what my son taught me about parenting cliches

Alexander Morgan Murphy, November 30, 1993

Cliches happen for a reason -- they're usually true.  The days are long and the years are short.  I wanted to slap all the well-meaning pundits when my kids were 6, 4, 2 and 6 months.  Now I'm trying to look them up online so we can start a cyber-support group.  

How else to describe the twisty, achy, wincing of my heart all day yesterday looking at baby photos of my son, trying to match his elation at turning eighteen, and trying not to weep when I caught the wanderlust gleam in his eyes.  Good God, how to parent well when I'm trying to figure out how to fold his over six-foot frame onto my lap for story-reading, to secretly call all the colleges he's turned in an application and tell them to never mind.

He was born determined to upset all my expectations.  And, from the first, he's always exceeded them.  Parenting human beings is an astonishing enterprise.  You build yourself a cozy little view of what it means to rear offspring, spend hours day-dreaming the impact of genetic distribution of the family chin or forehead thinking these to be grand dreams because you think parenting is about going to the park and making cookies and reading stories.  But the babe comes wailing into the world insisting -- without the slightest bit of irony -- that we, his parents, remove world hunger and then create world peace.  We were just hoping to get a good family photo around the hospital bed.  

I'm discovering that as at infancy, so at 18 (or 13, 15 or 20) our offspring have not altered their grand expectations of us.  They  may have become a bit more satisfied with a well-prepared macaroni and cheese casserole, say, but not at the expense of their insistent expectations of greater things:  that, starting with Mom and Dad, Christ's Church would feed the poor and that our elected government would be peacemakers rather than politicians.  That there would be enough of everything for everyone and that justice would always prevail.

On his way to his first day working as a Congressional Page. January 2011

Parenting is exhausting.  Not because of the reasons you think -- the four-times-a-night feedings and the temper tantrums and the ear infections and the flu and the growing pains and the homework and the groundings and the refusal to take naps and the breaking curfew and the doing-who-knows-what-when-you're-out-of-my-sight anxieties.  That's all child's play compared to the weight of knowing my kid was born into this world wired for perfect parents, Edenic economies, and never-ending shalom. Instead they got us.  

And we got them. Without an owner's manual.  

Not only that, but they come carrying heavy generational luggage, faulty genetic codes, and that annoying quirk from your in-laws.  If parenting children wasn't so beautiful, it could almost seem like one of those practical jokes gone horribly wrong.  

But know this.  Children come with a secret superpower -- they want to love us.  They want to be part of the family.  They are hardwired to be forgiving and gracious.  We don't give this to them and we certainly make things sometimes nigh to impossible when we try to manipulate, coerce, manufacture and all-other ways press them into a little images of our version of Christ.  Or the spitting image of yourself or your father.  Or, really, anyone else we had in mind for them.  

Enjoying his first legal cigar on his 18th birthday.
Please note that he is wearing the cardigan sweater and slippers
 left to him by his great-grandfather, Lester Morgan.

It's a tricky business I find works best when I'm contrite, dependent, expectant, curious and -- yes -- even, tired.  This is when our Father God, Brother Christ, nurturer Spirit leads us toward each other in forgiveness, good humor, and new mercies.  I'm still naive idealistic enough to hope that it will be the better version of myself that my kids remember most.  The days I have grace to spare, energy beyond 9am, and good humor enough to laugh at the stuff they think is funny.  After twenty years at this gig, though, I'm beginning to suspect the best parenting moments are happening when I'm least self-conscious.  

By the way, I gave up on finding the manual.  Even on writing my own.  Let me be clear, I am keeping track of some truths (including those wrapped in cliche).  It is possible to be wrong and start over.  You can face your worst fears as a parent and be OK at the end of the day.  Maybe even better than when you started.  Your child will need you to give them more than you have to give and this is a good thing.  It does take a village (and may God forever bless our village). 

And it flies by faster than you can ever imagine.

