Tag: parenting

It’s probably not demons

A while back, I wrote about how unfortunate it is that we often waste the time and energy of priests, asking them to do things that lots of other people could do. A priest once told me that this is the hardest part of his job, the non-priest stuff. It’s not that he thinks he’s too good to do office work or manual labour or show up at a BBQ; it’s just that he knows there are things that only a priest can do, and he wishes more people would ask him for those things.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a related phenomenon; people asking priests to do things that not only other people can do, but that priests really aren’t qualified to do. This happens a lot in Catholic online groups…someone will ask for advice, and several people respond, “Go to a priest.”

They frequently tell people seek marriage counselling from a priest, rather than from a marriage counsellor. Some priests may happen to be trained or especially gifted in this field, but most truly are not. It’s not a question of holiness; it’s just that counselling and therapy are specialised fields, and you can’t just show up and be holy, and expect good results, any more than you’d expect a holy priest to be able to give you good advice when your lymphatic system isn’t working well, or your vision is poor. There may very well be some overlap with spiritual matters, but that doesn’t mean a priest is the best person to go to. And a good priest will know this and say so to the person who requests this kind of help from them.

More and more often; and this coincides with an alarming rise in the fascination with “celebrity exorcists,” I see Catholics encouraging others to go to priests when someone is clearly suffering from a mental health crisis. A common example; a worried mother posts in a social media group for Catholics, saying her child has always been difficult, but there has been a recent, extreme escalation of erratic or violent behavior, and the child isn’t responding to any normal interventions, and she doesn’t know what to do.

The last time I saw this scenario, no fewer than 20 other moms told her to run to a priest and request an exorcism. Sounds like demons! Go to a priest.

Let me be clear: this is negligent parenting…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

image source (Creative Commons)

The joy and pain of being a Catholic foster parent

The first time Stephen and Paige Sanchez took their boys to Mass, the children had lots of questions. The boys were 2 and 4, and this was the first they had heard of Jesus. They saw a statue and asked who it was.

Mr. Sanchez told them it was St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. The boys looked at each other.

“Jesus was a foster kid?” the older boy said.

Mr. Sanchez said he was, kind of.

To himself, he thought, Man, the church loves us.

The two boys are now the adopted sons of Mr. Sanchez and his wife, but at the time they were his foster children, and everyone expected them to go back to their birth parents. The Sanchezes also have an older son, who was also adopted through foster care.

Stephen and Paige first began exploring adoption after five years of struggle with infertility. Then they discovered how many children in their area needed placement through foster care. They took a class, just to learn more.

“We started thinking God was asking us [to go down this path],” Mr. Sanchez said. So they kept going.

The day after they received their fostering license, they got a call asking them to take a child.

“We decided we’d say yes, just like if we were having our own children,” Mr. Sanchez said.

That child, who came to them deeply traumatized, stayed only a few days before moving to specialized therapeutic care. But the agency immediately asked about another child, a boy whose birth parents’ parental rights were going to be terminated. Would the Sanchez family accept him, and eventually adopt him?

They talked it over for 10 minutes and agreed. The boy joined them the next day.

Two weeks later, the agency called again. This time, it was two half brothers who needed a temporary home until they could be reunified with their parents.

That was the plan, as it usually is with foster care. The reunification goal got pushed back more than once. The birth parents, who struggled with addiction, were unable to get clean and create a safe environment for their boys. Finally, after two years of limbo, the court legally severed the birth parents’ rights, and Stephen and Paige adopted the boys.

The Sanchez boy who was 2 years old in the church that day is now 15, and since that day when they first met St. Joseph and “his foster kid,” the boys have learned volumes about their faith.

But one of their first lessons was that God had a son and sent him to live with another family because God loved his son and trusted the family. It became a way for the Sanchezes to talk about Catholicism, and about the relationship the two boys might have with their new parents and their birth parents.

“St. Joseph became a clear patron,” Mr. Sanchez said—for the boys, and also for him.

Sacrifice and Stability

The Sanchez family story seems to have as close to a fairy tale ending as possible. But the foster father analogy only goes so far. And the family’s story also demonstrates some of the things that make foster care so hard: the legal and psychological limbo.

In foster care, the goal is to reunite the child and their parents, but it is not always clear how long that might take. And that goal is ultimately met less than half the time. Sometimes the timeline is changed several times, and sometimes the parents’ rights are legally terminated without another family ready to step in and offer care. The future of a child frequently hinges on the sustained efforts of people who are already in crisis, in dire poverty, suffering domestic violence or in the grip of addiction.

