Note: This is a guest column by our daughter Saydi Eyre Shumway, who has just endured a record-breaking, patience-trying Boston winter. This was previously published on her blog at BostonShumways.blogspot.com.
Before becoming a mother, I think I knew that things would be hard and that everything wouldn’t always go according to plan. I imagined I’d be tired, that I’d lack vision and energy, that I’d have a hard time controlling my temper, that my kids would do cute little mischievous things, that I'd have to teach them to share and get along. But I didn’t realize how much my kids would get in the way of me parenting them. Isn’t that some kind of oxymoron?
I didn’t realize that I’d put in all this work and effort and time and prayer and planning on their behalf only to have them wreck it with resistance, a bad mood, too little blood sugar, a strong will to do something different, silliness, the list goes on and on.
Sometimes I want to just say to my kids: “Trust me! Just go with it, it’s gonna be good. Just follow the program! I had a vision here, people! And that vision was so much more beautiful than this mess you’re making of it!”
In those moments, I find myself wanting a remote control. To turn them off, or at least turn them down. I want to move their arms and legs away from all the buttons they’re trying to push and into a nice folded position. I want to turn their ears on and their lips off. I want to rewire their little brains to see things from my perspective.
I want a button to mute, a joystick to move them into place and a pause button to keep them there until I get all collected and ready to go. And I want a rewind button, to go back and get it right. And lots of times a fast-forward button would be nice, too, to get them to do what I ask.
But God didn’t give me a remote control. That’s not the plan. As fantastic as it sounds, that would sort of defeat the purpose of parenting.
We are to teach our children to control themselves, to ultimately make good choices without us using the remote of privileges given or withheld. If we could control them, they’d just be little puppets, unable to direct their own lives, and really, that might get a little boring.
I’m finding that motherhood is a constant dance between knowing when to be deliberate, structured and planned and when to throw our hands up and just surrender and shower down love. The trick is knowing when to let things flow in a natural way and when to push your plan through even in the wake of resistance and chaos.
This Easter season has had a hefty dose of that dance for me. I sat down to dinner on Holy Monday to tell the kids the plan for the week. All four kids were in quite a state that night. Maybe too many late weekend nights in a row, maybe too much sugar, who knows. But one was pestering, one was screaming, one was laughing and one was arguing with me about how tired they were of Jesus. Can’t we just do some Easter Bunny candy stuff? We already know all this stuff about Jesus.
So, that night, instead of teaching them about Jeus Christ cleansing the temple, I plaited my own figurative whip and I put them all to bed in a quiet (but kind of scary) mothering rage and flung myself on my bed to have a good long ugly cry. The floodgates opened and all the emotions contained for months spewed forth. I cried out pleas for Jesus to come in and clean out our temple here. Cast out all the filthiness in me, in us, in our patterns of interaction.
I felt hypocritical, like somehow on the outside I might look like I was getting it all right, but on the inside things were a royal mess. I felt the frightening and utter lack of control that is really the reality of parenting. I felt stuck and unable to realize my visions, to love the way I wanted to, to teach and enjoy the blessings packaged up in these little children of mine. I felt the frustration of trying with all my might to do something good and have it go totally wrong.
I know half of those rushing emotions that night were irrational — hormones flaring up their crazy heads. But I truly believe that sometimes those crazy, seemingly irrational emotions are also meant to propel us toward something new, to get us back on track, to give us the ambition to change.
So I tried to embrace all the feelings flooding my soul that night. I entertained them. I felt them fully. I wrote them down. And I woke up the next morning feeling much better, but also feeling weak and reliant on God. It was like all of those tears had washed away my resolve to cling to what I had believed was right, leaving me clear to rethink, a cleaner slate to rewrite. To start fresh and carve a new path, less mired by my limited vision and more inspired by God’s.
After that little epiphany, as soon as I felt things were going awry, as soon as I felt the frustration of things not going according to my plan, I just let go. I let things flow. I modified when things started going south. I danced that dance right on the edge and realized that with each situation, I needed to start with a plan but be so ready to look for God’s way rather than sticking to my own.
The Thursday before Easter, we went for a walk through the (still snow-covered) woods at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. I had printed out little lists of things in nature that I wanted the kids to look for. At the end of the walk, I had envisioned that we’d sit in some nice, warm, sun-filled spot and look through their bags of nature symbols and discuss the ways in which each one points to Christ.
The kids weren’t too excited about this plan, and I was bracing myself to be seriously disappointed until I decided to just let it flow. They traipsed through the woods unfettered and, being led by serendipity instead of my printed sheet, they found symbols and signs much more profound, real and thrilling than the ones I had included on the hunt.
We stopped still for nearly an hour to feed little chickadees that fluttered down and ate right out of the kids’ hands. The excitement was thick as the kids felt a new connection to the wild.
We noticed the thawing earth, the melting ice, the succulent water lily plants poking through the snow, the warm, bright sun. We noted how thorns hedged up some of the way, how the lichen looked so brilliant and alive against the rest of the cold world still waiting for more warmth to bring new life.
We spotted crosses in branches and bright green mossy growth. We walked through a tunnel carved through stone and stood in the damp middle of that path, breathing in the smell of an empty tomb. We didn’t read any scriptures or talk about anything too serious. We just let ourselves feel the thrill of breathing in the brink of spring.
One year we’ll do the Easter walk I had planned. We’ll collect beautiful signs and bring them home and make a centerpiece for our Easter table. But this year, where serendipity took us was perfect.
Parenthood is a great balancing act. Of course we want to plan and think and be deliberate and create meaningful experiences for our children. Of course we should push through lots of things even (and maybe especially) when our children cry out in protest against them.
But this past Easter season, I’ve been reminded that the minute I feel like my kids are getting in the way of my parenting is the very minute I need to step back, zoom out, rethink my plan and connect with God, who sees the big picture.
Richard and Linda Eyre are New York Times best-selling authors and founders of JoySchools.com who speak worldwide on marriage and parenting issues. Their new books are "The Turning" and "Life in Full." For more, see YouTube.com/eyresontheroad.