This is an easy one. I think about my family all the time at work when I forgo opportunities to goof off or waste time, and choose them to buckle down and do what needs to be done because I need to go pick up the kids at 3 o’clock on the nose. if it regularly pulls may beyond my own sense of physical capabilities, and my colleagues are always asking how I’m able to get so much done. The short answer is that I have smallish children who I want to be with and who need my attention.
YES. My husband has mentioned this same thing, about the impetus to do what he has to do to get home around the same time every day (when a salaried research job can *easily* take all the time you give it.... and often does, from anecdotes he's shared of coworkers without children.)
I once heard a working parent call this cutting the FAT from one's workday-- the Fooling Around Time. It's a process of self-discipline, but also balance, because it's okay to need moments of respite or down time; that's just being human, and taking appropriate pauses to reset. But I appreciate your point about how that self-awareness can help us, especially as parents, to keep a radar going for miscellaneous distractions, and (re)direct our time towards what we ultimately value more.
In my experience, as my little ones move beyond their preschool years and into "big kid" territory, we are more and more likely, as parents, to see elements of ourselves reflected in our children-- our personalities, our tendencies, our fears, our hesitations. Sometimes this comes with a fun and beautiful sense of recognition! And sometimes it really pulls us to self-examination, and inner work, and radical honesty about patterns we ourselves may have lived with since childhood, reevaluating them against the template of our grown-up selves, and our common life together, and our hopes for our children.
In other words, I'm finding more and more as we round the corner into the second decade of parenting that I must-- I can!-- find the capacity to work through *my* habits and emotions and foibles, as I seek to support my children in their own healthy growth. Sometimes this is because I recognize patterns all too well, reappearing in my kids, and other times it's out of a mystified wonder of, "How is it a person can feel and see this way??" To me this is a form of personal stretching, because as well as my parents loved and cared for and formed me as a child, I think that in our generation we saw less explicit modeling of that inner work from our parents and elders. So it's a push for me into compassion, and honesty, and pretty intense self-reflection, to accompany my children through their rough patches and recurring frustrations and fears. We call ourselves "grown-ups", lol, but I am constantly, always, still growing up too, right alongside them.
I live in a suburb of Denver Colorado; my daughter, Dani - lives in Boise Idaho. She recently graduated from Boise State University. She called me one evening 2 years ago when she and her college roommate were having trouble getting a lease signed for a new apartment. I offered some suggestions as to how the problems might be addressed, but there were reasons (excuses) that made my suggestions unworkable. In my mind I thought Dani needed to just grow up and get things done, but in my heart, I knew Dani needed a Dad ready to help. So, I told Dani I would come. She said no at first, but with some prodding, she admitted it would be really nice if I would come. I left my apartment at about 9:30 that night (there was a pending deadline) and drove through the night to Boise. In Wyoming there was a severe windstorm that made driving a challenge, and then there was snow near Evanston that required some 'white knuckling'. I made it to Boise by 10:00 that next day and had the leasing problem solved by about noon. I chatted with Dani and her roommate and explained how things like this needed to be approached - I was teaching them a lesson...
This was what it took at that time in that place to be a father. And I have always felt a satisfaction and validation as a man when I was able to sacrificially care for my son & daughter (and their Mother). Nothing in my life has been more important.
But now, I suffer. The kids are grown and live far away, and I live alone waiting for their calls. My circumstances were not chosen so much as imposed. I am praying for guidance on how to 'fix' my circumstances by getting close to someone...
Plus one to the Douthat piece - I'm definitely a better person for having parental responsibilities. I've tended in my life to gravitate toward career fields that provide Big Responsibility and Meaning over remuneration, only to eventually get jaded and frustrated with whatever institution I'm working in. Nothing like this has happened with parenting (and this time, I have no worries at all that it will).
Working with purpose and motivation at a job that's truly meaningful and good has done wonders for me.
I've recently read / am reading three lovely books on the call beyond ourselves! The first is One Straw Revolutionary, a biography of Masanobu Fukuoka. He devoted his life to the concept that we should always be in a state of learning from nature with great humility. In particular, he ran a many decade experiment on his own farm in Japan on the efficacy of 'natural farming' methods - letting nature decide what exactly should grow where, and working with nature instead of against it. A constant question: what does it look like to provide care and nurturing from a place of great humility and respect, rather than domination?