The practice of foster care is also widely misunderstood, leaving foster families isolated even among communities that could be helping the most. But experienced foster parents often say two things: Foster care reveals things that are true of every parenting relationship. And fostering is intensely, inherently pro-life work that should be much more vigorously supported and promoted by the Catholic Church.

Foster parents will also speak of a profound joy and satisfaction that keeps them doing this work over and over again, as long as they can.

Approximately 400,000 children—enough to fill Yankee Stadium eight times over—spend time in foster care every year in the United States. Each year around 60,000 children see their birth parents’ parental rights terminated, and around 50,000 children are adopted from foster care each year. About 25,000 children every year age out of the system, and 20 percent of these become instantly homeless.

Despite the great need, foster care can be a hard sell, even to families with the resources for it. Many foster parents say friends tell them they would love to offer foster care, but they are afraid of getting too attached. They are afraid they will fall too deeply in love with their foster children, only to lose them.

“In [American] culture, parenting is a little bit possessive,” Mr. Sanchez said.

Catholic culture puts great emphasis on the sacred bond between parent and child; and Americans often cultivate and cherish their identity as parents, emphasizing self-sacrifice in the name of forming lifelong attachments with their children.

None of this meshes easily with the goal of foster care, which is to relinquish children back to their birth parents. If foster care works as it is designed to, that sacrifice will lead to goodbyes.

The tension can be brutal. It’s also profoundly Christlike.

Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology at Providence College, the author of Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children and the adoptive mother of five, including one by way of foster care, said foster care is the best example of the kind of love Christians are called to.

“We’re called to love people and will the good of them, even when it requires self-sacrifice. Maybe even especially when it requires self-sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a kind of hospitality that may be very difficult for the host.”

The two youngest Sanchez boys call their adoptive mother “Mommy Paige” and their birth mother “Mommy H—,” and once poignantly suggested that their birth parents could live in the backyard, so they could visit back and forth.

Mr. Sanchez reminds his sons that it’s good to love your birth parents, and such affection doesn’t hurt him and his wife. What did hurt Mr. Sanchez is seeing times when his boys’ birth parents withdrew affection and didn’t seem to care. This is where the analogy of St. Joseph as a foster father falls short, Dr. Coolman said.

Mr. Sanchez said that when his boys are mad at him, they’ll pointedly ask how their biological parents are doing. He laughs, but also feels the sting. He knows it’s normal for the boys to have conflicted feelings. Dr. Coolman said that those feelings will likely continue throughout the children’s lifetime.

“Foster kids know better than anybody else that there really is an idea of being raised by your bio mother and father. They know it in their bones,” she said. They need to know that people who have not been raised in the so-called perfect family are also beloved and precious and are not fundamentally broken; that their biological family may not be whole, but each member can be a whole person.

“Brokenness is not the ultimate description of who they are,” she said. And yet it is essential for the new parents to affirm the children’s undeniable loss.

The Ties That Bind

The possessiveness of American parenting as described by Mr. Sanchez sometimes leads to stigmas against the foster children themselves. More than half of Americans, for instance, believe that kids are in foster care because they’re juvenile delinquents, not because they were previously in unsafe homes.

Mr. Sanchez said that some Catholics he has met have absorbed unwholesome cultural ideas about heredity or destiny, and they harbor an unspoken fear that when you foster, you’re inviting a problem into your house. “Like they come from bad stock,” Mr. Sanchez said with disgust.

But while people are not their genetics, our biological connections are important. “DNA matters, which means biological ties to parents matter,” said Dr. Coolman. “I think Catholic theology should be ready to stand up and say: These relationships with the person whose DNA you share, or the person in whose body you spend the first nine months of your existence, really matter.”

This reality is an underexplored facet of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. “You don’t just remove a baby from the body in which [he] lived and act like you’re just taking a baby from a petri dish,” Dr. Coolman said. She added that it was, in fact, at the urging of a social worker at Catholic Charities that the country began to question its practice of closed adoption. Today, approximately 95 percent of adoptions are open adoptions, a practice that works to allow children to maintain a healthy connection to their biological family of origin.

When a child is removed from their home, the smells, the tastes and their whole physical reality changes, and it is a shock to their system. And as they grow, things like their physical appearance and their genetic predispositions will continue to assert themselves. You cannot simply sever the link, and acknowledging that this is so is profoundly Catholic.

