It was as keen a wound as if she had driven a knife into my very heart. I read, then re-read the letter from my daughter, she was on the other side of the world for a gap year as a missionary. All my maternal alarm bells rang, what’s happened that she now thinks we are suddenly the worst parents in the world? Not in a huffy teenage sort of way but in an articulate I’m putting this to pen and paper so you can pour over and over how badly you’ve done at parenting.
Life had been, well different. There had been some big changes to deal with, including me moving out of the family home for five years until my now husband and I could have a sacramental marriage. It was a difficult and bumpy time, whilst most of our friends and family looked on in horror at what seemed like Religious mania. I’d watched her very carefully at the beginning for those tell-tale signs of not coping, but nothing more than the regular teen angst could I see. It wasn’t ideal but the time spent in that little home became some of my most precious and cherished memories. God greatly blessed those days.
She had left for America shortly after the wedding and the move back into the family home, and some five or six weeks after that the letter had come. I didn’t respond straight away, I was fearful of adding more to the list of our faults and failings.
It so happened the next day I was holding the monthly day of adoration at the Secondary school, this meant approx. 7hrs sat in a tiny room with Jesus in the monstrance whilst a small but steady flow of students would come in for prayer. I sat before Him, the letter in my hand, shrugging my shoulders.
“Tell me what’s going on with my child” I pleaded. “I have all day” I added as a little touch to underline my determination to understand.
God gave me a great, ribbon wrapped illumination that day, not just for my own child but for all our children.
From the moment we meet them face to face, our world revolves around the gift of our children, or it should. Our plans of how we will more or less carry on as usual but with a cute person in tow are quickly dispatched onto the pile marked “foolery”. We learn to love as God loves, sacrificially. It is the nearest we come on earth to perfect love, and yes that costs doesn’t it, it hurts sometimes but the near perfect love wins.
Skip forward fourteen ish or more years, the strive for independence is coming to the fore in your child, one minute they need you, the next you are pushed to the side. One minute you’re the hero the next the problem.
For all of your child’s life till now you have been the provider of self-esteem, the provider of self worth, the stability, the morals, well everything you have. But, yes but, we are raising children to become fully functioning adults, adults who go out to make the world a better place. Adults who thrive emotionally, spiritually and physically. Our job is never to hold on too long to the hands of our children. What feels like a painful rejection of you is actually the first attempts of freeing their hands to grasp the wounded ones of Christ.
There comes this time, when our affirmation, our building of their self-esteem is no longer enough. As adults they are moving into a place where they need God sized foundations, God sized love and a God sized hand to hold. Most importantly they need to move into a place where they are looking up and aspiring to the perfect one, not the broken, imperfect earthly parents who have raised them. We were never meant to be enough as our fledgings fly, its right they see our flaws because if we love them we want them to be more than we are.
In a God centred family, our children move from the absolute but flawed love of the parents into the absolute and perfect love of Jesus. We are still there, pointing forward but their sense of purpose and worth comes from the one who gave it to them.
Most will move straight into a relationship and look for their affirmation from other imperfect human beings. They leave the shaky hands of their parents lunging into the grip of an even more shaky hand. This means they don’t arrive as gift into a relationship but they arrive as “need”. Two people who “need” seldom will find the wholeness they are seeking from the other, we know that, if we dare to think about it long enough.
As for my daughter, well we are still best of friends and as transitions go, hers was one I wouldn’t change for the world. Our relationship evolves, she knows we know we aren’t perfect, but we do have very valuable experience of imperfection to share. Our empty nest is not emptiness, it’s a place where our fledging rests a while before taking once again to the wing. It’s a painful time but that’s because of that sacrificial love we’ve been graced with. The one where you gladly ache, the price payed to see the glory of their flight.
I have done the sleepless nights, the tummy bugs, the last minute homework, the parents evenings, fought some of her battles, been head cheerleader but without doubt my biggest parental accomplishment is stepping back far enough to let her reach out for the hand of Jesus.