July 2022
This is a sweet season with my five year old son, or as he explains it when introducing himself to church friends coming over for a potluck tonight, “I’ll just say I’m six, because I’m almost six.” He learned to read this year, practically overnight. We were on vacation for the school’s mid-winter break, a spontaneous trip where we packed almost no toys, and a handful of books. One day he was inching through words phonetically, the next he read at a good clip, word for word, an entire Harriet Tubman biography for children. What just happened?
If a magic switch lit up his brain that day in February, it’s only fanned the flames since. Something about reading, on his own, seems to have turned him–at moments, in ways–into almost a miniature adult, at least in how he carries on conversation. (Not so much in his explosive reactions to having his tablet taken away or his fascination with certain bodily functions.) His vocabulary, his diction, his confidence–they’ve all exploded with remarkable force. But of course, he’s still five, and all of that power is wrapped in the curiosity, innocence, and creative connections that are often only the province of children. It can be most delightful.
We’re walking out the door together, headed to what I’m calling a mother-son date, to keep one of his seemingly endless routine medical appointments from feeling like an annoying interruption to my workday. We pass by the 8 or 9 big pots lining our tiny front yard, newly installed after I removed the bulk of the fall bulbs in an attempt to cure and eventually replant them.
I couldn’t believe how many of the tulip bulbs I’d planted last fall, so fat and firm, were already on their way to becoming worm food, a few eager, squirming creatures wrapped inside and around the papery wrappers. Ferreting the bulbs from the pots, brushing off the dirt, rot and worms: not the most fun I’ve had in the garden, a good argument in favor of buying new bulbs each fall. (Price, of course, being the argument against. Tulips typically produce one flower apiece, if they bloom at all–maybe a quarter of mine don’t–and bulbs average a buck or more a pop. Those cheap tulips you picked up at the grocery store are a steal–from someone, anyway.)
Now that the fall bulbs are done, we’ve planted some summer annuals to freshen up the space, and a few perennials that are mostly foliage, like wavy mountain mint. Two are home to dahlias–they have near opposite seasons in the ground with tulips and daffodils, so sharing the same pot seems like a no brainer. This is my first time trying it; we’ll see how the experiment goes. They’ve started growing well enough, but I made what I suppose is a rookie mistake of placing one near the front border. I thought it would be the perfect spot to show off pretty poufy blooms. Turns out, it’s the perfect spot to catch a teetering bike, a frequent casualty of the routine mayhem of pulling out our bikes from the lower level storage area, steering through the narrow path and out our fence, and getting three children installed in a variety of bike seats and trailers. The ground isn’t the most level, the bikes aren’t the most sturdy, and as often happens, in a precarious unguarded moment, one crashed into my promising looking dahlia, slashed in half by the handlebars. That was a month ago and it hasn’t pushed out any new growth since. Recovery seems unlikely. The hazards of city living, I suppose.
We’ve also sprinkled seeds by the careless handful atop a few of the pots: marigold harvested from last year’s crop, bachelor’s buttons from the kids’ grandmother, cosmos from a neighbor, mystery wildflowers packed up from a school garden project. We scatter them all and see what will take. Within a week or so, many sprout, long stems growing leggy in search of sun in the non-ideal climate underneath our crepe myrtle. But still, sprouting, getting taller, looking more and more plant-like every day.
This morning as I survey the pots on our way out the door I notice little holes in a few of the pots, telltale sign of a critter digging for buried treasures, destroying some of my seedlings in the process. “Darn critter!” I let loose, cursing him with all my heart.
“Mom, don’t say that!” my son chides, “he’s God’s creature. And God doesn’t make anything bad.”
There’s a lot of reality that may complicate that view over time. But at this moment, with my five year old son appreciating a squirrel’s squirrelness while I just see obstacles to my aspirations of wildflowers, I’ll take it. God doesn’t make anything bad. Bless this squirrel, with its drive to find the buried nut. Bless these toppled seedlings, which will return to dust and nourish the next crop ever so slightly, and in their absence, make way for other seedlings in the too-crowded pot to find their way to the sky. Bless this trial and error, this putting things forth only to see them ruined, and learning to take a breath and try again. And bless this child, who sometimes when I least expect it preaches to his mother.
We have a little dance: “Guess what?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
He groans. “I know mom, you already told me. I’ll let you know when I need reminding, ok?”
We’re walking home from dropping off his baby sister at daycare and I initiate the dance: “Guess what?”
He knows what’s coming but the allure is too powerful; he can’t help answering, “What?”