But Catholics have a long way to go until foster care is perceived as a central dimension of pro-life activity. While it is true that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt as the general population, it ismore often Protestant churches that sponsor foster care ministries, not Catholic parishes.

The theology is lagging, and so are the logistical supports. Catholic foster parents will tell you that while individual clergy members, schools or parishioners may be supportive, it is rare for a Catholic parish to offer robust, organized support for foster families, or even to offer information about how to get involved.

There are some Catholic communities that get it right. In South Bend, Ind., where the Sanchez family now lives, foster care has been unusually integrated into parish life.

“It’s seen as how we participate in the culture of life: Not just by being politically active, but by taking care of each other,” Mr. Sanchez said.

He also said that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd was a helpful resource. This Montessori-based faith formation program gave the boys a space to talk freely about God and family as they played, and it became a kind of religious play-based therapy.

At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, “Who is this you have with you?” rather than asking, “Is this your mom and dad?”

But in other situations, people made clueless blunders, asking in front of the children if their birth parents were on drugs, which provoked long follow-up conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez and their children.

It Takes a Village

The Sanchez family’s faith was deepened immeasurably by their experience with foster care and adoption, and they constantly relied on their faith to sustain them through the difficult parts. They say their faith has strengthened tenfold since they took that leap.

Mindy Goorchenko’s story went the other way…Read the rest of my cover story for America Magazine. 

Image: by Matthew Henry (Creative Commons)

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time

It’s one of my favorite stories, so I’m glad it’s apparently true. The Vienna Beef company makes a certain kind of hot dog that is bright red, and it has a particular smoky flavor and a particular snap when you bite into it. It was very popular, so they made it in exactly the same way year after year, decade after decade.

Eventually the company became successful enough to upgrade to a new facility, where everything was streamlined and efficient and top of the line. But they knew better than to mess with success: The hot dog recipe stayed the same.

Except it didn’t. The hot dogs produced in the new facility weren’t as good. The color was off, the texture was feeble, and the taste just wasn’t the same; and nobody could figure out why. They hadn’t changed anything—not the ingredients, not the process, not the order of operations. It was a hot dog mystery.

They finally solved it by painstakingly recreating how they had done it in the old factory—and it turned out that, at one point, the processed ground meat was slowly trucked from one part of the factory to another, through several rooms, around corridors, and on an elevator. It seems that this arduous process, which everyone assumed was nothing but an inconvenience that ought to be streamlined away, was an essential step. The meat got warmed slowly as it went, gradually steeping in the smoke and moisture of the rooms that it travelled through. When they made the production more efficient, they eliminated this part of the process. And that ruined the hot dogs.

The secret ingredient, it turned out, was time. I thought of this story as I sat chatting with an old friend, someone I’ve known online for over two decades, and we only met in person for the first time last week. When we first got to know each other, we were in the thick of having babies and wrangling toddlers, both fairly starry-eyed about the possibilities of how to build a Catholic marriage and raise a holy family.

Now we both have several adult children, and our “babies” are almost as tall as we are. We talked about what we expected our lives to look like, what we were so sure about, and how differently things have turned out. We talked about our struggles and also our successes, and how we seem to know less and less as time goes on.

And we talked about how sometimes, the secret ingredient is time…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Photo by ArtHouse Studio

Frog and Toad at Cana

Not long before he died, I was complaining to my father I couldn’t persuade any of my kids to go to a Catholic college. I said I knew they were getting decent educations at the places they chose, but still, I was sure my plan was better than theirs. Half jokingly, half dead serious, I groaned,  “How will they ever find a nice Catholic to marry?”

My father said, “Well, I found one at Brooklyn Public College!” He was half joking, half serious, too: the joke being that, when he met my mother, they were both about as far from Catholic as anyone could be.

They had both been raised as non-practicing Jews, met at college when they were both cutting class, got married in secret in a hurry, had a second public ceremony to appease the parents, dabbled in Buddhism, moved to a kibbutz in Israel, came home, briefly joined a cult, found the Lord, and then eventually became Catholic — my mother and older sister first, and my father and the rest of us a year later, when they had already been married for about 20 years. They ended up as a happy old married Catholic couple, but they certainly didn’t start that way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and God’s will and who belongs together and how and why marriages work. It is very true that it’s smart to do a thorough investigation of your own understanding of marriage and of your spouse’s expectations before you take the leap. But it really is a leap. You can’t guarantee that doing everything the smart way will result in a strong or happy marriage, and you can’t guarantee that a strong and happy marriage will stay that way. Sacramental grace is mysterious and unpredictable, and so is human nature. It’s a leap.