The next is Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. One part I just read is about a man who spent multiple decades building a rewilding experiment, organizing funders, volunteers and workers to plant millions of trees and study the benefits and tactics of a return to complex ecosystems. A question it poses to me, is what work must *I* do to leave a better world to our children and grandchildren? What is more important than a healthier world, not just for us but for everyone who shares our ecosystem? How can I help my child see the natural world in its glory rather than as a threat or something to be controlled?
And the third book by Karen Armstrong, Sacred Nature, answers that question fairly directly. Her call to kenosis through direct experience of the natural world takes a path through multiple faith traditions. She herself is a former Catholic nun. She views an orientation toward true respect for our world as being a fundamental shift in our identity and one that is urgently necessary for ourselves and for humanity.
A common thread through Sacred Nature and One Straw Revolutionary is also an orientation toward non judgement. If you don't see the benefit of this way, or that way, you are not wrong or evil - perhaps this isn't the message for you, at this moment, right now. And all three books are about convincing through delight and persuasion, not coercion, not big p Politics, and not despair.
One thing I loved about the first one is its also a memoir of the author, a person who almost completely by accident wound up on Fukuoka's farm and translated his first book into English (which made Fukuoka internationally famous). I'm a big fan of the regular-person-memoir sub genre :)
Ooo! "Feral" is on sale for $2.99 on Kindle today, and I had some stray credits hanging around. Now it really is on my reading list, ha, right there in the app.
I can only speak from my perspective, but in preparing for fatherhood someday (currently in the right-before-engagement space), just being in a long term committed relationship in which growth of virtue and serving Christ/each other are most important, you start to recognize very quickly how selfish you are! Even in small ways, like obligations (family, friends, etc) from your partner that become yours as well, add up to a partial loss of agency for the good of the relationship and in service of your love. As a single person, I found that I had to seek out opportunities to serve and be humbled in many ways--as someone preparing for marriage, I am presented with these chances all the time.
Yes, it was just a few weeks after I started dating my now-husband that his uncle died. And that meant that loving someone new meant, in some way, being invited into his grief for someone I'd never met. A relationship *extends* you into the joys and sorrows of the person you love. You're not exactly less or more free, but you are more *exposed.*
I would say that for me, becoming a parent has also influenced how I see my role in the broader family network. Once kids arrived, I was forced to consider my nuclear family's position in the bigger tribe, and have tried to step up to help/contribute/etc in ways I wouldn't have thought of before.
“Looking at his son, Lester reflects, ‘What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings!’ . . . In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, ‘That’s what it is to be a parent.’ He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it.”
This also reflects what it's like to have medical power of attorney over someone who has no advanced directives in place. Those of us who perform this service for our parents find ourselves parenting our parents, I guess.
In November, I had written elsewhere, “I ended up with Mom’s medical power of attorney by default. Doing what I could to give her the best shot at recovery if recovery was expected (at first it was, though only partial recovery), then as good a death as possible under the circumstances (circumstances which included no advance directives and an estate plan last updated in 1985) was healing. It was also hella disturbing. (I *hated* having power of life and death over someone who’d lost her chance to articulate her own wishes. I wonder what kind of sicko would *like* it.) But healing.”
That said, this isn’t the kind of healing to deliberately invite into our lives. It really is better to have advance directives in place.
In our state, the standard medical power of attorney form has a basic advance directive option, too. I’m so behind on the rest of life after dealing with my mom’s final illness and death that I haven’t taken my own advice and completed this form for myself yet, but I should.
(I tried completing a full living will for myself when my dad died, but stopped once I learned that doctors typically can’t afford to honor the more-detailed medical wishes the living-will form leaves space for. The optional advance-directive clause on my state’s medical power of attorney form, on the other hand, offers only two standardized options, a choice between requesting life-at-any-expense treatment and one giving responsible parties more leeway to permit death if, in their judgment, further treatment would likely only prolong suffering without hope of recovery.)
I think Douthat would be the first to say that parenthood reminds you why you *need* to be a saint, because the consequences of your sins are much more immediate and obvious when you see what your kids take from them. But that (hopefully) whets desire and doesn't guarantee performance.
