In high school, I was very, very sure that I would never get married and have kids. I was also equally sure that the half a bottle of hairspray I shellacked my bangs with was money well spent. So you can see how discerning my judgment was.
In college, I assumed I would always vote one particular way. But I also thought a bean burrito at Taco Bell was a healthy lunch decision, bless my lard-coated heart.
Ages ago, one of my kids decided he believed something very different than many of his family members believed. When one of the family members found out, this person mailed my kid a book to help change his mind, without ever engaging my child in conversation about it. My kid never read that book. All it did was make him feel like someone’s project, something to be fixed. He isn’t. He is a person learning to adult, to determine what he believes, who he is, how he’ll spend his working life. It’s terrifying and exhilarating all in one breath.
The truth is:
Some kids are gay.
Some kids are agnostic.
Some kids love Jesus.
Some kids hate reading.
Some kids are terrible at soccer.
Some kids play ten instruments by ear.
Some kids write beautifully.
Some kids fail science and love math.
Whatever your kids are, they are more than you expected them to be. And less. They should not be compared with the shiny outside of someone else’s family.
They disappoint you. They amaze you. They make you furious. They make you laugh.
They are not the people you thought they’d be. Their lives aren’t following the journey you dreamed out for them.
When kids start stretching, pushing, tugging at the mold we’ve tried to pour them into, we will either become angry and anxious or we can practice acceptance. The one thing we cannot do is treat them as a project to be worked on, a problem to be solved. They are people. They are human. They will grow and change and push, just as we did.
I am thrilled that I’m not the same girl I was when I was twenty and frying my skin at the beach with no thought of sun protection; the girl who was sure that she would never homeschool or drive a minivan. Any change that I experienced was not the result of someone sending me books to convince me of what they wanted me to believe. Any change was not the result of debate or argumentative, shaming comments. Any change that was bone-deep and lasting came from the spirit inside of me, a gentle whisper, a quiet stirring, a moving and shifting in my heart and mind. Any true change came through watching others walk through their own fires and come out the other side with a different but stronger faith.
Any change in our kids, in your kids, will come that same way. Let’s put down the heavy bag of tools we’ve been gathering to carve the kids into our own image. Instead, let’s wrap our arms around them, just as they are right now, accepting them and holding lightly to whom they are today, because they won’t stay there.
After all, neither did we. Thank God.