My parents made each other truly miserable sometimes. We kids saw a lot of that. You probably could have made the case that they didn’t belong together.  But by the end of my parents’ lives, I could think of all sorts of ways that God’s will had indisputably been carried out in their marriage.

Even my mother’s dementia seems to have worked some kind of transformation on my father, and the last years of their lives together did something mysterious but important to him. They weren’t even really together; he just visited her in the nursing home every day, fed her, prayed with her, and was delighted when she would occasionally mumble “amen.” By the time he died, he was a happy man; happier than I ever remember seeing him. And then, her final work done, my mother died too.

Does this mean they were made for each other? Yes and no. They eventually became made for each other, I know that. I know couples who seem so incredibly well suited for each other, it’s hard to imagine them living any other life other than with each other. And I know couples who are monstrously incompatible, and seem to belong with each other even if they don’t make each other very happy. There are all kinds of successful marriages. Marriage is strange. Life is strange.

The other day, we prayed the second luminous mystery of the rosary, which is the Wedding at Cana.

“When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you,’” we read.

Jesus hadn’t yet done any public miracles, and apparently didn’t think it was the right time to start yet; but Mary was apparently focused on saving a young couple just starting out from the embarrassment of not being able to serve their guests. We’re all familiar with the somewhat amusing account of mother and son having a little spat, and the mother confidently assuming he’ll do what she says. But it occurred to me for the first time: They are both sinless. This means that neither one of them could have wanted to do something that was against God’s will. And yet they disagreed about what was best to do! What does this mean?

I think it speaks to the notion that God’s will is hardly ever one specific action or decision. Sometimes it is certainly clear: Don’t murder, for instance. Don’t do evil. But it’s much more common, when we’re faced with choices, to be torn between a few different possibilities which might be good, but we’re not sure yet how they will turn out. It’s pretty rare that we can just “do whatever he tells us” and know for sure that we’re doing the right thing. Even when one choice seems like the natural, godly, wholesome choice, and the other seems more murky and less desirable, we really can rarely say, “This one is definitely God’s will, and that one is definitely not”.

We have to take a leap, and the leap is important, but even more so is what comes next. It’s rarely the leap that puts us either in or out of God’s will; it’s what we make of where we landed, and what we do with the grace we find there.

I was mulling all this over when a quote popped up in my Twitter feed. It was a line from one of my favorite “Frog and Toad” stories by Arnold Lobel. Toad, after admiring his friend’s garden, wants to start one of his own. So he plants the seeds, but they don’t immediately sprout. Fretting, and increasingly frantic, he spends the next few days exhausting himself with trying to make it happen: He plays music for them, he reads poems to them, but nothing works. Then Frog gives him some advice:

“Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Then your seeds will start to grow.”

And this, of course, works. The seeds start to grow. Toad has done the work that’s indispensable: He has put the seeds in the ground. Then he wastes a lot of effort and anxiety trying to force things to work out well in the time he expects. Finally, he gives up and while he sleeps, the larger forces at work, the rain, the sun, and time work to achieve the thing he is longing for. The seeds sprout. He has his garden.

And . . . an angry boy in Brooklyn ends up married to a nice Catholic girl who brings him to Jesus and makes him very happy, eventually. A mother has done her best and then tries to sit back and let her adult-ish children make their choices about college and everything else, because they are adults, ish. Let the sun shine on them. Let the rain fall on them. Let people take their leaps, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does when they land. It really is the only way.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I have taken the leap. We’ll see.

***
A version of this essay first appeared in The Catholic Weekly in August of 2021.

The long game of Advent parenting

I don’t mean to alarm you, but it’s almost Christmas. Advent — what’s left of it — is a time of preparation, but unless you live a very unusual life, you probably need some time to prepare for this season of preparation.

We have done various things over the years to try to make Advent a season of anticipation that leads up to a day of Christ-centered joy, rather than a month-long wallow in decorations and cookies that leads to a volcano of presents. We fail every single year.

But we do always try. The nice thing about Christmas is that it’s a birth, and that means it’s a beginning, not a culmination. Call me hopeful or call me delusional, but I always feel like as long as we TRY, then we’re getting Advent and Christmas right.