Thank you GrantDeb Photographers
 for these priceless senior photos.

*linking with the imperfect prose community today*

mostly grateful

Somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I had a seven-year-old, five-year-old, three-year-old and one-year-old I sat down at my desk and began a very detailed list that included each calendar year through  2016 and the ages and grades for each of my kids for that year.  I think it had been a particularly difficult day in our little universe and this was my attempt to gain some sense of control.  I needed to know -- in black and white -- what I could assume for the rest of my child-rearing life.  I needed to see, in the middle of days that felt endless before 8am, that there were end dates.  

I also wanted to get some kind of lifeline to the day when my kids would all be at school and I could have the house to myself for a few hours each day. 

Fast forward three school districts, two states and all these years and my whole list has been shot to heck.  More times than not, three of my four kids are home during the day.  If it's lunch time chances are pretty good that all four kids will be grazing out of the refrigerator.  

Because this season has been unexpected and extraordinary for my family, most days I'm able to pause and give thanks for this extended time of bonding with my kids.  I never expected to be homeschooling two teenage daughters or living in a new city where my kids have not yet filled their social calendars and are hanging around home most evenings and weekends.  During those moments I step back to the fringe of the activity and try to capture the moment in my memory.  I know this is like a bonus season we're experiencing and I want to be grateful.

I say most days because there are some days I'm not quite feeling the love.  

When we moved here we felt like my main focus needed to be helping the kids get acclimated and that we'd be open minded, willing to try new things in order to help them thrive here in Austin.  We were hoping to lean into the place where change stretches but does not break our kids.  I'm grateful for a season I'm able to be home full-time.  

Most days.

Linking today with Em's imperfect community:

enlarged in the waiting

I've copied an old post below.  I found it today on accident, but I'm so glad I did.  The words I wrote during that very difficult season help me rehearse all of the ways God has been Emmanuel to us this past two years.  We have, indeed, been delivered time and again from uncertainty to certainty.  From displacement to place.  From scarcity to sustenance.  I'm reminded too that while we live in this already-but-not-yet world advent is always with us.  Waiting is always with us.  Each crossing out of Egypt into promised land, brings new life and new expecting.  New need.  New hope.  New longing.  

My sister tells a story about her five-year-old son.  Not long ago, Kaley chose to make an exception to the norm and allow him to eat cookies even though he had not eaten all of his dinner.  Like any good mama she used the moment to teach, "Griffin, do you know what this is called, when you are given something you didn't really deserve?  It's grace."  Griffin enjoyed every last crumb of the cookie, turned his gorgeous blue eyes up to his mother and said sweetly, "More grace please!"

We live from grace to grace in this life.  The space in between is the waiting and it always feels like we're not going to make it.  In the excerpt below Eugene Peterson says "we are enlarged in the waiting".  Yes and yes.  We are made larger in our fortitude, but also in our expectation.  We long for more, hope for more.  We've tasted of the goodness of grace as we wait we can't help but ask more grace please.

photo credit: Craig Shields (thank you!)

From December 2009:  

We are expecting.

But not the kind you think.  Those days are done, but they were glorious and exhausting and unforgettable.

The kind of expecting I mean is the waiting and longing and travailing for something that is glorious and exhausting and thrilling and painful and unknown but familiar all at the same time. 

And, really, what better time than Advent to wait for a birth? 

This morning I sat with our Advent book.  I read Luci Shaw's essay for Third Sunday Of Advent.  Then I read it again.  Then I called Brian into the living room and read it to him in the middle of his banging around to make me a fire and getting up and down to make us tea.  I waited until he settled in with the dog on the couch so he could really hear the words because I suspected they were intended for him this morning.

"Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled - perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into a wilderness of spiritual barrenness and thirst. For him, and for many other Old Testament seers, the vacuum of dry indifference into which he spoke was not yet a place of fulfillment. Yet the promise of God through this human mouthpiece (and the word "promise" always holds a kind of certainty) was verdant with hope, a kind of greenness and glory. A softening of hard-heartedness, a lively expectation, would herald the coming of Messiah. And once again, in this season of Advent, the same promise for the same Anointed One is coming closer."

Without naming the darkness, I knew as I read these words out loud that both of us were fighting whispers of cynical and despairing demonry.  Our cozy scene of crackling fire and steaming mugs of tea in a quiet house on a quiet day off is a phony, Kinkadian snapshot to our true tumultuous internal scene.  In defiance to the unseen, I kept reading.

"Just as in Lent, the season of watchful waiting and preparation for Jesus' dying and the great transformation of his rising, so in Advent, we wait for his coming down to be with us once again. The word Lent is derived from the Middle English lente, meaning "Spring," and in French "lent" means slow. In winter it seems that the season of Spring will never come, and in both Lent and Advent it's the waiting that's hard, the in-between of divine promise and its fulfillment, like a leap across a ditch after take-off and before landing. Most of us find ourselves dangling in this hiatus, which is the interval may seem a waste of time."

Harumph...dangling in mid-leap.  How about clawing by our bare fingernails after being pushed off a cliff?  Seems more like it to me. Again with the inner tormenty whispers.  Again with the intrepid reading.

"Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, "Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the  more joyful our expectancy." With such motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work within us, as he was with Mary as the child within her grew."

Linking today with Emily :

the abundance of also

On Silent Retreat with Christ Community Church, September 2011

Cedarbrake Retreat Center, Belton, TX

a journal entry:

Our Saturday Vespers meditation was in the form of lectio devina on John 14:1-13.  The word that caught my attention (especially after the first reading) was the word also. Jesus said to his disciples:

I am the way

Also the truth

Also the life

It may just be that the version of Scripture Christine read was different than I've known and this verse -- being one of the most-quoted verses in the New Testament -- sounded different with the word "also" as opposed to the word "and" with which I am familiar?

Really, though, I wonder why the change? Without a dictionary handy I can't see much difference between the two conjunctions. They both connect one part of a sentence to another, like a bridge or a harness. I'm thinking that also carries a bit more weight than "and". For one thing, it's made up of two syllables, brief snippets of language, yes. But having to push the palate around two phonetic shapes rather than one fleeting breath deems a heartier substance into the subject at hand.  All so.  Also.

As for why God spoke this word to me, I do not comprehend. I wish I knew the Greek for also. I think Greek for "and" is the word kai. Another day that word caught my attention with its ability to so effortlessly hold together two tensions:

In sickness and in health.

For richer and for poorer.

The humble word also says to me "but, wait, there's more!" Jesus is the way. This is good news!  He is the road on which we travel.  I am at peace.

But wait, there's more!  Also, He is the truth. Also the life.

Within His being, Jesus holds together many selves.  Jesus is God, one with the Father. Also, He is the Son showing us the Father.  Also the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth living on in us.  Making a way for us to live like Jesus and counseling us to do even greater things.

Also speaks another way -- as an indication of abundance.  As in:  we had chocolate and caramel-drizzled apple slices for dessert last night.  Also we had Blue Bell ice cream!

I spent the first part of this retreat grieving the sin of my own unforgiveness to so many people I love. I listed a whole page of names:  those I'd sinned against and those who'd -- real or imagined -- sinned against me.  I've been carrying this list in  a hidden recess, holding them there hostage to my demands that somebody love me unconditionally, somebody find me valuable enough to not betray me, reject me, forget me. I was holding so many people hostage to my demands I had no room for new possibilities of community, companionship.

So obsessed was I, I took my own self hostage. Denying myself the hope of new life when the old has been so disappointing.  Telling myself I was not valuable enough to deserve another chance at Christ-centered, life-giving,  heart-mending community. I had to hold these names hostage because if I released them I would have nothing else.

