Do You Think They Wish They Were Us?

Last Friday night we went to bed very late.  Earlier, some of Kat's friends and I totally pulled off the perfect surprise birthday party for Kat.  She cried.  After everyone went home we got all the ski gear out, sorted, and packed.  I loaded the car with boots, poles, skis, and snowboards.  I think we went to bed at 2:00.  At 6:00 AM we got up and got the kids setup for the two hour trip to Powder Mountain.  It's a lot of work.

As we drove through Bountiful on I-15 I looked over at my beautiful partner in crime.  I surveyed the other cars on the road.  I saw a car full of family in semi-casual dress.  I imagined some family function (it is Easter weekend after all).  They didn't look super stoked.  I turned to Kat and said, "Do you think they wish they were us?"

"What do you mean?"

Everyone wants to be that family that gets out, lives on their feet, and adventures.
There are really good excuses not to:

• Truman is too little - he only barely walks
• Jeffrey could use a nap
• Emerson wants to play with his friends
• Ava wants to go to movie
• Elisabeth made plans with her girlies
• It's too far
• It's too hard to get everyone up and packed into the car
• It's too much work
• It only creates more work once we get home
• We could do other things on Saturday like cleaning or yard work

Well, I know that we are so much happier if we get off our collective ass.  Get up and get out.  Take the kids.  Of course it's work, duh.

Years ago, Duane Call said it quite nicely:  "We work way too hard during the week to not do something amazing on the weekend."

Sink your teeth in and suck the juice out.

The Price Our Kids Pay

Our children will take on our unresolved crap in order to continue to have a relationship with us.  This is something that is pretty easy to see in other, really screwed up families.  Like the way that children of addicts will humor their parent's narcissism so that they can stay close.  It's harder to see in ourselves.

Several years ago, I had a broken heart for a period of months.  I was so deeply hurt and broken, and I know this produced a heavy burden for my children.  I look back and see how they buoyed me up and took on some of my weighty pain.  I adore my children, but this is not right.  My kids shouldn't have to shoulder my crap.

I remember praying so earnestly that I could be healed, and not stay broken; and even more earnestly that my pain and guilt wouldn't fall so hard on my children.  I prayed for them to be shielded from my pain, my burdens, and my mistakes.  My faith in the atonement leads me to believe that there is relief for them.

I learned to acknowledge it in appropriate ways with my children:  "Emerson, I'm sorry I got upset with you.  I was being selfish and could only think about what I wanted.  I was too wrapped up in taking care of me, and what you needed was bugging me.  That's not OK.  You are precious to me.  Can we try again?  I promise to listen to you and hear what you need."

The longer term outcome from this experience is that I'm much more conscious that my troubles, trials, burdens, and imperfections are indeed "leaky".  My garbage spills out regardless of how well I think I have it covered up and contained.  So I don't fool myself into thinking I can hide it from my family.  Things like:

• Selfishness
• Jealousy
• Deceit
• Resentment
• Boredom
• Addiction

I know many of us are already constantly beating ourselves up, and this message seems like yet another stone in the huge pile that buries us.  The good news is that our goodness will spill over too:

• Generosity
• Love
• Kindness
• Creativity
• Encouragement
• Patience
• Honesty

The Kind of Parents We Aren't

In our family, you're allowed to get bruised, broken and hurt.  God gave us bodies that heal themselves... for the most part.  Broken hearts don't heal by themselves... which is a topic for some other post.

God's plan is a high risk/high reward proposition:  We make choices about what we worship in terms of our time and attention.  God sent his children to earth to learn by faith and experience.  He respects our agency, a perfect expression of our present desires.  For many of us God sent us to parents who are interested in helping us learn the process of choice, faith, and experience; all with a healthy measure of obedience and self-discipline early on.  As parents, there is always a temptation to focus on control and safety at the expense of agency and experience.  

You might ask, "So what about safety?  Are you saying you have no obligation to keep them safe?"

Of course we try to keep our kids safe.  We have a bedrock standard:  Not dead.  Not molested.

We can probably recover from anything less than those.  And the truth is that the reach of the atonement makes it such that we could and would recover from those... regardless, we're not reckless.  If you're reading this thinking that we must be negligent and don't watch out for our kids, that's not the case and you must not really know us very well. 

There's a balance.  Respecting agency is a risky venture.

I really can choose to spend all my time reading comics, chewing tobacco, and loitering; or even worse... and I would experience and (hopefully learn from) those consequences.  And as we learn, there is a reward when we make choices that grow our faith and reinforce our love for God and his children- the reward is that we can be made better than we are.  

We are trying to raise kids that understand the nature of agency:  That they control their wants, and they can choose really elevated desires.  If they are willing to live by faith, they can belong to God.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Sitting on your butt in front of the TV is not technically "living".  Get up.  Get out.  Find something kind to do for someone.
• You are allowed to ride bicycles, skateboards, scooters, sleds, skis, snowboards and anything else that goes. 
• Crashing is allowed.  Bones heal.  Scars are cool.  
• Tubes are not allowed:  you can't stop or turn it which means you've relegated agency and you're just going to be a victim.
• You are allowed to play in the snow too long.  
• You are allowed to stay in the water too long.  
• You are allowed to forget to eat and get crungry (cranky+hungry).
• You're allowed to work super hard.
• You're allowed to experiment with laziness. (Those consequences suck!)
• Wood, hammer, nails, screws, hot glue, scissors, knives, etc. are allowed.  
• Power tools are allowed with proper instruction.
• You're allowed to make really big messes, and you're allowed to choose to clean them up ;-)
• You're allowed to choose kindness, patience, and love.
• You're allowed to put others before yourself.

You're allowed to fully experience the consequences of your choices.  And you're allowed to repent and change your wants if you decide you don't like how some of your choices turned out.

Give Thanks

Some thoughts over the Holidays that I didn't get around to publishing:

At Thanksgiving, and through the Holidays, I made rolls. I did a lot of other stuff, but honestly, I've never made so much dough before.  The night before Thanksgiving I made enough dough to produce about four-hundred rolls.  These are the famous ones that every Facer has grown up with.  In my twenties it kinda bothered me that we celebrated gratitude with such amazing excess.  I was sure that we had entirely lost the sense of constant background hunger that was a nearly permanent fixture of early pilgrims and pioneers; that a big meal with so many choices wouldn't be meaningful to us in the same way that it was to those who had nearly starved to death the prior winter.  And it's not.  How could it be?

But I've made peace with the excesses of Thanksgiving and the Holidays.  I've learned to avoid overeating, and try a little bit of each tasty dish or treat that neighbors share.  With such a large and connected family, our gatherings are large and most of us will bring something, so there will be many choices.  This gives us an opportunity to think of others as we prepare something awesome.  And second, a chance to sample the best efforts of people we love.  The treats that neighbors leave on our doorstep help us be mindful of those around us and give us an opportunity to appreciate them.  Who out there knew that I absolutely adore pomegranates?!?  Maybe it was just lucky, but I choose to believe in the greater interconnectedness of things.

Gratitude is central to all of that.