This was not a good parenting morning. At all. I got angry. I slammed a door. I reacted poorly. I had listened to all the excuses I could listen to and I got mad. Was I right to get mad? Is it acceptable to show kids just how upsetting they can be sometimes? YES! Was I right to be so upset? What was the infraction of the morning? Some of them were just too tired to get up and go to church…didn't go to sleep until 3 (playing video games) and just couldn't do it today. Whose fault is that? Is that a reason to let them skip church? Again?!? This is not the first time I have heard this.
As some of you know I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With that comes quite a lot of expectation…especially of our youth. Well, of all of us really, but we do focus on the youth and for very good reasons. It's hard to grasp what they are faced with on a daily basis…I don't mean war or famine, that's different though still dealt with in some parts of the world. I am referring to the temptations that are literally everywhere. I could launch into a diatribe about that but I won't…for now. Back to the morning, being a member of this church means going to church on Sundays…every Sunday. It means that we go at an assigned time based on where we live. Our current time is 8:30am but that will change when we hit 2015 and it will be a little bit later. 8:30 isn't my favorite time but it's doable…unless you are a teenager and you stay up until 3 in the morning and then it's tragic.
As I have worked through the frustration of the day I have realized something much bigger and it's kind of hard to express but I will try. You see, in our home only one parent is actively engaged in any attempt at being part of church. The other parent chooses to abstain, for many valid and personal reasons that I have come to accept. (mostly) As in any faith, one parent involved is only half the team. We stand together in everything else. It's hard to grasp unless you have worked through something like this…and it isn't just religion that divides people. It can be anything. When you want a baby and the other one doesn't, or one wants to move for a job and you just can't even consider it…I know well that this is a universal challenge. What our particular challenge implies is a murky gray area where we are neither too religious nor too apathetic. We are in the middle. Here's where the realization came for me.
I have often felt inadequate as a member of this faith based on my willing participation in the gray zone. Much counsel has been given clarifying that there is no gray area. Only the black and white. Those are the talks that are hard for me. I have sometimes prided myself on my ability to walk this gray line and keep my family together and support my husband in his own beliefs. What I know now is that there was nothing noble about it. My immersion into the gray area is self preservation. The truth is that every time I find myself merging out of the gray, attempting to present definition for our family and raise the expectations for all of us I find myself quite sad…sometimes heartbroken. See in our faith we believe that families are forever. We believe that we have the divine responsibility and privilege of sealing our families together for time and eternity in sacred ordinances in the Temple. We want that for everyone. We know that not everyone agrees with this idea and that's ok…that whole free agency thing and all. It is; however, a fundamental tenant of our faith. Having grown up LDS I knew that my only path to real happiness was to marry a nice Mormon boy and be married in the Temple. Well…that theory has been proven and disproven many times over. It is sometimes difficult to maintain the faith when I will not be allowed to perform this sacred ordinance with my own husband and children. It also means not participating in the daily rituals that come with this faith. So, I wade in the muddy waters…I allow mediocrity because it, in some small way, diffuses that disappointment for just a little while.
I do believe in a loving Father in Heaven who knows better what to do with me than I do. I believe that families can be together forever and that sometimes those ordinances aren't done for some time….but at some point, they will be done. The problem is that while I do believe that, the moments of disappointment are still real. So today I reacted poorly. I am still reacting poorly actually. I tried communicating with all of my children a little while ago and felt quite defeated by the end, wondering why I tried at all.
So why did I say anything about a parenting measuring stick? Because in spite of this very personal frustration I have great kids. I know that. I don't measure them against anyone else or what others might expect of them. I want them to be the very best versions of themselves, no matter what that looks like. I heard a brave woman talk about her desire to impose her own maternal will on her children today in church and that she wished that she could have done so to prevent the loss of her oldest child nearly a year ago. Wouldn't that be nice? Just to tell them what to do and they do it…because we said so. That isn't the order of things though. Agency is the thing that allows us to fail and succeed and it is up to us to determine which way that falls, even if the results are devastating. The beauty of the results potentially being positive is enough to make us carry on either way…gray area, muddy waters, divorce, suicide, job loss and any other manner of tragedies and disappointments notwithstanding. We keep getting up.
In a funny way this realization makes me slightly less upset with my kids about the morning. They have no idea what it all really means to me and that's because they have only really known the gray. So I try to explain…and then the cycle starts all over again.
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