I was living in the mindset of scarcity. The belief that I could only love either this community or the other. That the best I could hope was either the old wounds of the past or the unseen wounds of the future.

But Jesus says also.

He redeems the scarcity of my either/or mindset to the abundance of also.  I am wounded, yes. Also I am healed. I have been rejected by friends.  Also, I have been loved.  I am fearful of the unknown in this new community. 

Also, I am delighted about the new possibilities.

*linking with Emily and the imperfect prose community*

*also, linking with Ann today*

is God like a greased watermelon? (a re-post)

Continuing to meditate this week on the practice of spiritual study as a way to gain not just knowledge but faith,  wisdom, humility and transformation.  Way back in the early days of this blog, June 2006, I asked a question that I seem to be asking still:  Is God like a greased watermelon?

Here's the re-post and a few links to other posts asking the same question again (it also seems I couldn't find a way to wrestle without using metaphor after metaphor):

Did you ever read Waking the Dead by John Eldredge? In his first chapter he compares our ability to see God and really "get it" spiritually on this earth like a pilot trying to fly in the fog. He talks about the fact that while we are on this earth it is most days that we are unable to get a clear visual -- we are more often flying in the fog than we are in the clear. But -- the moments that we do experience, where we 'get it' (it feels like we can almost literally see God's face and can hear him speaking to us about who we are and what our life holds) keep us energized for all of the rest of the foggy days. It keeps us hungry to follow Him and to be hopeful for eternity with him.

I have personally found that I struggle with making an idol out of those moments. When I experience them, I usually behave like Peter when Jesus took him and James and John up on the Mount and allowed them to see him full of glory and talking with Moses and Elijah. It's hard not to do that, but it is not growth and quickly turns into idolatry. Boy, it is tough, though.

It strikes me that God loves our pursuit of Him so much that He sometimes seems to playfully hide from us (picture peek-a-boo or hide 'n seek with your kids and all of the giggling that goes along with it and the joy of being found by them) in order to keep us moving forward and unable to make ourselves God because we figured him out (picture Eve wanting to eat the fruit in the garden so she could have the same knowledge as God).

It seems that God chooses to be more like a greased watermelon than a bird with clipped wings in a cage. Even those this often leaves me feeling frustrated, I wouldn't want to serve a God who could be caught-- by me or anyone else.

other links:

• On Wrestling Watermelons, April 2007
• Authentic Experiences, December 2008 

*linking with the imperfect prose community today.* 

becoming forgiven [imperfect prose]

i've lost count the number i've recited this prayer

somewhere between my catholic friends and the baptists

regarding the others, how many times eyes rolled

at the mention of the title

It should be called the Disciple's Prayer, you know.

i've lost count the number i thought i had no one 

to forgive so i would be forgiven

until the words roll off my tongue

leaving behind the vain repetition of the slightly-miffed 

the increasingly more annoying

intentions were good and didn't mean to hurt

the little slight i barely noticed

and the one who overlooked 

the number of those unaware i hold them accountable

seventy times seven,  

requires rote recitation three times daily, sometimes
four, to account for the repetitious Lord's
praying these now-counted disciples off to graceland

with me, becoming forgiven

*linking with the forgiven at Em's place today.*

Imperfect Prose: Come, Home

Come, mend

Come, Mender

speak comfort to the broken

hearted, hardly hearing truth
affirm the damned, lies
become gospel.
Come, Gospel.

Come, Promise

strength to the weak
willed, willing as we are
not competent, accusation
becomes repentance.
Come, penitent.


Come, Home
cover our exposed
selves, selfs gathered seeking 
squandered consolation, humility
becomes compassion.
Come, passion.


Come, perfect Three
come, union
unity.

*Thank you again to my dear poet-friend Brett for inspiring me with his unique brand of genius and for letting me riff off his beloved words.*

*Linking up with Em's community today.*

Home is Here

   But the places that used to fit me / Cannot hold the things I've learned

 And those roads closed off to me / While my back was turned 
                                                            -- Sara Groves, "Painting Pictures of Egypt"

Binghamton skyline (photo credit: Kirsten Reynolds)

Austin skyline

I'm realizing one of the largest obstacles to getting settled in our new city.  A fierce, quite likely  misplaced, sense of loyalty to our NY friends.  It's kind of embarrassing to admit, sounds a bit juvenile even.  Sort of like when you lose a beloved pet and people ask too soon if you're going to replace it with a new one.  Or when you trap ask your husband whether or not he'd remarry if you died.  It's that kind of feeling.

Of course, mourning is real.  We're definitely mourning around here.  Unpredictable bouts of weeping pop up here and there.  They don't last too long, but they are intense.  Still we are convinced that we are where we are supposed to be, that we've thrown our lot in with a good group of people.  Plus, we love it here.  We love the house, the city, the job, the church, the people.  Kids don't really love the schools, but that's not really anything too new.  

Somehow I'd never heard this Sara Groves song until this past week.  It's a perfect description of the tension we're living in.  When this new job for Brian was still pending, we often described to people that we'd be heartbroken if we found we had to move and heartbroken if we found out we had to stay.  You could look at that as a win-win.  Or you could look at it the other way.  Around here, it just depends on the day.  

Sea bass and General Tso's in Endwell, NY

Enchiladas in Austin

I don’t want to leave here
I don’t want to stay

It feels like pinching to me either way
The places I long for the most
Are the places where I’ve been
They are calling after me like a long lost friend

Lovely friends cleaning out our NY house

Lovely friends setting up our TX kitchen

It’s not about losing faith
It’s not about trust
It’s all about comfortable
When you move so much
The place I was wasn’t perfect
But I had found a way to live
It wasn’t milk or honey
But then neither is this

Family prayer for strength and courage in NY

Family prayer for strength and courage in TX

The past is so tangible I know it by heart
Familiar things are never easy to discard
I was dying for some freedom
But now I hesitate to go
Caught between the promise
And the things I know

Imperfect Prose: With-God-With-Us

Christ in the Suburbs
Georges Roualt

With-God-With-Us

With-God, man will make his plans, but the end result is the Lord's.

And sometimes we just make dumb plans.

With-God's Spirit praying for us in groanings that can not be expressed in words.

Sometimes, though, we should just learn new words.

God-With-Us will never leave us or forsake us.

But, usually, He disguises Himself pretty good.

With-God we listen whether to turn to the right or the left.

Sometimes He tells us only to get up and go.

God-With-Us sends angels to keep us from falling.

Sometimes we're just supposed to die. 

*Linking with Em's community today.

Thursday is for Imperfect Prose: circling the presence

I wonder what marked the moment as the acceptable time for tongues of fire to fall down?

A certain magic word?

What ancient riddle opened the door?  Moved the mountain into the sea?

What familiar Spirit fluttered the dead eyelid?  Called deep up from deep?  

I do not have the word, have not discovered the incantation.

                                                                                       But I've met the Spirit

and I think I know the answer.

I do not know the answer in the way one memorizes a flashcard formula, babbles 
incessant technical jargon, wishful thinking, vain repetitions of one-hit wonders.

Not in short-term memory exercises.  Not in altar-call professions

sudden inspiration,  prickly goose-bumpy revelation.

I do not know the trick to conjure down the flames.

                                                                                        But I studied the dusty photographs
read unfeeling the prayers, practiced the old language on inert tongue.
                                                                                        I slept under the canopy of intercession,                squatted in the hallway with the Son,
rocked sweaty in the lap of the Father,
eavesdropped under the door crack the Spirit-guide

and we knew it when we saw it.

The Tree of Presence Completes the Forest
Scott Erickson
Vancouver Project, By/For

*Linking with Emily and the imperfect prose community today.*