In the Catholic faith Douthat and I share, consecrated virginity is *higher* than marriage, but it;s also a lot *harder.* His argument is that marriage helps us grow despite our weaknesses, not that being married is itself an accomplishment or the highest form of life.
I think the question is how much higher he rates his chances as a married person (my guess is not that high!)
He's grateful to have such a concrete (and lovable) cross to carry, because he knows he needs one and doesn't feel very prepared to take on a lonelier/more abstract one.
Of course, in Douthat's case particularly, he's also written at length about the unasked for cross he received on chronic illness (https://amzn.to/3Th99Xi) which similarly opens a door to sanctity, but one that's very hard to walk through and which you'd hesitate to wish on anyone else. He doesn't think being severly ill makes him better than other people, but that it helped him recognize some truths that were available to him when well, but which he was less inclined to be attentive to.
Yeah. As a parent, I agree. I had kids because I wanted to expand my family. They bring me joy. I don't see my daughter as a vehicle to my own self improvement. Insanely narcissistic claim. And I know FOR SURE that many women and men are not called to parenthood. Different callings. Not one is superior.
I think this in Whitney Rio-Ross's review of Zero at the Bone is particularly good in what's true of people carrying a visible cross, and what's easily distorted:
"With every book published, Wiman has gained more readers and devotees. Say the name “Christian Wiman” in certain churches or writing workshops, and you’ll be met with slow nods, closed eyes, and hands on hearts. I always feel uncomfortable when invoking a non-divine name leads to reverent gestures. The reaction might not indicate full-scale idolatry, but it does betray a troubling approach to a beloved writer’s new book: writer as spiritual guru and text as scripture. I understand the awe Wiman inspires. An award-winning poet with a startling scope of theological knowledge and imagination, he also possesses the wisdom unique (though not guaranteed) to those who live with death."
This is an easy one. I think about my family all the time at work when I forgo opportunities to goof off or waste time, and choose them to buckle down and do what needs to be done because I need to go pick up the kids at 3 o’clock on the nose. if it regularly pulls may beyond my own sense of physical capabilities, and my colleagues are always asking how I’m able to get so much done. The short answer is that I have smallish children who I want to be with and who need my attention.
YES. My husband has mentioned this same thing, about the impetus to do what he has to do to get home around the same time every day (when a salaried research job can *easily* take all the time you give it.... and often does, from anecdotes he's shared of coworkers without children.)
I once heard a working parent call this cutting the FAT from one's workday-- the Fooling Around Time. It's a process of self-discipline, but also balance, because it's okay to need moments of respite or down time; that's just being human, and taking appropriate pauses to reset. But I appreciate your point about how that self-awareness can help us, especially as parents, to keep a radar going for miscellaneous distractions, and (re)direct our time towards what we ultimately value more.
In my experience, as my little ones move beyond their preschool years and into "big kid" territory, we are more and more likely, as parents, to see elements of ourselves reflected in our children-- our personalities, our tendencies, our fears, our hesitations. Sometimes this comes with a fun and beautiful sense of recognition! And sometimes it really pulls us to self-examination, and inner work, and radical honesty about patterns we ourselves may have lived with since childhood, reevaluating them against the template of our grown-up selves, and our common life together, and our hopes for our children.
In other words, I'm finding more and more as we round the corner into the second decade of parenting that I must-- I can!-- find the capacity to work through *my* habits and emotions and foibles, as I seek to support my children in their own healthy growth. Sometimes this is because I recognize patterns all too well, reappearing in my kids, and other times it's out of a mystified wonder of, "How is it a person can feel and see this way??" To me this is a form of personal stretching, because as well as my parents loved and cared for and formed me as a child, I think that in our generation we saw less explicit modeling of that inner work from our parents and elders. So it's a push for me into compassion, and honesty, and pretty intense self-reflection, to accompany my children through their rough patches and recurring frustrations and fears. We call ourselves "grown-ups", lol, but I am constantly, always, still growing up too, right alongside them.
I suppose that's just another way of framing the "sanctification" that some of these readings allude to.
