Biting Our Tongues

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 9, 2004

Reading 1:
A poem from Judith Viorst's collection of poetry, Suddenly Sixty.

"Just a Few Words of Advice, Just a Few Helpful Hints"

So your son has announced that he’s going to marry that woman,
You know he’ll be making the biggest mistake of his life.
For a daughter-in-law even Lady Macbeth deserves better.
And even a Henry the Eighth should be spared such a wife
So before you begin to arrange the rehearsal dinner
From cocktails to capons to chocolate-covered mints,
You intend (without being critical) to (diplomatically) offer him
Just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So your daughter is leaving a job with an excellent future.
She’s pulling up roots and she’s moving out West to create,
Unencumbered by furniture, money, or health insurance.
This is surely a game plan any sane person would hate.
So before she trades in her office and East Side apartment
For wind chimes, a futon, and maybe some cactus prints,
You intend (without seeming skeptical) to (quite respectfully) offer her
just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So the parents of your new grandchild are spoiling him rotten.
He’s never heard “no” or “say please” or “don’t do that again.”
It looks like he’s worn the same shirt from last May through November.
It looks like he’s going to breast-feed until he is ten.
So before his mother and father are too late to stop him
From growing up to be someone who’ll make the world wince,
You intend (without sounding horrified) to (very tactfully) offer them
Just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So our daughter ands sons and their spouses are no longer children
They reach their decisions without ever calling us first.
They often unreasonably tend to look on the bright side.
While we’re always asking ourselves, What if worse comes to worst?
So before they do something too fatal we will rush in with
Anything from a big hug to a check to a blintz,
In addition to which we’ll continue to (oh-so-unintrusively) offer them
Just a few words of advice,…just a few helpful hints.

Sermon:

A conservative commentator once remarked, “I can’t control the world or even what happens in my own community. But I can control myself and my children.” I suspect this fellow’s children are under the age of ten. As a parent, one can control the expectations for their children and mete out consequences when those expectations aren’t met. However, when it comes to the unfolding of a child’s life as they come of age and head off into their own lives, there’s precious little parents can do than be available and supportive, and how challenging such a task often proves to be!

All of us here know the challenges of coming of age. I am delighted the Marwood youth are with us this morning, for this subject is not alien to you. As this is a special day many families celebrate, I want to reflect on themes that parents can relate to, as I suspect many of you know the challenge of biting your tongues when raising teenagers and relating to your children when they are young adults.

Perhaps many of you associate the name Judith Viorst with outstanding children’s books as she as written many, but she has also written some of the best works I’ve read on dealing with loss, change, marriage, and dealing with the universal human struggle of maintaining control in various aspects of one’s life. For today’s sermon, I am indebted to Judith Viorst’s book, Imperfect Control, especially the marvelous chapter, Permanent Parenthood.

Viorst identifies three stages of parenting. These stages roughly correspond to each of the first three decades of a child’s life. A member of my previous congregation provided me a perfect reading about the about the shift from the first to the second stage.  I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was about how children as they grow into adolescents metamorphose from dogs into cats. Whereas children love to be companioned, play, get into your face, run around, and generally have a fun time, somehow they gradually become less interested in all those things. They shed their inveterately happy, energetic selves. It’s as if in the first decade of parenting you have a puppy to take care of, a puppy who constantly expresses love for you and takes all the attention you can humanly muster, and then somewhere in the second decade of parenting, the darling little creature becomes emotionally aloof, regularly retreats to one’s bedroom or friends, no longer likes being hugged or kissed goodnight, and wants full control over when and how to be interacted with by the parents. If you’ve been the owner of a cat as I have, you know that cats refuse to be told what to do. They strut away, sometimes contemptuously, when someone tries to give them attention. Cats often are often very particular for whom they’ll show affection. I imagine many of you parents know this canine to feline shift, the second decade being one of great challenge. Parenting is great fodder for spiritual growth. It is completely natural to feel, a lot of the time, like a novice. It doesn’t surprise me when a parent expresses grave concern about whether they are being too lenient on their growing children and then two minutes later express a similar concern that they are being too strict.