So this is how we try: We set aside the day after Thanksgiving as Jesse Tree Day. And that is about all we do the day after Thanksgiving. The kids are home from school, nobody expects me to cook anything elaborate, and God has granted me the gift of a profound unwillingness to rush out and shop for amazing Black Friday deals at Target. So Friday is the day of getting ready to get ready.

The first step is to choose a list of Jesse Tree readings. The idea is to find one that more or less matches up with the actual calendar. Advent begins Dec. 3 this year, but if we end up with one that starts on Dec. 1, it doesn’t matter that much, because we know we’re going to miss some days anyway, so it all evens out. Then I print it out, round up the kids, and read off the symbols, and they dibs the ones they want to do.

Some years, I get fancy and buy special paint markers and a bunch of blank capiz shell discs with holes drilled in them, so we end up with a set of more or less uniform ornaments. Other years, I just open the infamous craft cabinet and pull out everything that looks like it won’t cry if you put glue on it. (This is my first act of Christmas Generosity: I renounce my claim on anything I put out on the table. If you’re not going to use the good stuff for getting ready for Jesus, then what in the world are you saving it for?)

Then I start some music going. In this house, we do not listen to Christmas music before the day after Thanksgiving; and the very first one we listen to is “A Medieval Christmas” by The Boston Camerata. The kids groan and complain, but I’m a big believer in building unwilling fondness through repetition. I choose my battles with music, but I insist on this one at least once a year. This is my first act of Christmas Bullying, which is also an essential part of the season, if you’re in charge of other people.

So then I toss the list with names into the middle of the craft heap, and I leave the room. The kids are going to be incredibly mean to each other while they work, which is just how they show affection; and they are going to make an insane mess, which is something I don’t need to see happening. This is my first act of Christmas Surrender. Some things are beyond my control, and it’s very good to keep this in mind and not waste emotional energy getting upset about it.

Read the rest of my latest monthly column for Our Sunday Visitor.

What are your kids really learning at school? How will you find out?

When my family used to homeschool, I used to interrogate myself about which was be worse: The horrible knowledge that I was in charge of everything they would learn that day? Or (if we switched to someone else teaching) the horrible knowledge I wasn’t in charge of anything they would learn that day?

It was very hard to get used to sending my kids off for six or seven hours a day, and not really know what they were learning. Now that I’m used to it, I can see that some of it is great, some of it is fine, some of it is terrible, and some of it is just baffling. The thing is, I never really know how much I know. All I know is what the kids choose to tell me, or what I can figure out.

This is true for every parent who is not physically sitting on top of their child twenty-four hours a day. All you know about what your kids are learning is what you are allowed to know, by the people your kids come into contact with, and by your kids. That is the nature of kids growing up.

Right now, there is a case working its way through the courts about whether or not parents should be able to get their kids to opt out of learning with books with LGBTQ+ themes. The problem with stories like this is that, reading it, I don’t really know what these books are. The article says the parents who are suing object to “LGBTQ+ inclusive books.”

It mentions, “Some of the books at the center of the clash include Pride Puppy, geared toward preschoolers and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, geared toward students in kindergarten through 5th grade.”

You get the general impression from reporting on such stories that the parents are opposed to these books solely because they include LGBT people. This may be the case, but I have read numerous stories phrased identically to this one that, when you drill down into the facts, are revealed to deliberately mention one title but not another, or excerpt one page but not another. It’s hard not to conclude that the goal is to make the parents appear foolish and bigoted. It’s hard not to conclude that the article is complicit in hiding something from the general public.

Slate magazine—hardly a mouthpiece for conservative, reactionary parents—recently published a story about this very phenomenon, in which the author admitted that he thought it was overblown hysteria when people objected to the popular sex ed book It’s Perfectly Normal. But when he saw the actual copious and explicit drawings of intercourse, masturbation, and genitalia designed for ten-year-olds to pore over, he was taken aback.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image by USAG-Humphreys via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Microdosing catechism

When I was growing up, we had catechism classes at the church, occasionally at school when one of us was going to Catholic school, and also at home—and those were real, formal lessons. Sitting on the couch in the evening, we would go over the reading and do a question-and-answer section, true and false and multiple choice, and sometimes my mother would even set up little games to reinforce what we had learned—bingo and catechism baseball.

We had memory work and little practice sessions and occasionally prizes for good work. My mother was an incredibly organized person, and dedicated one or two days a week to catechism.

This is not my style. My style is more to be in a constant state of freaking out over how much my kids don’t know about their faith. But my life is very different from my mother’s, my family is different, and I am different. So I do things differently. Sometimes I’m even able to convince myself that it’s not a bad system.