I pause. A few seconds go by. Then I let out a high-pitched yelp and come at him in a chicken-squawk meets tickle-monster dance.
He laughs, surprised. “Oh! I thought you were going to say that thing I don’t like you to always say.”
That thing, you know, that I love you. “You mean that I love you?”
“Yeah. Because I already know that.”
I am in Australia, for work. Nate is solo parenting for ten days, keeping me updated mostly by text, as our schedules rarely align. One day there’s the concerning update that a neighbor’s daughter, in the same camp as our son, is being bullied by another kid at camp- who has apparently tried to enlist our son in the campaign to harass the girl. The victim’s parent mentions something to Nate, and he promises to talk to our son about it.
What will we say? My instinct is to come in hot: no child of mine will bully! I would rail and rant, which I’m sure a part of me knows has approximately zero percent chance of getting through, at least in any meaningful underlying, sustainable way. A friend of one of my colleagues, traveling with us, teaches kids this age. “She’s great with kids,” my colleague says, “I would take all my parenting dilemmas to her.”
So I present the situation. She ponders, then confides, “I’d ask him about it,” sagely ticking off the kinds of things she might inquire, essentially coming to our child through a series of questions, letting him arrive at the right thing to do ala Socratic method. “What do you think about what the other boy asked you to do to the girl? How do you feel about each of them? How did it feel when he asked you that? Do you think we should listen to him? Why or why not?” She suggests emphasizing we can love people but that doesn’t mean we have to listen to him–what a great line for people pleasers! Love doesn’t have to mean we listen, take in, abide by, everything another person tells us. “That boy isn’t in charge of you, you don’t have to do what he said.” Let him walk through what it would mean to reject the calls to bullying, affirm his instincts toward kindness and compassion. Even toward the boy instigating the bullying.” Even toward him. What a heart that demonstrates, what a heart it would take to embrace it all. Will our son be able to stop shouting “poop butt!” long enough to talk with Nate and take it in?
Nate says he’ll do his best.
The next day he texts an update, recounting his follow up conversation with our son:
“How was the playground today?”
“Dad, I wanted to tell you that the other boys said we should attack the girl,and I told them not to.”
“How did it feel when you did that?”
“I was scared to but then I got a moment of courage and I said it.”
I tear up immediately, swelling with pride and affection. I can’t wait to go home and hug him, tell him how proud I am. I want to tell everyone about his moment of courage, write about it here.
The texts continue:
“What happened then?”
“They kind of just kept playing with each other.”
Maybe sometimes the moment of courage is just enough to overcome the urge to do evil; maybe evil isn’t always as powerful as our fears make it out to be, and next to a moment of courage, poof, it pops and dissolves, and the would be bullies give up and just keep playing with each other. What would happen if we all found the courage to speak up like a brave, earnest five year old? I know there are times I haven’t found the same courage when my moment comes, but he makes me want to try harder, try again.
Although, the truth is we don’t usually find a moment of courage through will power alone, just as he won’t usually find it because we tell him to. We can’t make our kids be the kind of people we want them to be. All we can do is model it ourselves, and affirm it in them when it shines through. His moment of courage, his kindness and compassion, can’t be created from direct instructions, not if we want them to internalize it at the core, as part of who they are, and not just surface level, consequences-based obedience. Caught, not taught, they say. I suspect a child is more likely to find a moment of courage if they’ve seen it modeled. And I can only model what I am growing into through the work of transformation in my own soul, which comes less from trying harder and more through my willingness to be transformed by God’s work and power, less rowing and more hoisting a sail and letting the wind carry me. In other words, I am probably most likely to invest in my kids’ moral formation if I’m investing in my own spiritual formation.
We joke all the time about how mom needs her quiet time to be with God because it helps me not be so grumpy with them, one of those “funny because it’s true” kind of things. But it isn’t just how I directly treat them that is at stake, it is how I’m able to model the good things I want them to pick up-it is how my own example is lived in front of them, day in and day out–which is how I form them and indirectly, how they show up in the world. So much rides on how I tend to my own soul.
My son has asked for something, and I’ve granted it. I don’t even remember what it was–maybe making pasta for dinner, or packing a water bottle in his backpack, or doing a silly dance. It doesn’t stand out to me amidst the many hundreds of requests I receive each day, the hundreds I grant. But it did for him; he lets out a yelp, “Mom, you’re the best!”
A beat.
“Actually, you’re not the best, because there’s been like a trillion moms. But you’re in the top 500.”