By the third decade of parenting, many parents still struggle with seeing adult children as adults. Jean Davies Okimoto and Phyllis Jackson Stegall, in their book Boomerang Kids, writes, “Respecting your adult children as adults, as separate individual human beings who are entitled to make decisions on how they will live their lives, is the single most important task to master if you are to move out of old parent-child interactions… It’s a job so difficult,” they add, “that many parents never quite get there.”

Growing up is hard to do. Parenting a child who is growing up is often as difficult. For it means that as an adult one must truly become one’s own person to let a beloved child be their own person. My father once shared during a father’s day service in Bakersfield that the most painful moment in his life was on the day he took me, his oldest of two boys, to college. While he was delighted I was beginning an exciting chapter of my life, he and my mother drove home alone, in tears, knowing that life would never be the same. Their baby had grown up. My father says he can’t understand parents who talk about how much they look forward to when their children are old enough to leave home. For my father, my brother and I were, and still are, his pride and joy. Yet he has to deal with our choices to not spend as much time on our vacations with him and my mom as they might like, to often miss Thanksgiving or Christmas with them, and to have tense moments when their deep desire for familial connection gets thwarted by our longings to turn away and live our own lives.

Parenting is a great spiritual task. Initially, a child is entirely dependent upon the parent for its physical and emotional needs. Then the parent must deal with letting go of this young life to find his or her own path. For many women and men, parenting gives them a sense of joy and meaning as well as a role which offers a sense of purpose. Parents must eventually face difficult questions: now that my children don’t need my mothering other than friendly support, what is the meaning and purpose of my life? Now that the beautiful babies upon whom my entire existence was focused and to which I fully devoted myself, as these children leave the nest, how do I deal with the loss of identity as an active parent?

My adolescent years were pretty boring. I was one of those kids who did really well in school and never broke the rules. I guess I was a mama’s boy. My rebellion came subtly with the choices to spend summers during college away from home, to major in religion when I had outstanding skills in math, and then to travel to India shortly after I graduated from college, and to work with troubled children despite my father’s family’s academic pedigree and tacit expectation of further Ivy League education. I remember my parents wanting to be supportive of me but not knowing how to respond to these life choices.

I can remember when I became irritated with my parents. I didn’t want to spend time with them. I wanted to spend all my time with friends. And once in college, I limited my time in Bakersfield, and when I was there, I went out with friends. In time, I became especially critical of what I saw as my parents’ weaknesses, perhaps because they were surfacing in me. At one point, I started feeling like their weaknesses had doomed me for life. Although my parents were truly supportive in trying not to guide or set my path, I even harbored anger that my parents had not given me more structure.

I had taken my cue from books I read. Too many self-help books today encourage us to look through a lens that shows us how our parents limited us. While such speculation is easy to do on one’s own, it may be out of touch with reality. While there is such a thing as horrible parenting, most parents do the best they can, and I realize mine did a particularly good job now that I’ve reached a more grown up perspective.

A faulty and destructive assumption that lines many a pop-psychology work is the assumption that good parenting ensures successful, happy children. While good parenting improves the odds of an emotionally healthy child, there are no guarantees. Likewise, some wonderful people have emerged from poor parenting. But what I think is important to remember, whether we are thinking of our parents or our children, is that parenting is not easy and that no matter our familial connections, we need to look first and foremost to our own selves for responsibility. And further, even many good parents are in a no win situation—no matter what they do, the children by their very nature of needing to test their environment, must resist their parents to discover their own selves and autonomy. It is completely natural for children to want to fire their parents, if not outright hold them in contempt. Regardless whether parents are good or not so good, adolescents will find plenty of reasons to be upset with them. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Donald Trump show was so popular, an unconscious or not so unconscious desire among young folks wanting to control their own destiny without realizing they have little to fall back on if they successfully yell, you’re fired.