Of course we avail ourselves of the faith formation classes offered by the parish when we can. Sometimes we can’t, for various reasons, and sometimes it’s just not what our kids need right now. But there is a method we’ve found that consistently yields some kind of good fruit. I’ll call it “microdosing theology.”

Silly name, simple method: You just do a tiny bit almost every day, and you don’t stop. Or if you do, you start again as soon as you can. That’s it. That’s the method. The theory is that it doesn’t overwhelm anybody, because it’s just a tiny bit. You can keep it up because it just takes a few minutes; and the kids can hardly complain, because it’s just a few minutes.

And even if they do complain? Well, it’s just a few minutes.

When you keep a constant, steady stream of words and ideas about theology in the family conversation, it no longer feels like some kind of uncomfortable, rarified activity that it would be weird to introduce. This way, even if the topics you’re introducing are not what they’re interested in, it’s not such a big leap to begin talking about the things they do want to talk about.

It works the best if you already have an established routine. We do have a pretty firmly entrenched habit of evening prayers (and that, too, follows the “just a little bit every day” model, because someone once told me to pray as you can, not as you can’t, and how we can pray is a little bit), and after prayers, we read a little bit.

Two books we recently used for microdosing, that have worked very well:

Saints Around the World by Meg Hunter Kilmer. We had the kids take turns reading aloud the short, punchy biographies of saints, one a day. I had never heard of most of them, and have been fascinated and occasionally incredibly moved to learn about the vast variety of saints, from ancient to modern times, all finding a way to follow God’s will in circumstances that could not vary more widely.

The tone and reading level is aimed at maybe grade 3, but the material is more than interesting enough to capture the attention of all ages; and although it doesn’t go into gory detail, it doesn’t sugarcoat the facts of martyrdom or persecution. It is thought-provoking and frequently made me want to learn more about the saints we met in these pages. Really good for a child preparing for confirmation, and it just provides a good, natural overview of what holiness looks like in action, in real life, which is the entire point of studying theology.

The illustrator has gone to a lot of trouble to include historically and culturally accurate and meaningful details in the pictures, which are briefly explained in the captions.

When we finished the saint book, we switched gears and began Michael Dubruiel’s The How-To Book of the Mass. This is less entertaining, but it’s an intensely practical book, written by someone who really understands the obstacles and temptations that beset the typical Catholic, and offers actionable advice about how to deepen your relationship with Christ and to enter more deeply into worship at Mass.

It is systematic and thorough and extremely clear. It is probably aimed at teens and older, but some parts of it are extremely simple and easy to understand, so I’m comfortable with the “take what you can manage, leave what you can’t” approach. Did I mention, it’s short? It’s broken up into very short sections, just a page or two, so you can easily read for just a minute or two per day and work your way through the Mass that way.

When we’re done with that, I’ll probably return to a book we read some time ago: Peter Kreeft’s Your Questions, God’s Answers. I recall that it did answer many of their questions, answered questions they already knew the answers for (which counts as review, which is fine), and opened up discussions about things they didn’t realize they had questions about.

And here is one of my important rules, vital to the whole microdosing operation: Always let the discussion happen! Doesn’t matter if it sticks to the original topic or not. If they ask a question about God, then right now is the right time to answer it, period.

The segments are short enough to read in five minutes or less. It’s intended for teenagers and is slightly goofy but not pandering. It’s theologically meaty and profusely studded with scriptural references, but written in a clear and chatty style that is easy to understand. Some sections are better than others, but some are very good indeed.

In general, I try to remember what several people told me when I signed up to teach faith formation one year: No matter what else I did, I must remember that it is not about me. It is about being there and letting the Holy Spirit do what he wants to do with the hearts of the children in that room. Yes, I had to do my best, and I have to put the effort in. But my efforts, my performance, are not what will make the difference. I have to remember to stand aside and make a place for the Holy Spirit.

That is harder than it sounds. Sometimes—most of the time, even—you really don’t know how good of a job you are doing when you teach your kids. All I can tell you is to keep going. Just a little bit at a time is good. And if you stop, start again.

___

A version of this essay originally appeared in The Catholic Weekly in May of 2023.
Image sources: eyedropper ; Bible (Creative Commons)

At a certain point, all you can do is provide a space

When my kids were little and we were house hunting, the one thing I promised them was that we would find a house where we could hook up a hose. The place we’d been renting before had no hose spigot, and even though we went to the pool and the beach, I always felt like an important part of their childhood was missing.

