(written in summer 2016)
It’s about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the sand piled on the concrete patio is crumbling like brown sugar against the plastic bucket of a tiny yellow bulldozer. The bulldozer beep-beeps its steady way back to pick up another load, then falls to its side as its owner loses interest and runs for the kiddie pool.
We are in the center of summer – a place of fun and exploration – at my parent’s house out in the country.
Nana and Papa don’t have a sandbox. When I mentioned in passing that our sons were really enjoying their new plastic construction toys, Papa immediately set out to devise a makeshift sandbox out of a dusty blue wading pool and two or three bags of Quik-crete. When we arrived and were ooh-ing and ah-ing over it, he told me that Quik-crete is designed specifically for playground use because of its fine grain and the fact that it is both sifted and washed, that even though it’s not as fine as the pool filter sand (that one is really fine) it’s still perfect for sandboxes.
My dad is one to elaborate beyond the answer you look for, but he carefully selected his materials with the kids in mind. When they started digging and it got dusty, he ran for the garden hose to water it down and kill the dust. He purchased a rainbow-striped beach umbrella to shade the box from mid-day sun, and sweeps the patio after every play session. He sits every afternoon of the week with our Percy in his lap, watching the other kids play with the contented look of a well-fed bullfrog on a lilypad (Papa, that is; although our Percy has mastered this zenned-out expression as well).
I often wonder if I will be that invested in such small things, and that content just watching them play.
As a parent, I recognize that my current season is one of embracing insanity. This is why we are all in such a frenzy to capture each moment, because right now there’s no time to enjoy them. That’s for later, when the kids are no longer running around naked smeared with peanut butter. I mean, I hope my kids will stop doing that someday. It’s the glory of the aged to relish grandparenthood. I don’t begrudge it to my dad, and I wish for it someday myself.
However, I have goals for my kids, in particularly my eldest. This summer she is almost five and she’s tall enough to reach the bottom in the shallow end of their in-ground pool. She loved paddling around on the lakeshore back in June, and she’s excited to learn to swim. The pool, mid-July, is at a comfortable 81 degrees, and the sun is shining hot.
My goal is that she can doggie-paddle by the end of the week. So I get in, pick her up, and put her in the water.
The sirens go off, and suddenly she’s clinging like a leech. I’ve never heard her scream this loud, and believe me, she has shown exceptional prowess in vocal intensity thus far. This is the decibel level normally reserved for fire sirens, and my ear is three inches from the source. I attempt to peel her off of me and the scream erupts, louder. My head is spinning suddenly, and being marginally stronger than a four-year-old, I push her far enough away so the sound is at least less directional.
“Nadia. Nadia! Honey, whoa, whoa, slow down.”
(banshee noises)
“Nadia, there’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m here.”
An upstairs window shatters.
I hold her at arms-length, and she is reaching for me with both arms and legs, clinging to my hands, begging me to take her out, she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t want to swim. I’m a little stunned, despite my nearly five years as a parent. This is my path as a parent, to be flummoxed beyond belief, continually bewildered. My wife joins me in the pool and extricates me from the child-leech. I stand there for a second or two, considering what is to be done.
We don’t cave often to our children. I like to claim that this has to do with carefully-curated parenting philosophies, but mostly I’m incredibly stubborn, and I hate being wrong.
My child needs to learn to swim. She needs to overcome her fears. And so help me, she’s going to do it.
When my wife passes my daughter back to me, I let her go.
She buckles her knees, goes under, and takes on water, and my heart skips a beat. I pull her quickly up, but the damage is done. I take her to the side, where she sobs and shakes uncontrollably and runs away, screaming at me. No, I won’t swim, I don’t want to, don’t make me, Daddy, please.
I’m standing, dripping, in the shallow end, watching her get as far away from me as she possibly can. My wife watches me. My dad is silent. My grandma, who lives with my parents and didn’t quite catch what happened besides the screaming, asks if Nadia is scared. I stop the bitterness before it gets out, and admit, simply, “Yes, she is.”
I don’t know how to help her be courageous, because now she’s scared of me.
