

January 23, 2022

For the time being, weekends are more of a toggle to our second shift than a break. Weekends are the days no one else helps us manage the three little souls who look to us for nourishment and don’t care about keeping food off the flour. Our ambition is minimal: end the weekend with groceries in the fridge and clean underwear, share a meal with a friend, progress our weeks-long journey through the Frozen empire.

But there is one truly restorative element of non-paid-work days: morning snuggles.

As we’ve traveled for the holidays, the kids have gone into snuggle auto-pilot, half-consciously climbing into our bed each morning to luxuriate in delicious vacation snuggling. When Christmas vacation ends, the kids don’t want to shake the habit. I keep waking up in the middle of the night to find our three year old tucked inside my arms, oblivious to how and when she appeared. I sporadically muster up the willpower to snatch her up and carry her back to her own bed before the five year old notices she’s gone. It is hard to resist the siren song of a snuggly toddler curled contentedly in my arms, but we’re short enough on sleep without the extra limbs in our bed. 

Weekend mornings are vacation all over again. We’re in what will likely be a rare season of no commitments, no programs, no schedules (thank you Covid), and so, like my daughter and her naptime, weekend mornings require nothing from us but rest. The three year old bursts triumphant through the door, runs around the bed and nestles into my arms. The five year old follows, settling into the safety of his father’s chest. Later in the day they’ll yell at us for not letting them have chocolate milk, for setting limits on screen time, for enforcing naps and cleanup, but right now, they’re all marshmallowy, soft and sweet. Eyes still half shut, they gaze up at us and murmur completely artless, uncontrived declarations of adoration: “I love you, mama,” “I like snuggling, dada.” There are no requests they’re manipulating us into granting, no fears about how their love will be received. It is pure and total, a surrender into the safe arms of a parent whose love is expected to be unconditional. In these moments, I’m awash in joy, with each breath inhaling “don’t miss this! Stay present!” and exhaling sheer gratitude. 

It seems audacious to hope for even more: that these snuggles would be wiring my children’s neural networks to know, deeply and experientially, they are beloved, just as they are, for who they are. That in the safety and surrender of these snuggles they might get a glimpse of what God’s love is like. Dr. David Benner, writing about surrendering to the perfect love of God, describes a suicidal, goth teenager he counseled through a difficult season, who attributes her unexpected close relationship with her mother to regular snuggle sessions. Benner says about the mother: “[W]ith a wisdom I have rarely seen in parents, she recognized that what her daughter needed was not lectures but love . . . she had been giving this in large doses for all of [her daughter’s] life . . . she did not now allow her disapproval of her daughter’s behavior to interrupt this pattern in the slightest.” I make a lot of mistakes as a mom, but I’m going to give this one thing my all: my kids knowing in their bones they are loved, unconditionally.

But to do this well, my own neural networks must be rewired. My theology is sound; I could ace the quiz: God loves me, just as I am. My identity is not what I produce or achieve, but as a beloved child of God. I have been preaching this gospel for years. It’s the stuff of how I counsel mentees and console friends, a talk I could give in my sleep. 

And yet, I’ve become increasingly aware of something deep within me that even still subconsciously arranges my actions as if I must prove my worth and pay my way. Hiding underneath many of my surface flaws, the things for which I read leadership books and set out growth action plans, I deduce a common yearning: being enough. When I’m able to hold it together on the surface, I can be deluded into thinking I’ve mastered the problem. But the pressure cooker of the last few years has at times carried me to the limits of what I can bring about through sheer effort, and now it’s like a buried secret has been seeping through cracks. 

My initial instinct is to use the toolkit I’ve spent my life building: growth mindset, can-do attitude, perseverance and hard work, call it what you will. I know how to tackle problems with ingenuity and effort, to polish off my defects by applying best practices and building good habits. I’ve diagnosed the issue: my identity as beloved is insufficiently real, creating an obstacle to being the best version of myself. Well then, let’s work hard to embrace my belovedness! I’m so deeply rooted in this paradigm that I can’t see the contradiction. 

Benner describes God’s love as floating, something that happens to us effortlessly when we let go. He describes our efforts to be loved as treading water, expending useless energy that we think keeps us afloat, but really justs exhaust us:

To rely on the will . . . is to reinforce our natural willful self-determination. . . . Relying on the will to make things happen keeps us focused on the self. Life lived with resolve and determination is life lived apart from surrender . . . It is living the illusion that I can be in control.

Slowly it sinks in–this quality I’d counted as one of my shiniest features has a major shadow side. I am pursuing experiencing unconditional love as a strategy toward being less imperfect. Relying on my willful effort to know I am beloved apart from what I accomplish. But being unconditionally loved is not a means to becoming deserving of love.

And while I’ve long known God’s love isn’t something I can earn, somehow I’m only now grasping that experiencing belovedness is not something I can manufacture through my effort. I can’t work my way, through resolve and determination, to converting head knowledge into a knowing that animates me from the inside out, releasing me from the compulsive need to show that I’ve developed the solution before you noticed the problem, to make myself understood at all costs, to tie myself in knots to avoid your disapproval. Willpower won’t cut it. And that is exceedingly maddening.

So how do you get there? It is not a problem to tackle, but a gift to be received. Benner calls it “contemplative knowing,” deeper than belief. Knowing in your bones comes from experience, the experience of “sitting at the feet of Jesus, gazing into his face, and listening to his assurances of love for me. It comes from letting God’s love wash over me, not simply trying to believe it. . . . It comes from spending time with God, observing how he looks at me.” Basically, from holy snuggles. There’s nothing I can do but curl up in God’s metaphorical arms like a three year old, and receive love as a gift.

And not just the love of Jesus-died-on-the-cross-because-he-loves you sacrificial love, but God’s ongoing, present delight in me. The face lit up with joy I’m supposed to (and usually do) picture when I think of my kids. Sure, love can be exhausting. Those of us who excel at busy activity chide, maybe a bit self-righteously, “It’s a verb!” We turn our noses up at inane romantic comedies. Love is not a giddy feeling in your stomach (driving you toward baaaaad choices). Paradigmatic mom-love, in particular, is as portrayed in the classic allegory The Giving Tree, a complete emptying of self for what you think is the good of the other. It can be easy to confuse holiness and having no boundaries. Benner writes, “The grudging fruit of willful determination does not give God any more pleasure than it gives a parent.” He could as easily have noted the failure of a parent’s willful determination to demonstrate love through begrudging sacrificial acts. It’s not that they don’t need some acts of service from me; that poopy diaper don’t change itself. But more than endless service, what they really want from me…is me. These weekend mornings re-teach me the expansive delight at the heart of love. The delight my husband and I find in each other creates a desire to enfold others in our delight, not only but certainly including our children. As the four of us bask in that delight together, safe, secure, at ease, we experience love beyond belief, not through willful determination, but joyful surrender.

A coo comes from the closet where our baby sleeps. The three year old pops up in alert. “Cutie!” she squeals, her nickname for the baby she thinks is her own personal doll. “Let’s go get her, mom.” I agree, and move to get up. “And bring her back to snuggle,” she finishes. Yes, bring the baby back to snuggle, because it is the nature of love to bring others into its glow. Delight in us, and let us delight in you. There’s nothing to do right now but enjoy you: unaccomplished, unproductive, and perfectly beloved.