Trying to stay positive, continued

My kids can sometimes be the greatest buoys for my spirit. After days of fixation on life’s end, my heavy soul, embraced by these lives just begun, knows the miracle of flotation. When I am sinking in my own bad humor, their goofy, girly love pulls me to the surface for air.

I used to think it was the height of unselfishness to have kids. But as Liz Gilbert asserted in Eat, Pray, Love, there are many very self-interested reasons to have them. Right now, one of those reasons is the hope and energy that surround me in my children. When time seems frozen at Good Friday, my little ones wake me up to Easter morning.

I want to maximize this natural spirit of hopeful energy, never spoiling it or breaking it. I worry I rain on their parades too often for the sake of prudence, as I try to help them grow up.

The other morning, I was playing the tough guy, insisting that Brielle do something for herself rather than bossing me around to get it done. She wanted a blanket, and was helplessly trembling and crying about how cold she was while the blanket she wanted was three steps away.

This went on for about a minute and I finally said the obvious. “Sweet Brie, if you’re cold, just put that blanket on you,” I told her, working on breakfast at the sink.

“No! I can’t! YOU do it!” she demanded. “Brrrrrr!”

I didn’t respond. We try not to respond to any requests unless she “asks nicely,” meaning use of the magic word and a ladylike tone.

“BRRRR! I need a blanket!” she cried.

“It’s right there, sweetheart. Grab it.”

“I can’t reach it! My arm isn’t long enough!” More screams from the neglected child.

Sarcasm time. “Hmmm. What is another way you could get that blanket? Let’s think….”

Brielle recognizes sarcasm well enough to hate it. “Stop it!” she shrieked. “You’re being MEAN to me!”

“Brielle, I’m not being mean to you. I just know you are a big girl and you know how to fix this problem by yourself so you can be warm.”

“You’re NOT being nice to me! It makes me very sad and mad when you are not nice to me!” Forlorn cries.

“Brielle, sometimes Daddy’s job is not to be nice. Sometimes my job is to teach you how to be a big girl,” I said.

In the past, we’ve used “being nice” as the ever-desired goal, although the older I get, the more convinced I am that love is not always nice. I just hadn’t tried before now to get that across to my four-year-old. Just now I was realizing why I had waited so long.

“But the way you teach me doesn’t teach me anything!” she cried, cheeks soaked. “It only makes me sad and mad when you fight me like this!”

Most of me wanted to put her on time-out for her insolence in this whole conversation. I was not cool with being bossed around by my preschooler for something she could handle on her own. I resented being chastised for taking a stand that she take care of herself rather than ask me to drop what I was doing to wait on her.

That was what most of me was saying. Yet there was this annoyingly vocal minority in my head saying, She is right. You are fighting her, not teaching her. You could easily do the nice thing here. She’s only asking for a blanket. Is this the hill you want to die on in the battle to teach her self-determination?

And then, Actually, you ARE teaching her. You’re teaching her not to help people who ask for a simple favor. You’re teaching her to be contrary and difficult, to ignore the plea of a shivering human being in the name of teaching her a lesson she is clearly not in the mood to study. Teaching her to be…mean?

I walked around the room in external quiet, defending myself against this minority voice. But it’s important to say “no” to build self-reliance instead of chronic dependency, not to enable laziness or bossiness, I insisted.

But there have got to be more positive ways to do this, whispered the minority.

I busied myself, recounting the ballots to see which voice was really me, and which the pretender. My verbal ceasefire gave her time to calm down.

The votes were tallied.

When I thought it was clear that I was not rewarding her bossiness, I brought over the soft crimson blanket Brielle had been crying for and wrapped it around her skinny pajama-clad frame. From over her shoulder, I kissed the salty cool of her right cheek.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she whimpered.

“I love you, sweet Brie. Next time, just ask nicely and I will be happy to help you.”

My kids do so much to be the light of my darkened life, the updraft that carries me above the thunderheads, the spring that thaws away my hard winter. When I think of them, I see grins, hear giggles, feel cuddling.

What more can I do to be this kind of a positive presence for them? What creative responses to difficult times might increase their experience of me as the brightness, the favorable wind, the warmth in the midst of their dark, storm and winter?

