daddyville

There are times for me during this parenting process when I feel like my job is just to repeat instructional phrases, and while that is just a part of the process at this stage of the game it is a large part of that process. "Do this, Oh don't do that, wash your hands first, be sure to wipe well, please take your shoes into your room and put then in their 'home place', please watch out sweetheart that's hot, please be careful with that it's breakable", I say along with many other things. Parents, do you remember these times? Single people or kidless ones, you haven't had the pleasure? Well, if you do at some point in the future then you will know the joy and the craziness of which I speak. Our little girl is four years old and while they are some really cute, beautiful and innocent years there are moments, a fair amount of them actually, when I say to myself that I really am ready for the time line to go ahead and move along. Yes, I may miss them later, and that will perhaps be the case regardless. There are days when your patience gets pushed to limits that you didn't know that you had. There are no 'days off' on this kind of thing. Your patience gets tried every single day. Some days are easier than others and for those you are eternally thankful, and yet when you look at how exasperated you become at times and how easily that all takes place, and how quickly...You wonder how you ever made it this far. Day by day; that's how we make it....day by day. In these times I look at myself in the stark truth of a challenging reality and I see what a kid, a child I have been in the majority of my adult years, I am humbled. For this I am grateful lest I get the wrong idea about myself or about others undergoing the same processes that in the past I have been quick to presuppose or judge. Being a parent certainly gives you a fresh, informed pair of eyes through which to view your own parents and upbringing. All of a sudden an unvarnished respect and compassion abounds. All of this time you thought that you were smart, and now you've earned a little of your own--smarts---and if you're careful, it may even grow.

Grace is a vital element in surviving the ups and downs of life. Parenting is no exception to this. Grace for yourself and grace for others: grace all around. I have to remind myself of this when the process of parenting presents personal challenges that cause me to see parts of myself that I really need to work on. These are parts of myself that nothing else in life before now has successfully reached on any kind of consistent basis. Parenting does. Full stop; parenting takes the bait. I am happy to be a parent, and yet it is the hardest thing that I have ever done. I love it dearly, and yet it pushes me into territories of painful growth and stretching inside myself. How could I love something so intensely demanding? Because the sum of that is a little person and they are part of me; they came from me. This process is biological in it's origin and in that way bypasses much of the mental stipulations governing most rational involvements in physical affairs. The family unit is a Universe unto itself and yet it cannot help but be the cornerstone of so many other systems that we know of both physical and non-physical. Perhaps that is one of the facets of the perfection that it holds. Maybe that is part of the mystery that it embodies. Because there most certainly is a mystery about it and in it's processes. It's one of great love and great growth: challenge and beauty, strength and vulnerability, assertion and reception, firmness and malleability.....and all of it hand in hand, side by side. There's a resonance of perfection there that I think is shared in the bedrock of all the most worthwhile things in life.

The marvel about this mystery is that it is masked by it's own self, clothed by the common tasks that you perform everyday, quietly working on who and what you are through subtleties of it's own until later on down the road you look back at the self that you once were through the eyes of the self that you are and it is then that you realize the change that you Are: The Change that you have been Living. You are that change and it has been on you and in you and through you all the while, working it's magic, fueled by the ember of love inside you.
What can be said of this? Sure, there are moments when you feel like you really wish yourself more of a saint than that which you are, but that which you are--the parent that you are --must be loved and nurtured and given the room to grow and to learn just like the precious children you raise. I think that it is in 'the doing' that we learn how to be the best parents that we can be. We are, we learn, we adapt, we are, we learn, we adapt. We feel it out, step by baby step walking In the half light, sometimes sorry for ourselves, sometimes proud of responding well to challenge. We are happy, we are sad, we laugh, we cry, we're stupefied and dumbfounded, we're amazed and radiant...... All in their Time. But the whole while we are walking down the hall in our sock feet looking for the closest light switch to turn on the knowledge, carrying that ember of love in the center of our chests with the seeds of hope firmly clenched in our palms and with the soft sing-song Prayers of Grace swirling off our lips.

Who are these people??
They are parents.