Tenderness under pressure
I want to be a gentle parent. In our culture, this often feels out of reach.
Century illustration (Source image: Getty)
At 7:34 a.m. on a Wednesday, I begin to lose my calm. This is early last fall, with the school year still young and my family not yet settled into a routine. I am cajoling my son, trying to instill in him the kind of responsibility I hope he can live out. He’s in fourth grade now—old enough, we’ve decided, to be making his own breakfast and lunch. Surely he could have done this sooner; surely I could keep doing it for him. But his dad and I are now more strapped at work, and I’m hoping he can rise to the occasion.
We need to leave for school in 11 minutes. Despite my frequent reminders-turned-nagging, Sam has been focusing on snuggling our beloved dog and reading Calvin and Hobbes. His lunch is not made. I feel my jaw clench, my eyes tighten, and I can hear my tone of voice before I open my mouth. I know it will not be kind. But just then, my husband calls out that his first client of the day has canceled. “Fantastic,” I bark. “I need you to get Sam across the finish line and to school. I’m out.” It’s less a passing of the baton than a desperate chucking of it. I am not proud of myself in this moment, but I know I need to leave with the dog before I yell at my son. He is not actually the problem here, not at all.
By 7:46, I am on the trail. Mabel is our pandemic puppy, ostensibly adopted for the good of our very lonely children in the fall of 2020, but it didn’t take long to come clear that I needed her emotional support as much as, or perhaps well more than, they did. She slows to sniff acorns; I help her dodge poison oak. I’m soon on the phone with a friend, Nikky, who, like me, is both a mom and an Episcopal priest. Most weeks we find time to wrestle with the scripture for the coming Sunday together, bouncing ideas around in the hope of finding the sermons we’ll each write in the days ahead. Today, though, I need to wrestle with the text that is my life. I tell her how everything feels untenable, how often I’m dropping balls, how I feel the primal urge to yell. She listens, ratifies my overwhelm, shares her own. We agree that something needs to change; we struggle to identify what or how.