I know there must be negative moments in parenting. But I’m thinking maybe I have been resigning myself to too many of them.

Trying to stay positive

I’m struggling not to violate the cardinal rule of blogging: “Don’t let it become too negative.” (I’m trying to do the same with my parenting in general; more on that tomorrow....) It’s not like I get a kick out of life’s dark stretches. I don’t. Nor do I derive any sadistic pleasure watching my kids walk through them.

It’s just that so far in 2008, my girls have lost their More Papa, their Papa and their cat. (Please don’t mention the cat to them—they still haven’t spoken of his absence and we haven’t brought it up.) Shuffled into this was a holiday featuring the violent death of God. Watching my kids process the first death of their life at the end of January was touching and even a tearful sort of beautiful. I didn’t like that they had to go through it. At the same time, it was important, deep, inspiring.

But watching them lose their grandpa has been simply bleak.

It’s as if two deaths in as many months has left them feeling like this is routine. They felt the stress and sensed something was wrong; it showed in their hyperactive and hyperfussy behavior all last week as they spent evenings with other loved ones while we were at the hospital. But there was a grim resignation this time, something even more painful to see than the more visible grief that showed up when they lost More Papa.

The twins both took the news of Rachelle’s dad’s death in silence. Brielle didn’t even manage to cry until half a day after she’d heard, when she listened to Mommy sing “Goodbye for Now,” the same song she’d sung at More Papa’s funeral. And then, at last, Brielle fell to pieces. I was relieved.

We barely got to that point though. The evening had all the ingredients of human brokenness. We had designed it as a quiet time for the family to gather in our home and remember Don.

By 8 p.m., we had not yet begun to do this.

I had been waging a man-against-machine battle up to the last minute, trying to get the 161 photos I’d scanned of Don to play on the TV, oblivious to any human beings in the room. Don’s sisters were getting along like sisters, which at this point meant a disagreement sharp enough that one was out on the porch calming herself down before she said something regrettable. Rachelle’s recently widowed grandma had come up the mountain to share in the time, but had run out of steam by then and was begging for rides back home, convinced that she too had lost her husband that very day. In the midst of this was Rachelle’s mom, shell-shocked after the loss of the two most important men in her life, just trying to hold it together.

And in the wailing department were my three daughters, whose enthusiastic screams would have put Bible-era professional mourners to shame. So vociferous were our lovely progeny that we carried the twins off to bed in the middle of dinner. This meant leaving them out of a process I fear they really needed. It was this process that finally wrung the tears from Brielle’s eyes, the moment that her resignation gave way to real feelings.

We all need those moments. Maybe even fussy three-year-olds? Why couldn't they stay sane enough to have theirs?

Melía prayed the night before last, “Thank you for this nice day. Thank you for this wonderful day. Thank you that Jesus die and rose adain. Thank you that Papa die and rose adain. Amown.” It was sweet. It was funeral homily quotation material. But is it OK that either one of those tragic deaths should roll so routinely off the lips of a child? Is this a welcome sign that Melía is trusting in the hope of the resurrection, accurately applying Jesus’ story to that of her grandfather? Or this all too glib for a loss that is much closer to home than the one two thousand years ago? Should I be encouraged or concerned?

I am sad that my daughters have to deal with so much death right now, resentful even that Easter had to fall when it did. More than than, I'm angry that this most recent death came much sooner than necessary. I am indignant that hospital visiting rules and the twins’ own fussiness has made it so they haven’t gotten to say good-bye the way I think they needed to. I am worried that theses losses will lead to I don’t know what in their psycho-spiritual future. I am scared of how we adults may fail them as we handle our own grief.

And despite all that has been breaking in our babies’ hearts of late, I’m trying to keep my eye on what remains whole. I’m making an effort to keep things real yet positive with regard to the family we’ve lost and all of us who are left. After last Tuesday, we got out of town and spent a couple days in Carlsbad at the beach and pool. Yesterday found us at church and a birthday party. Today we all went to a play and dinner with the kids' choir. Good stuff. Hollow-feeling at times, but good.

So yeah, we’re working not to let this all get too negative. But it is work. Sometimes, it is hard work.