So we found a house, and we did hook up a hose and filled up a little wading pool. The kids loved it, and they loved the sprinkler I set up and the little water slide we had on the grassy slope. They spent a lot of time out there every summer, gleefully playing as all kids play in a small amount of water.

One month we found ourselves with all our bills paid and a little leftover money, so we splurged on something else I’d always wanted for my kids: A wooden play structure. It had swings and a slide and a climbing net and a little tower with a wheel, and they had endless active time and pretend games, swarming up and down and on and over it; and as they grew, they nailed things to it and painted it and switched out swings and made it more and more their own.

Kids growing up

Several years passed, the kids were getting older, and I again found myself looking for something to make our yard richer for them, more exciting and entertaining, and something to draw them outside and keep them active. We got a trampoline, the biggest one we could find, and it was wonderful. Kids of all ages could use it, from the toddler who got bopped up and down like a piece of popcorn when the other kids jumped, to the teenagers who needed to work off some angst and frustration with a furious solo jumping session in the evening.

The other day, I looked in the shed, hunting for some pruning shears, and I saw so many toys that no one has played with in years. Bikes with silly little miniature wheels. A beloved backyard ride-on roller coaster that we took apart and brought with us in move after move but that hasn’t been assembled for a while. There’s a red and blue playhouse, once in constant, hot demand, and now it’s faded with the sun and occupied only by blackberry brambles and a few spiders.

It’s the same on the porch, and in the attic. So many roller skates and stilts and baseball gloves and bow and arrow sets, games and activities that I gathered and brought home for my kids to try to make them happy, to make them healthy, to make them into well-rounded people who could do a lot of things and knew how to enjoy themselves, and were strong and determined and capable. I wanted our home to be the place they would want to be, and the place they’d want to bring their friends to, so I constantly worked hard to fill their life with everything rich I could manage, and I constantly encouraged them to use them. Sometimes I even insisted they use them.

Have I mentioned that my children are growing up? 

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Some thoughts on the dreams of children

One day, a child came snuffling and sobbing down the stairs in the morning, and when I asked what was the matter, she said, “Mama, I dreamed that you were dead.”

Oh, poor thing. I tried to wrap my arms around her and give her comfort, but she wasn’t done.

“And . . .and I had a REALLY HARD TIME GETTING MY BREAKFAST,” she wept.

Ah. My first impulse was to be offended. Is that all I am to you? A pourer of juice? The one who knows how to work a toaster? My death makes you weep because the most important meal of the day is now compromised?

But then I considered. This is a very young child. She has barely emerged from the age when food and mother are all one thing, not to mention the age when mother and she are one thing. To such a little one, a cold, empty breakfast table really is a terrible thing, a dreadful loss.

It’s very much like the song “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” You wouldn’t scoff at that man and say, “Oh, I guess you don’t really love that woman; you just care about getting your vitamin D!” To him, she is the very sunshine. To my daughter, I was breakfast. That’s how much I meant to her, in her dreams. When I thought it over, I was very moved (and I made her a nice breakfast right away).

I do love hearing about my kids’ dreams. They’re sometimes fascinating, and often very funny. And some of my kids are usually fairly tight-lipped, especially when they hit the teen years, and I am openly hungry to know what is going on in their heads, and dreams are where it’s at.

But I do have to brace myself when I turn up in their dreams.

Dream parents, when they’re not dead, behave abominably, at least at our house. We are just the worst. We are constantly missing their birthdays, telling our bewildered children they get no Christmas this year, driving them off cliffs, refusing to look out the window when they’re trying to warn us there’s a tornado made of tigers outside, and so on. Sometimes we spread a giant feast on a table and then tell them they can’t have any; sometimes we just throw away their favorite shoes.

I don’t think I’ve ever behaved decently in their dreams. I don’t take it personally anymore. I know I’m a pretty okay mother in real life, and I know the kids more or less know I love them. I also know that dreams are where people work out our feelings about things, and the emotional content of a dream is much more significant than the actual plot and characters.

Just as the very young child was unable to tell the difference between the death of her mother and the loss of breakfast, and older child may not be able to discern (in their dreams, at least) the difference between “something bad is happening to me” and “my parents are monsters.” At different stages of development, the lines between me and thee, inside and outside, are blurry and shifting, and that’s doubly true when we’re dreaming.

