Here’s some commentary about parenting,
guys: It’s freaking hard.
I’m jealous of all of you people who get to
raise your own children. I have a theory from when my friend Julie and her
little boy were living with my family, that mothers have a special bond with
their kids. They have to. Because I can tell you: Josiah would be screaming
bloody murder and I would be beside myself, beating my brain to come up with a
way to make the toddler stop shrieking, and Julie would wander in and have the
whole thing resolved in three minutes flat. You mommy people have super powers.
Since none of my kids are actually my kids,
I work more on a trust-building, trial-and-error way. Usually we get thing
figured out after a period of transition, and until that transition period is
over it’s important to remember how strange and scary we all are to new kids,
especially when they come in alone. I love that part, getting to know them and finding
out what they like or dislike. I love getting to the point where the girls come
to trust me and realize that they actually are somewhere safe. It’s a great
feeling.
However, good feelings aside, it can be
really hard to deal with nine kids at once. There is always someone who needs
attention, always someone who’s behavior needs to be corrected. I think anyone
who has kids can agree with me that they never all behave themselves at once,
except maybe when they’re watching TV (and we don’t have TVs in the dorm). Here’s a hypothetical scenario for you:
Sitting down to my dinner, I stop eating to listen to Jenny explain to my why she can’t possibly be expected to eat (because it’s a lot of food and she has a very small tummy, and we should send it to the hungry kids in Africa that you’re always talk about, Alisha!) Ingrid just tossed her chicken nugget at Erika, causing an ear-splitting shriek to issue from Erika’s lips and Italia to spill her tea all over Evelyn’s plate, and Teresa starts to cry. Andrea gets mad on Evelyn’s behalf and starts shouting about how she’s gonna give Erika a knuckle sandwich (she’s a scrapper, that one) and Teresa starts to cry because she thinks her sister is going to lose all her teeth.
Somehow, in the middle of all of that, I find it difficult
to keep calm and respond with the love I know I need to show, especially when
what I really want to do is shriek myself.So what do I do? I get annoyed. Sometimes,
I get supremely annoyed. I’m short with the kids as we go get a towel and find
a new dinner for Evelyn. I speak sharply to Erika about screaming when I know
she was really just scared and it was a knee-jerk reaction. I try to hold
Ingrid accountable for throwing food, but now she’s insisting it was an
accident and starting to cry, which just makes me more irritated as she’s
making a scene in the community center, so I tell her I’ll talk to her
later-knowing that may never happen, because later is when children get
scrubbed and wrangled into bed before I fall into bed myself. Teresa stops
crying and is now covered in snot, and I can’t send her to the bathroom alone
so I wipe her nose with a tissue I have in my pocket and tell her to eat, leaving me with a nasty tissue in my hand and totally grossing me out. I remind
Andrea that violence is not the answer, even in the defense of a friend, and
ask her to apologize to Erika, but Andrea seems to have lost the ability to
talk, something that’s really annoying. And Jenny has still not eaten a bite of
food, and continues to insist that she really wants to help the African kids,
causing me to wonder to myself why I even say things like that to them,
anyways.
How do you show joy in the middle of that?
How do react like the adult you’re supposed to be when you really just want to
stomp your foot and start screaming?
(By the way, the hypothetical part of that
exercise was that all of it happened together. It all happened at some point
this month, but not all at the same time, thankfully!)
Lately, I’ve been reminiscing on pieces of
my parent’s advice. When I was a kid, my parents divided their schedules so
that my sister and I would spend the least amount of time in daycare as
possible, because they actually liked us (go figure) and wanted to spend time
with us. Something I remember my mom correcting me on, again and again and
again, was my attitude. I did not always have a good attitude. I would be
cranky and get asked if I had a good attitude. I would give a saucy answer and
get asked to change my attitude. I would be surly (great adjective to use on a
seven-year-old) and would be sent to my room until I changed my attitude. It
was always about attitude, decisions and consequences with her. Add to that
those big nineties posters that were everywhere at the time with pictures of
kids playing sports and the slogan “Attitude is Everything” and it felt like I
was surrounded on all sides by this whole attitude thing I didn’t care about
and didn’t understand.
My father, on the other hand, was more of a
doer and less of a correct-the-children’s-behavior kind of guy, like most guys
are, I think. I remember him getting annoyed at us occasionally, but for the
most part, he’s always been the even-tempered guy we all know and love. He
didn’t offer advice very often, but there is one thing I remember him repeating
to me and my sister every so often, usually in my mother’s hearing to get her
to smile: If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Ignoring the fact that my
dad sometimes thinks he’s a hillbilly because he grew up in Elk Mound, WI, even
when I was a kid I know how true that was. If mom was in a bad mood, we knew
what to do: duck and cover! (sorry, Mom!)
I was reading a book last week (shocker)
about how to have a happy marriage. Please feel free to snort and think that
I’m getting ahead of myself; your judgment is probably merited. I wasn’t
expecting to get a lot out of it in the moment; it’s more like studying for a
pop quiz you know is coming at some point. Anyways, the second chapter talked about joy, and one of the things
that Debi Pearl said stuck with me, even if was more of a footnote to the larger text:
Your kids take their cues from you. If
you’re happy, they’re happy. If you’re not, they’re not. They never stop
watching, measuring your reactions and recreating them. Listening to your words
and repeating them. Watching what you do and copying you. I was left with
the uncomfortable feeling that I am not always the best role model for them.
Sometimes I react poorly. Sometimes I have a bad attitude. Sometimes I sulk.
Sometimes I don’t use nice words. And most of this happens right in front of
them, making me the worst parental figure to ever exist.
Anyways, once I consoled myself that there
were worst parental figures in the world than I, and also that if I was the
worst there was nothing to do but improve, I figured this being joyful thing
was worth a try, even when things start looking like a battle scene from the Lord of the Rings. Maybe especially then.
Anyways, once I consoled myself that there
were worst parental figures in the world than I, and also that if I was the
worst there was nothing to do but improve, I figured this being joyful thing
was worth a try, even when things start looking like a battle scene from the Lord of the Rings. Maybe especially then.
So I
spent last Saturday being joyful. I didn’t yell. I didn’t raise my voice at
all. I smiled and used positive words. I did not say “What are you doing?!” in tones of panic and despair once. I made no threats; I brokered no deals. I just played with the kids and
when they started to act up, I took them aside, looked them in the eyes and
asked them if they were making good decisions.
And wouldn’t you know it, the girls
responded amazingly? Instead of the pandemonium inherent to Saturdays, I had
calm little children. Instead of fighting, I heard cooperation. Instead of mean
words, I heard nice ones. I’m not going to lie and say that we had no conflict
at all, but we had a lot less than usual, and when I put them to bed that
night, instead of feeling drained and impotent, I felt alive and peaceful. I
was excited for tomorrow. I felt joy.
That’s basically all I’ve got here. I’m
still reeling from how something as small as changing my attitude can have such
a big effect on the attitudes of my kids. It’s been a challenge for me, as
well, to look at other areas in my life and see how my negative or apathetic
attitudes have been limiting me. I think one of the important things to
remember is the difference between happiness and joy. If you wait to feel
happy, it will happen every so often by itself. There are plenty of things that
make me happy in this life: a cup of hot tea, spending time with my mom,
getting a new book and finding out it’s more than 500 pages-all great examples.
Happiness is flighty, though. It comes and it goes. Joy is not something you
just feel. Joy comes from knowing what God has called you to do and fulfilling
that call. It may not be something earth shattering-God’s call can be something
as small as knowing you need an attitude change. When you’re living in that
call, and living in obedience to Him, that’s where the joy comes from.