From Here with Heart

It’s the craziest thought to me that when they ‘look back on their childhood’ it will often be filled with stories of me; the containers I created for their growth, the flaws they inherited from my screw ups, the ways in which I did, or did not show up. Some of their stories about me will be full of holes, some will be formative and lasting. Some scars that are in them may or may not soften or will eventually completely dissolve.

When we get older, we learn to undo our proverbial fists, let in a little more light through the cracks our parents may have created, or just give up and stop our complaining. We loosen our grip on our resolve and learn that to polarize absolutes as fervently opposing truths leaves no room for either side to move around with any oxygen or grace. We realize that our parents were young when they raised us, were possibly in addiction, or were raised by children themselves. We realize that they are human, that what happened, happened and here we are now. 

Parenting, the hardest job in the world is often the least supported and yet, one of the most deeply scrutinized.

Families: an odd and mysterious arrangement, in which all parties are called to see things from a myriad of angles, most often right in the thick of the toughest moments.

This is no small feat for a motley crew of HSP roommates who never even got to veto one another for domestic compatibility in the first place.

Two of them haven’t paid rent since birth and came out shitting and spitting food on the floor as their early entry into this obligatory arrangement. We’re oddballs for roommates, thrown into a shared compound, whose heartstrings are tied by the prickly word ‘family’. What chance did we ever really have for success?!? Seems like a suspicious set up to me.

While domestic attempts at love often look like efforts towards good behaviour, what is well-intended in here, is often misinterpreted as hurt or malice. But somehow, as they get older, life starts look like mercy in a Halloween costume and then suddenly creeps up on you as grace in a grad dress.

Most often, parenting teens consists of fielding confusing and very opposing language. Think of it as being yelled at in a train station in Germany. Most of their cries oscillate between, ‘Go away!’ ‘Come closer.’ But ‘Not too close!’ ‘Aren’t you listening?!’ ‘Leave me alone.’ And ‘Never leave me.’

What they are saying is this: ‘Tell me I will be alright in the world because I do not often feel alright inside.’

The best we can do is parent from a place where we remember just how hard it actually really was. What makes you ‘in touch’ as a parent is not knowing the hippest rappers or brands, but remembering what it was really like to be in their skin.

Just as we are limping toward our own Mid-Life-Awakening, we are asked to stretch ourselves across the vast needs of these insecure and unfolding humans and this is the work of angels or at least of the tired and willing.

In the teen years, they so crave their sullen bedrooms that the doorways from the porch to the living room to the snacks to the car rides to the kitchen and beyond start to feel like gateways towards an otherworldly love. Your heart starts to bend and expand in ways you never thought we’re humanly possible. There’s awkwardness and sass, for sure, but if you’re lucky, they’ll reveal themselves to you and trust you to be their container so that their whole world does not explode into oblivion.

All of our flaws are seen here in this house. Out There, we wear smiles and personalities, but In Here there’s dishes, sensitivities and heartache. Out There we can protect ourselves by revealing only certain parts of ourselves.

In Here, everything is exposed. We slam doors, reveal fears, swallow lust, eat badly and cry.

But In Here, at its best, can also be holy. In Here, at its best, is a place to convene; a tea made for a hard day, a billion encouraging conversations, reconciliation, and an infinity of efforts towards understanding one another. In Here, love can change you.

Parenting at its best is a place.

A quiet, whole-lotta-listening-place. A place of a million attempts at getting it right, a whole HELL of a lot of resource-provision and in their teen years, mostly just a readiness to be that place that they come to to reveal, to know and to find themselves. We are called to be the house that holds them, that dissolves their fear, the house that sees them even when they cannot see themselves. We light a candle for them and shuffle them towards their own aliveness, out the doorways of In Here to their readiness for the great Out There with heart.