So when a kid dreams about parents doing unfair, outrageous things to the kid, it may very well not be a dream about the parent at all. It’s pretty likely actually a dream about the kid and how he is feeling about his life. The parent gets to be the aggressor in the dream because parents are the main doer-of-things-to-kids, so parents are the most obvious choice to act the part as the one who does something unpleasant to the kid.

Parents loom large in real life, so when kids need a way to express to themselves that they feel impinged upon in some way, it’s probably going to be the parent acting that part. But what the dream is really about is how that kid feels and responds to the unpleasant thing.

Do they feel powerless? Do they feel angry? Do they feel afraid? Do they feel energized and motivated to save the day? This is the important part. That’s what the dream is about. Kids, especially, are very self-centered (in a healthy, developmentally appropriate way, I mean), so when they dream, they dream about themselves.

It’s very common, especially as they hit pre-teen and teen years, for kids to feel that life is unfair, or that they’re the only one who understands something and no one will listen to them, or that things have gone out of control –maybe someone who is supposed to be in charge has disappeared — and they have to struggle desperately to get back in control.

And so these overwhelming feelings turn up in dreams, and the larger machinery that produces those feelings is likely to be parents. If a child is having a lot of dreams of being hunted and persecuted and tormented, and if they are disrupting sleep regularly, then it might be time to take a closer look and see if something bad is going on with the kid; but some dreams like this seem to be a normal part of growing up. Unless there is some very obvious catastrophe or betrayal or injustice in the child’s life, these are probably not actually dreams about the adult doing anything wrong. They are probably typical dreams that signify a child slowly coming into his own identity as separate from his parents and from his family, and facing very normal mixed emotions as they come of age.

Sometimes a kid will even dream that there are zombies or some other scary monster pretending to be their parents. I used to think this signified that my kids thought I was a hypocrite, and that they could tell that my patience and dedication were just a mask that could slip at any time.

But this was me massively projecting my own fears about my adequacy as a parent onto them. Dreams about something scary pretending to be your parent are most likely about things in general not being what they seem — about a child not being as secure or in control as he once thought he was when he was younger, for instance.

Anyway, that’s what I think. Probably the significance of dreams varies as much as individual psyches themselves vary, which is quite a bit. But I do think that parents shouldn’t put too much stock in the dreams of their children, or at least remember that dream rules are different from waking rules.

What do you think? As usual, my training and expertise in this matter are absolutely zero; it’s just something I’m interested in! 

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Image: Wallpaperflare.com

The thing about having kids

If you are wondering what things are like at our house, here is what you need to know: We have FOUR teenagers. Wasn’t that good planning? Aren’t we smart? It also smells wonderful here, believe me. And whatever the levels of snark and sarcasm you’re imagining, multiply it by 10. The four of them tend to gang up on us and act together like some kind of unholy army of scoffing and scorn.

Sometimes my husband will fuss at them, because they need to be fussed at. I recently learned that, after he leaves the room, one of my daughters will turn to the others and say, with a look of mild astonishment on her face, “I never did catch that man’s name.”

Pandemonium. She has very good comedic timing, just like her father, and she gets away with way too much just because she’s so funny. Just exactly like her father (whatever his name is).

And that’s what it’s like at our house.

I set this essay up like I was complaining, but this is actually one of the greatest parts of having children — or two of the greatest parts, I should say.

One is that they are so entertaining. They start out that way when they are first born (all babies are beautiful, and all babies are incredibly ugly, which is hilarious), and they keep it up as they trundle through one developmental stage after another, gracefully or clumsily blossoming into life as if they’re the first ones that ever thought of trying it. These comic firsts — first goofy laugh, first words, first joke, first completely insane knock-knock joke, first pun — they don’t get old when you have a lot of kids. If anything, they get better and better, because you’re relaxed enough to enjoy it.

It’s possible that I’m predisposed to enjoy my kids’ humor because I love them, but I have also heard so many people say that they had kids for various reasons — for duty, or because their wives wanted it, or by accident — and were amazed to discover how entertaining the little buggers turned out to be. I remember seeing a post on Facebook where some hapless young man loaded down with a stroller and diaper bags smiled goofily and told the cameraman, “I never thought I’d be so proud of someone for rolling over.” He knew the kid wasn’t some kind of genius for hitting a basic milestone, and yet that’s what milestones are like: They feel huge. They feel historic, even though trillions of people have done them before.

I suspect this is a large part of why people answered as they did in a recent Pew study…  Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash