I thought I would lose it. My 10 year old was having a woe is me day, moaning at every task with slumped shoulders and hanging head; my 4 year old was being unusually loud and wild; and my 3 year old, recovering from pneumonia and a weekend stay in the hospital, was extremely clingy. I didn’t want to see their faces, hear their voices or feel them tugging on me. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I paused, remembered my role and got back to performing it to help stabilize them. They all had needs, some legitimate and others questionable, but what was true for each child was their world centered on them.
Though I had settled to perform my motherly duties, I still struggled as a mother in this moment so I took to Facebook: “I believe the selfishness in children is designed to squeeze out the selfishness in parents. I am being stretched on my selfless journey. Anybody know what I'm talking about?” I got dozens of likes and comments echoing variations of my experience, and I know plenty of you know what I’m talking about, too.
Children call our names a gazillion times a day wanting water, food, help with homework, to know where their favorite shirt is, money for this school project or that new outfit and a ton of other requests that seem endless. Even when our children are out of our homes the calls still come for us to come to the rescue. How do we respond to their demands? I have gone the gamut from gentle to gangsta, but I have found it best, so I can grow as a parent and a Christian, to observe what ugliness is still in me and investigate how to get it out. Chief among my ugliness is realizing my mother love had limits.
I tell my children, and I’m sure many of you do, too, that you will love them no matter what they do, say or become. “I might not like what you do, but I’ll always love you,” my mom would tell my siblings and me. I got that from her, but I also got from her the ability to shoot those sharp looks and spicy words when, at times, I see or hear something I don’t like. Here is where my conditional mothering kicks in: I will only exhibit the pertinent Fruit of the Spirit until the boys do something that goes way beyond my sensibilities (Galatians 5:22-24). I unconsciously placed a limit on my sweet talk, firm but not harsh talk, and loving looks. Until I really focused on what love is, I didn’t realize that with these disapproving responses, I had withdrawn my love, effectively displaying hate. My responses would serve to show my displeasure but also came with looks of disgust or words to shame or another flagrant display of emotion my flesh deemed appropriate for the offense. I can try to rationalize that my looks and words appear because of what the child may have said or done, but we don’t speak words and toss looks to actions; we speak words and toss looks to people, and they tell the real story.
Typically, how our children interact with us gives us a measure of how well we are responding to them. “Love is patient and is kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).
We know these verses and they sound good and make us starry-eyed at weddings, but they don’t feel good when a situation challenges us to love like this. I have cringed at times at the thought of having to love like this again and have cringed again when I realized that I still can’t love like this, evidenced by my inner struggle and maybe a downcast look on my child’s face. I endeavor to do better because when we don’t love like the Scriptures tell us, we are not parenting the way God intends.
Maybe your weak area is not love, though I would suspect that its many points challenge most of us. Perhaps your high-achieving child shows that you are not just proud but prideful. Or having to give an update on your incorrigible child brings out the liar in you. Whatever the issue, we should not give up on and condemn ourselves, but instead, be thankful for children who squeeze each of our Fruit of the Spirit to see how ripe it is.
- When our fruit is not ripe from lack of learning in an area, we may regularly respond based on our emotions.
- When our fruit is overripe from an abundance of unexercised knowledge in an area, we may snap with a snarky sense of piousness.
- But when our fruit is ripe for the picking, we can habitually respond in love. I am not saying that we won’t get agitated or frustrated, but we can choose to see our children’s attitudes and actions as tools to teach us how to be better parents and Christians.
When we get agitated and frustrated, let’s stop and examine the type of response we give our children so we know where we need to grow or stand firm, always seeking to put the Kingdom first.
As you respond to your children’s attitudes and actions, in what areas have you discovered you need to grow?