Parenting For Fruitfulness (5)
Arranging Your Life
The beginning of the school year always comes with depression and dread from me and Rochelle. We love being around our kids. And, even though the girls like school, the start of a new school year comes with a degree of sadness. I know some parents count down the days to the first day of school. I get it. Sometimes, life is arranged in a particular way that makes having kids at home in the summer difficult.
Recently, when talking with friends about the upcoming school year, one shot back that Rochelle, who has mostly worked in education, had summers off. That is true now, but has not always been true. The deeper truth, however…wait for it…is that Rochelle and I arranged our lives around particular outcomes for our children. Read it again, we arranged our lives around particular outcomes.
Once a working therapist, Rochelle came home and said, “I want to be home when the girls are home.” That meant looking for work that fit their schedule rather than our economic or professional goals. In the same way, when our oldest daughter was born, Rochelle and I both made arrangements with our employers to work from home 2.5 days per week. That meant one of us was home every day. Daycare is good service. I have no judgments about people who use it. Rochelle and I might have too, but our income was so meager when the girls were little, it was actually negative cashflow to work and pay for daycare than it was for Rochelle to simply not work. Plus, and without the Christian sub-culture’s pressure for “moms to stay home” at the time, we simply wanted to be with our girls. That being the case, we have always made every effort to be with our girls.
Many parents pushback and tell us, “Well, I (we) can’t do that.” I don’t doubt that’s true. What I also don’t doubt is that many parents have not asked whether they could or not. What adjustments could be made? What sacrifices might be made?
This is partly what I mean when people ask me about how we raised our girls and I respond, “Most people don’t want to do what we did.” I say this — even now — without judgment. Life is complicated and requires tough decisions. I’m not saying what should be done, only what we did.
Our decisions came with consequences. It meant we took on some debts. I meant some of our personal educational goals slowed or were delayed — which happened again when the girls started school. It also means we are not as prepared for retirement as we would like. But it also means, that we put our best efforts into our only unique roles in the universe.
Our decisions were never, to the best for our knowledge and efforts, made to indulge, entertain, and pacify our girls, but rather to guide them into becoming women who demonstrated the fruit of the Spirit. And growing fruit is (1) imperceptible on a day-to-day basis, (2) takes time, a long time, and (3) the result of careful nurture. Parents don’t have to arrange their lives around their children, and probably should not, but parents can arrange their family lives for their children.
This has also meant prioritizing what has always been significant measure to aid spiritual formation — reading, service, practices, spiritual conversation, church participation. Formal and informal practices are casual and frequent in our home. There were behaviors Rochelle and I didn’t like that we overlooked, because they were the kind of acts that didn't;t ultimately matter. And there behaviors we immediately redirected because they are the kinds of acts which deeply matters. We did our best to live coherent lives. We wanted to be who we said we were. Behaviors in the house were adjusted for age, but there were not rules for the girls and rules for us. Even today, we don’t say, “Don’t speak to me that way.” We say, “we don’t speak to anyone that way.”
These are just a few of the guardrails we created for who our girls — and us — were, and are, becoming.
The reality is that parents are never — not even for a minute — “raising children.” We are raising adults. When our kids leave our homes and enter the workforce or head off to college, if children, rather than adults are what we have, then we should consider that a failure. Dallas Willard said that what God gets out of our lives is who we are becoming. A wise parent looks to who their children are becoming and how they can best nurture those outcomes.
When parents become concerned primarily with who their children are becoming, rather than educating or entertaining them, we introduce hope that they are and are becoming people we actually want to be around, the kind of people we miss in their absence. It’s actually possible to hate when your kids go back to school.
In the 37 years since I became a parent, there are many things I wish we had done differently, especially things I wish we had been more intentional about, or even known to be intentional about. But one thing I will never regret is making a decision to be intentional about, as you say, “arranging our lives” around the important job of being parents. That did not mean having every waking hour be centered around our children. It meant evaluating our strengths and weaknesses as individuals and as a couple and determining what our life needed to look like for the flourishing of our kids, our family and for my husband and I as individuals. I knew before I was even married that I was not wired to have a full-time job and be a mother at the same time. I knew I would do neither job well or even moderately well. I just can’t keep all those balls in the air and remain sane. Neither one of thrive in a fast-paced life. In addition, neither one of us wanted other people raising our kids during the week so we knew I was going to not have a paying job for the foreseeable future, and we would reevaluate things as we went. My husband was in a management role for a large Christian nonprofit for the first three years of our first daughter’s life, which afforded us the financial option of me not having to work to pay the bills. Money was tight but we were ok. The job was close to home but became more and more stressful as he took on more responsibility. With only a two week vacation and long hours, he had little time at home. So when he was abruptly and unjustly let go from his job, what started out as something very painful ended up being the best thing that ever happened to our family. Instead of pursuing another 9-5 job, a visiting teaching position at a university that required us to move a few hours away fell in his lap and he took it. That opportunity and the choices we made (and the sacrifices we made moving away from extended family and our church) resulted in a family life I could not have imagined when we started our married life. He had a 32 year career as a professor, I worked part time in education in a job I loved as our kids went through middle school and high school, so we both had summers off.. We were not frantic, harried parents rushing off to jobs every morning and coming home tired and out of energy after picking our kids up at daycare. We had time to help with homework, I could volunteer in classrooms, on school committees, field trips, etc and like you, we absolutely loved our summers with our kids and always dreaded it when the school year began. We made tough decisions and sacrifices financially over the years and I’m not retiring from a 40 year career as many of my friends are, but I would not have had it any other way.