By bedtime, my daughter has forgiven me, warily, and we talk quietly about trying again, about how I won’t let her go this time. I admit to her that it is scary, that I was wrong to let her go. She tells me she just wants to play, not swim. That’s okay, I say. That’s okay. I still, stubbornly, end the conversation with an insistence that she still try it sometime, that she will love it once she learns how, that if she trusts me she can learn.
Two days later, with our help, she reaches for the bottom, and learns to climb down the ladder into the shallow end, and we celebrate with her. Somehow, my heart expects more of her than that. I hate myself for it. I hate myself when she does it over and over and looks to me, face shining, and I respond by telling her, “That’s great, now try kicking!” I want her to meet my expectations and then move quickly on to the next triumph, and somehow her extended enjoyment of her little triumphs annoys me. And I hate myself again for my cold heart. I hate that I can’t move beyond myself to see her as she is, and love her without expectations, and train her with grace.
I hate that it’s so hard for me to just sit back and rejoice with her during these moments the moments of triumph with her, like Papa the zen bullfrog.
How quickly I lose the grace of parenting in service of my selfish goals for parenting.
As parents we often think that the world is simple. Eat your vegetables so you’ll be healthy. Brush your teeth so you don’t get cavities. Go to bed so you don’t get sick (and so we can have some kid-free evening time). Learn to swim so you won’t drown. All of this makes sense when you’re looking at it from five or six feet off the ground. The water only comes up to your waist. What’s so scary about that?
Well, from three feet off the ground, that water is at your neck. If you’re not careful, it’s in your lungs. How quickly I forget what it’s like to be small.
Thankfully, God doesn’t:
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.” – Psalm 103:8-18
My Heavenly Father asks a lot of me: faith, good deeds that match the newness of the life He gives us, endurance in sufferings and persistence in prayer. In the midst of all of these things — not least of which is the admonition to be perfect as He is perfect — He knows that I am small and weak. He knows that we are all dust. He actually cloaked Himself in dust and grew at our pace to prove it. And He loves us in all our dusty smallness, and gently and patiently helps us to grow. He loves us as the little children we are. He rejoices over us with singing (Zeph. 3:17).
I insisted on Nadia’s growth in swimming not because I wanted her to trust me, but because I wanted her to be better on my time table. I wanted to get the moments of growth out of the way as quickly as possible so that we could celebrate the goal – children who swam confidently, like me. My goal was the end of the matter, not the process in between. God’s goal, right now, is the process in between. Without the process, the goal would have no meaning.
We are not one-and-done creations. We are built in our faith by the moments in between. Of course we look ahead to heaven, of course we look ahead to perfection, of course we look ahead to the prize set before us. But until we get there – and God knows when that will be – we are in the thick of this scary and often overwhelming and sometimes difficult journey as dusty children.
I hurry to get where I’m going. I think little of the real work to be done in the everyday moments God gives me each day.
It wasn’t just Nadia that needed more grace from her graceless dad. I needed more grace from my Father – grace to forgive me for my belligerence, and then grace for the everyday. I needed to extend this grace to myself, understanding my smallness in light of God’s patience. And then I needed to let this grace seep into my hard heart and show Nadia the love and encouragement and patience I have received from God, time and again.
By the end of the week, I’d revised a couple philosophies, eaten a lot of humble pie, and repaired what I could of the damage. She can walk from wall to wall now in the shallow end, kick her feet while holding onto the ladder, and even bounce a little. She puts her face under the water in the kiddie pool with the help of some pink goggles we got for her and a lot of encouragement. But these matter not because of the goals, even as we celebrate each tiny triumph, but because of the slow rebuilding of trust, and a much more methodical form of courage.
I think of my zen bullfrog dad and my in-the-moment children now a little less like they’re just enjoying themselves, and more like they’ve discovered something wise that I’ve forgotten: these things take time, so why not take the time for these things?
My forgetfulness and brokenness will always break me, as it does now, as I write this. I will never achieve the grace and goodness of my perfect Father, and I will break more than this as she grows up – I will probably break her heart, and the hearts of all of my children. The only thing for me in this is the grace that has been, is, and will be, from a Father who knows my faults, how I need to grow, and just how long it will take before I can swim with the buoyancy of the faith that He is near, and He will not let me drown.