Lord, Grant Me Not to Judge My Teens

Photo by Jasper Garratt on Unsplash

The biggest secret of motherhood is that the labor pains never stop.

Not everything you read on the mommy-blogosphere sticks, but this one has pestered me for almost twenty years. I read it for the first time in the early days of nursing my oldest, only a few months after a difficult birth experience. Frankly, the thought kind of terrified me. What kind of labor pains, pray tell? What exactly had I signed myself up for in this experience of parenting?

Well, I get it now, and boy, do I get it.

You see, during childbirth, that tiny baby’s body separates physically from her mother’s. But much of the child is still enclosed within the loving mother, sheltered and nurtured like a little sprout in a nursery. Unlike a plant, however, eventually the child wants to leave the greenhouse, is ready and well-equipped to become her own person.

Well, duh. That’s adolescence for you. Tell me something new.

Here it is: As my children become adults, I find that I am faced with an insidious temptation to take my own experience and leverage it into judgment. I secretly decide that I know better, that with all of my wisdom and experience, I am uniquely qualified to direct my child’s adult path. Not only do I think I anticipate the mistakes he will make, and reflexively think to prevent and correct those mistakes, I also project my fears and anxieties about those mistakes onto him in this moment, when they are nothing more than potentialities rather than actualities. But anticipation and prevention are no longer my roles (and projection of fear never was), and if I do not relinquish them, I will cause injury.

Have I forgotten so quickly the pain of parental judgment? How as a young woman in my twenties, even implied disapproval could be both painful and shameful? How in the freshness of my adulthood, I recognized that I still deeply craved acceptance? Do I dare to admit that even slight parental disapproval can sting, even decades into adulthood?

I read The Blessing prematurely; it was one of many parenting books my own mother had collected, lying dusty on a little used bookshelf. I had only small children at the time, and as a concept, it was similar in message to many other parenting books. Its secret, though, is that it takes this kind of parenting to a different level. Blessing a young child can be as simple as cuddling on an armchair and reading aloud a picture book. Blessing a young adult requires more from me.

As the saying goes, “Little children, little problems; big children, bigger problems,” and, as is so often the case, many problems start with me rather than with them. Just when I thought I had really finished my own growing-up and gotten the hang of this parenting thing, the stretching and growing and challenging of my own self begins again in ways that leave me longing for the simplicity of baby- and toddler-sized challenges.

Over and over again in our book, Patterns for Life, we caution against using education as a system, against using church as a tool, against seeing our children as projects with which to succeed. But like all temptations, it’s perennial; a battle we should expect to fight until our last breath.

Why did we homeschool our teens, if the goal wasn’t to succeed at academic excellence, to launch a ready-made paragon of success and renown? Well, we did it because we believed home education was a great gift to give our children, regardless of how they chose to use it. We blessed our children with home education because it is good.

Why did we take them to church, especially when it was so hard, if the goal wasn’t to inculcate them into life in the Body of Christ? Well, because life in the church is a gift. Quiet moments in candlelit Vespers, the intense prayerfulness of the Great Entrance, the joy of procession: these are all gifts that are worthy in and of themselves, not because of anything they do to us or our children. We blessed our children with Christ’s Church because it is beautiful.

Our children are not projects, remember.

Remember, remember.

Our children are persons: Precious icons, precious gifts of whom we have been given a brief stewardship. So this thing is true: When we pray with St. Ephrem, “O, Lord, grant me to see my own sins, and not to judge my brothers and sisters…” let us also echo, “… nor my sons and my daughters.”

And when it is time for that next level of labor, when our children become young adults, let us resist the temptation to judge them. Preventing our children from making mistakes, or from choosing a life path different from the ones in our imagination or unfamiliar from the one we’ve walked ourselves – these things were not part of the package. Instead, when we feel the tug of condemnation, dismissal, cynicism or even just plain old sarcasm or bossiness, let us release these into the aether and instead, purposefully continue to bless our children. Not with unwanted direction or control, but rather with acceptance and love, entrusting them into the care of the Father who loves them even better than we can imagine.