A Child’s Growth Does Not Always Glitter Like Gold
Here’s some wisdom I’m keeping close as I embark on my new life living with four kids under 6. The passages are excerpted from The Child Under Six by James L. Hymes, which my wonderful mom-in-law gave me. The book remains one of my all-time favorite parenting books, but it’s sadly out of print.
“The stages of growth so important to a child are not necessarily easy for us. There is a difference between behavior that is developmentally healthy and significant – good for the child – and behavior that is good for us – pleasant to live with. Young children wet. They have to, but wetting is a nuisance. Young children spit up. They have to, but what a nuisance! Young children wake up in the middle of the night. They cry because they cannot talk. They must be carried because they cannot walk. At every age children do what they must do because they are who they are. Their normal behavior does not always check with our convenience.
Sometimes we know why children do what they do. We accept their crying, for example, when we know they are teething. But the times when we know the reason are few compared to those times when we do not. You get no medals for siding with children when the reason for their behavior is obvious. Then the gold glitters – anyone can see it. The real trick to living well with youngsters lies in our willingness to give them a little free reign. Can you go along with them, even when you don’t know why they do what they do, and when their behavior certainly isn’t what we would do at our advanced age?
Living well with children calls for faith as well as facts. You need a conviction that there is a plan to growth and some point to all behavior – the faith that ‘God works in wondrous ways his miracles to perform.’ It is this faith that breeds humility. Our task is not to play God. Our task is not to end those acts that don’t happen to please use, although they please the child very deeply.
We each have our tolerances, peculiar to us, and our special tender spots. Some of us can live with the young children’s noise and activity with never a qualm. Some of us can tolerate the four-year-old’s verbal ‘outrages’ without breaking stride. Some of us are not bothered in the least by the young child’s love of water, mud, and gush. The job we face is to extend our tolerances. We have to learn to take children as they come.”
What I’m Pondering Today…
…and given my recent “restricted activity/modified bedrest” (or whatever you want to call it) mandate, I’ve ample time to ponder.
“Our body is a cenacle, a monstrance; through its crystal the world should see God.”
~Saint Gianna Molla
Thanks to a friend for sending this along to me.
For a Friend
He Leadeth Me
“The greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers – and then to sustain him with his grace so that he may endure to the end and be saved.”
This friend, I thought as I re-read these words again and again, has been given a great grace and while many would be crushed under the weight of her cross, she is shouldering it with supernatural strength.
The last time I saw her – only about three weeks ago – she’d just had her 20 week ultrasound and discovered she was having a boy and a girl. I remember her beautiful, irrepressible smile. I remember this, too: She was wearing a fashionable shift that was gently hugging the silhouette of her burgeoning belly, and her hands would continuously rest on her tummy, a protective touch upon the sacred sanctuary that was home to not one but two tiny, precious souls – souls, I understand, she waited a long, long time for and referred to as her miracle babies.
Today those miracle babies are in the NICU after she discovered last week that her body was going into labor. (She delivered late last night.) There have been prayer chains for her all over the place – the Body of Christ at work. These prayers, I hope, are lightening what seems to me like an almost unbearable cross. Then again, I’m someone who, like a petulant child, wanted to shout out, “This isn’t fair” when I heard that after only one week of bed rest, her body could no longer wait and the babies were coming.
When she knew labor was imminent, a close friend of hers asked for our prayers and said that this beautiful mother was already learning the most difficult lesson: To entrust your children, pieces of you that you desperately want to cling to and hold onto and to protect no matter the cost, completely to God.
We have so little control. It’s terrifying, really. Like Jesus, we are so often thrown into positions of powerlessness that we never would have chosen. Yet, like Him we are asked to remain faithful.
And this is what my friend is doing right now. She is in a Passion; yet, she is living through it with such a powerful faith and grace that she is, no doubt, bringing others to the foot of the cross and helping them to see that there lies something more than hurt and hopelessness in suffering.
May this precious family be sustained with His grace and find peace in His will no matter what happens to these tiny, perfect, and fragile miracles.
“Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer.” Romans 12:12