I live in a suburb of Denver Colorado; my daughter, Dani - lives in Boise Idaho. She recently graduated from Boise State University. She called me one evening 2 years ago when she and her college roommate were having trouble getting a lease signed for a new apartment. I offered some suggestions as to how the problems might be addressed, but there were reasons (excuses) that made my suggestions unworkable. In my mind I thought Dani needed to just grow up and get things done, but in my heart, I knew Dani needed a Dad ready to help. So, I told Dani I would come. She said no at first, but with some prodding, she admitted it would be really nice if I would come. I left my apartment at about 9:30 that night (there was a pending deadline) and drove through the night to Boise. In Wyoming there was a severe windstorm that made driving a challenge, and then there was snow near Evanston that required some 'white knuckling'. I made it to Boise by 10:00 that next day and had the leasing problem solved by about noon. I chatted with Dani and her roommate and explained how things like this needed to be approached - I was teaching them a lesson...
This was what it took at that time in that place to be a father. And I have always felt a satisfaction and validation as a man when I was able to sacrificially care for my son & daughter (and their Mother). Nothing in my life has been more important.
But now, I suffer. The kids are grown and live far away, and I live alone waiting for their calls. My circumstances were not chosen so much as imposed. I am praying for guidance on how to 'fix' my circumstances by getting close to someone...
Have you tried calling your kids? Or organizing a low key dinner (your treat) in their area?
Plus one to the Douthat piece - I'm definitely a better person for having parental responsibilities. I've tended in my life to gravitate toward career fields that provide Big Responsibility and Meaning over remuneration, only to eventually get jaded and frustrated with whatever institution I'm working in. Nothing like this has happened with parenting (and this time, I have no worries at all that it will).
Working with purpose and motivation at a job that's truly meaningful and good has done wonders for me.
I've recently read / am reading three lovely books on the call beyond ourselves! The first is One Straw Revolutionary, a biography of Masanobu Fukuoka. He devoted his life to the concept that we should always be in a state of learning from nature with great humility. In particular, he ran a many decade experiment on his own farm in Japan on the efficacy of 'natural farming' methods - letting nature decide what exactly should grow where, and working with nature instead of against it. A constant question: what does it look like to provide care and nurturing from a place of great humility and respect, rather than domination?
The next is Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. One part I just read is about a man who spent multiple decades building a rewilding experiment, organizing funders, volunteers and workers to plant millions of trees and study the benefits and tactics of a return to complex ecosystems. A question it poses to me, is what work must *I* do to leave a better world to our children and grandchildren? What is more important than a healthier world, not just for us but for everyone who shares our ecosystem? How can I help my child see the natural world in its glory rather than as a threat or something to be controlled?
And the third book by Karen Armstrong, Sacred Nature, answers that question fairly directly. Her call to kenosis through direct experience of the natural world takes a path through multiple faith traditions. She herself is a former Catholic nun. She views an orientation toward true respect for our world as being a fundamental shift in our identity and one that is urgently necessary for ourselves and for humanity.
A common thread through Sacred Nature and One Straw Revolutionary is also an orientation toward non judgement. If you don't see the benefit of this way, or that way, you are not wrong or evil - perhaps this isn't the message for you, at this moment, right now. And all three books are about convincing through delight and persuasion, not coercion, not big p Politics, and not despair.
Those sound like three great titles! [adds to reading list]
One thing I loved about the first one is its also a memoir of the author, a person who almost completely by accident wound up on Fukuoka's farm and translated his first book into English (which made Fukuoka internationally famous). I'm a big fan of the regular-person-memoir sub genre :)
Ooo! "Feral" is on sale for $2.99 on Kindle today, and I had some stray credits hanging around. Now it really is on my reading list, ha, right there in the app.
Yes! I love it. And it sounds like it would be a great one to put in conversation with some of Wendell Berry's writings, too.
YES! Wendell Berry makes a cameo as the editor of Fukuoka's book in the US, the person who really saves the day and helps popularize it.
I can only speak from my perspective, but in preparing for fatherhood someday (currently in the right-before-engagement space), just being in a long term committed relationship in which growth of virtue and serving Christ/each other are most important, you start to recognize very quickly how selfish you are! Even in small ways, like obligations (family, friends, etc) from your partner that become yours as well, add up to a partial loss of agency for the good of the relationship and in service of your love. As a single person, I found that I had to seek out opportunities to serve and be humbled in many ways--as someone preparing for marriage, I am presented with these chances all the time.