While guilt is a burden parents may lay on their children, it is also often a burden that parents put on themselves, especially when grown children are having difficulties. Another Judith Viorst poem:

Quality time and vitamin C and a book before bedtime at night,
I did everything right
Then why, when I reach out to touch him, does he hold me at bay?
Something inside of me dies
When I look in my son’s shuttered eyes,
So far from here. So very far away.

Tricking and treating and soccer games and second grade’s Halloween show,
I was sure to go.
And yet he is stumbling through jungles of bitterest black.
Lost in the fog that he buys.
Wearing a rebel’s disguise.
Unwilling, or unable, to come back.

I never claimed to be the perfect mother.
I made mistakes. Well, everybody did.
But God, I was so glad to be his mother.
And God, oh God, oh God, I loved this kid.

I love this kid.

Patience and laughter and trips to the beach and tickles and song,
Did I do something wrong?
Am I kidding myself? Am I simply rewriting the poem?
Telling myself a few lies,
While somewhere a frightened child cries,
And I wait, and I hope, and I pray that he’ll find his way home.

If only there were foolproof recipes that guarantees a happy, healthy child. While we may understand in theory that parents aren’t the sole creators of children, and we may understand in theory they were born with their own personality and that they are also shaped by the world beyond the home. But it is difficult to believe this when something goes awry in one’s own family. In her book, Imperfect Control, Judith Viorst writes,

When our children confront us with their complaints about our past behavior, we must recognize that this is how they experienced it, that whether or not what they’re talking about is objectively true, it is true for them. We can listen sympathetically, non-defensively. We can tell them that we’re sorry they’re in pain. We can try to explain what was going on in our lives at the time. And we certainly can apologize where it’s appropriate. But what we certainly shouldn’t do is allow our adult children to completely shift the blame from their shoulders to ours, allow them to make us responsible for the sorrows and the troubles they’re going through now.

For whether or not we blame ourselves (or our children blame us) for the troubles they are in, they must begin to see these troubles as theirs—their divorce, their business disaster, their drug problem. They—and we—also need to know that we’re being loving, caring, respectful parents when we allow them to solve these problems themselves, instead of—as a friend puts it—“always needing to rush right in with the mop and the bucket.” But what if they don’t solve their problems? And what if they can’t solve their problems? And what if they ask for our help in solving their problems?

We cannot play God in our children’s lives. Once they reach adolescence, we cannot be in charge of their lives. But we can make an effort to be in charge of our own. Parents, you may always be intensely and lovingly invested in your children, but you can also have aspects of your life which they are not a part. Whether it be work, play, social concerns, or fulfilling non-motherhood relationships, this turning from them to something else, “something they couldn’t touch or be a part of” is, says Judith Viorst quoting novelist Mary Gordon, “the ‘tremendous mercy’ of autonomy.” She goes on to say that the more a mother achieves autonomy, the better she is able to grant it to her children, though that’s got to be much easier when we’re talking about an uncongenial lifestyle rather than drugs and crimes and cults and other threats to their bodies and minds.

I believe the spiritual journey of life is largely about learning to let go of the illusions of control that we may have and embrace the reality of influence that we hold if we were to cultivate a deeper relationship with the truth of our being, with the spirit of life, with God. Growing up is hard to do. One must suffer disappointment after disappointment to realize we lack control over the world around us, the people we care about, and how our lives shall unfold. The ways we deal with control can enrich or diminish us. The way we deal with control shapes our relationships for good or for ill.

And while we may not have the control we wish, we do have influence. In theological language, we can increase the odds of allowing grace to happen in the lives of our children, in those we care about, in our community, at Chicago City Hall, even nationally or what’s going in the world. We may not be able to control the world, but we are not entirely powerless, in either the wider world or in the lives of our children.

I close the words of Judith Viorst from Imperfect Control, “Parenthood is a double bind. It requires us, at the same time, to live with our fierce and undiminished love for our children, while making peace with the limits of what we can and can’t and shouldn’t try to do for them, while making peace with the limits of our control.”

Happy Mother’s Day!

Blessed be. Amen.

 

© Copyright 2004 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.