Yes, it was just a few weeks after I started dating my now-husband that his uncle died. And that meant that loving someone new meant, in some way, being invited into his grief for someone I'd never met. A relationship *extends* you into the joys and sorrows of the person you love. You're not exactly less or more free, but you are more *exposed.*
I would say that for me, becoming a parent has also influenced how I see my role in the broader family network. Once kids arrived, I was forced to consider my nuclear family's position in the bigger tribe, and have tried to step up to help/contribute/etc in ways I wouldn't have thought of before.
“Looking at his son, Lester reflects, ‘What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings!’ . . . In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, ‘That’s what it is to be a parent.’ He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it.”
This also reflects what it's like to have medical power of attorney over someone who has no advanced directives in place. Those of us who perform this service for our parents find ourselves parenting our parents, I guess.
In November, I had written elsewhere, “I ended up with Mom’s medical power of attorney by default. Doing what I could to give her the best shot at recovery if recovery was expected (at first it was, though only partial recovery), then as good a death as possible under the circumstances (circumstances which included no advance directives and an estate plan last updated in 1985) was healing. It was also hella disturbing. (I *hated* having power of life and death over someone who’d lost her chance to articulate her own wishes. I wonder what kind of sicko would *like* it.) But healing.”
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/two-funerals-and-a-thanksgiving/comment/44120423
That said, this isn’t the kind of healing to deliberately invite into our lives. It really is better to have advance directives in place.
In our state, the standard medical power of attorney form has a basic advance directive option, too. I’m so behind on the rest of life after dealing with my mom’s final illness and death that I haven’t taken my own advice and completed this form for myself yet, but I should.
(I tried completing a full living will for myself when my dad died, but stopped once I learned that doctors typically can’t afford to honor the more-detailed medical wishes the living-will form leaves space for. The optional advance-directive clause on my state’s medical power of attorney form, on the other hand, offers only two standardized options, a choice between requesting life-at-any-expense treatment and one giving responsible parties more leeway to permit death if, in their judgment, further treatment would likely only prolong suffering without hope of recovery.)
I think Douthat would be the first to say that parenthood reminds you why you *need* to be a saint, because the consequences of your sins are much more immediate and obvious when you see what your kids take from them. But that (hopefully) whets desire and doesn't guarantee performance.
In the Catholic faith Douthat and I share, consecrated virginity is *higher* than marriage, but it;s also a lot *harder.* His argument is that marriage helps us grow despite our weaknesses, not that being married is itself an accomplishment or the highest form of life.
I think the question is how much higher he rates his chances as a married person (my guess is not that high!)
He's grateful to have such a concrete (and lovable) cross to carry, because he knows he needs one and doesn't feel very prepared to take on a lonelier/more abstract one.
Of course, in Douthat's case particularly, he's also written at length about the unasked for cross he received on chronic illness (https://amzn.to/3Th99Xi) which similarly opens a door to sanctity, but one that's very hard to walk through and which you'd hesitate to wish on anyone else. He doesn't think being severly ill makes him better than other people, but that it helped him recognize some truths that were available to him when well, but which he was less inclined to be attentive to.
I think as he sees it, as a non-parent, it takes an active act of the will for him to get up early to be of service to others.
As a parent, children entering screaming at 6:30a settle the question for him.
It’s definitely available to everyone, but parents have a harder time escaping it!
Yeah. As a parent, I agree. I had kids because I wanted to expand my family. They bring me joy. I don't see my daughter as a vehicle to my own self improvement. Insanely narcissistic claim. And I know FOR SURE that many women and men are not called to parenthood. Different callings. Not one is superior.
I think this in Whitney Rio-Ross's review of Zero at the Bone is particularly good in what's true of people carrying a visible cross, and what's easily distorted:
"With every book published, Wiman has gained more readers and devotees. Say the name “Christian Wiman” in certain churches or writing workshops, and you’ll be met with slow nods, closed eyes, and hands on hearts. I always feel uncomfortable when invoking a non-divine name leads to reverent gestures. The reaction might not indicate full-scale idolatry, but it does betray a troubling approach to a beloved writer’s new book: writer as spiritual guru and text as scripture. I understand the awe Wiman inspires. An award-winning poet with a startling scope of theological knowledge and imagination, he also possesses the wisdom unique (though not guaranteed) to those who live with death."
https://farefwd.com/index.php/2023/12/11/zero-at-the-bone/