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Eyes and bellies and other parts

I’ve been thinking a lot about bacon. Have you tried it? Holy cow is it good. Speaking of cows, hats off to steaks sizzling on a grill, prime rib, and juicy cheeseburgers. And don’t get me started on roasted lamb.

We Eastern Orthodox are in our final Lenten throes. Our liturgical calendar is different than that of Catholics and Protestants. I’m unsure why. I’ve had it explained to me many times, just as I’ve had Bitcoin and natural law explained to me many times. Some heads are just not fitted for certain knowledge. The point is, I’m glad Easter approaches, for many theological and spiritual reasons, but also because a man can only eat so much hummus.

So why fast at all? And what to teach our children about it? In The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Patitsas writes: “…it is in the lowest part of the soul, in the appetitive powers, where the battle will be won or lost.” In other words, if we want to achieve noble, virtuous lives—and raise sons and daughters to do the same—we must subdue our passions. Fasting is a means of bringing the body, and thereby our passions, into submission.

Jackrabbit and Professor attend a little private school. It’s Montessori-based, which aims to help children become self-directed learners. Every week they’re responsible for achieving a number of goals—reading aloud so many pages, say, or completing a handwriting primer.

Jackrabbit is struggling. Week after week, he fails to complete his goals. The children who do complete their goals get to go on field trips. Jackrabbit usually has to stay behind. He tells me he has difficulty keeping his eyes off the work of the older kids. It’s not the work itself that distracts him, it’s the fact that they’re using computers. One downside of not giving your children screens is that when they do see one, even an ad for dish soap can be captivating.

On the drive to school, we talk about what he can do to guard his eyes. Which leads to a talk about battling the body. Now Professor is curious. “How can you fight your body, Papa?”

Oh man, I’d almost rather talk about Bitcoin.

I do my best to explain that some parts of our bodies—especially men’s bodies—will run the show if we let them. Men will eat themselves to death, drink themselves to death, and look at wrongful things until their minds can’t focus on anything else.

Jackrabbit wants to know if hands also want to take charge, because sometimes he can’t help but whack someone. Professor’s question is more philosophical: “But if your belly and eyes are you, why do you say that you’re not in charge?”

Your belly, your eyes, your hands are parts of you, I say. But they’re not all of you. You have a heart, and a mind, and a soul. When one part of you tries to rule over the others, it leads you into bad places.

“Like not getting my goals done,” Jackrabbit says sadly.

Think of today like you’re going into battle, I tell him. This gets his attention.

Your eyes have been running the show at school, I say. Today, see how much of the time you can make them look at what you need to focus on, instead of what they want to focus on.

“But what if I can’t?”

You won’t win the whole day, I say. But see how much you can win. Even if you just stay in charge of your eyes for five minutes, that’s five minutes you won. And tomorrow you can try for six.

“Do your eyes ever try to be in charge, Papa?” Professor asks.

Sigh. Yes, child.

You will battle the rest of your lives, I tell them, to keep charge of your bodies. Every part of them is made to do good things, but it’s up to you to make sure they do those good things.

In the school parking lot I pull their heads close to mine and pray that they’ll win their battles today. Off they bounce and stumble into their little school. Off to fight their battles, as I go to fight mine.

That afternoon, Jackrabbit finds me at my desk. His face is beaming. “Papa,” he says, “I finished all my goals. I won.”

Amen, child. Amen and amen and amen.

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Eating an elephant

There’s a scene in Conspiracy Theory when Mel Gibson’s paranoid character, realizing bad guys are breaking into his apartment, triggers a string of self-destruction mechanisms while he and Julia Roberts make their getaway. Embedded fuses burn along the walls, flash-bangs go off in succession, and the whole place blows apart, piece by piece.

Sometimes I feel like that apartment. Overloaded and on the brink. One more intrusion, and I just might blow. I don’t suppose that’s an unusual feeling for fathers, for parents, for people. It’s probably not unusual, but I don’t think we’re supposed to feel this way.

Recently I took my youngest children fishing. If this sounds relaxing, envision four year-old twins holding rods with very real hooks at the end of a very real dock. I instinctively went into manage-the-burdens mode, moving back and forth between them, baiting their hooks, helping them cast, making sure they locked their lines, and repeatedly pulling them back from the edge.

I began to feel like I needed someone to pull me back from the edge. Fishing is supposed to be fun, but there I stood with clenched jaw, laboring through another task on my never-ending list. I could feel my patience slipping as they yanked at their lines, swung their hooks too close to my head, and general behaved like, well, four year-olds fishing.

That’s when one of them said, apropos of nothing as he eyed his bobber: “Papa, do you know how to eat an elephant?”

“No,” I said. “How do you eat an elephant?”

“Bite by bite.” His brother nodded in agreement.

I’m not very good at eating elephants, and most days I don’t feel very good at fathering, but I’m learning that you don’t have to be heroic to accomplish big things. You just have to show up every day, and do what work you can with contentment and humility. Parenting often feels like trying to eat an elephant, but the good news is that you only have to do it one bite at a time.

I can only do so much. You can only do so much. The mercy and the grace of it is that all we can do is all our children need.

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Your child the wild river

A stubborn child can be hard on a parent. We’re trying to keep them alive, and it’s like they’re working against us. It’s the stubborn child who keeps climbing onto the roof even though you’ve warned him about broken necks. It’s the stubborn child who tries to tame the stray cat even after you’ve explained to him that rabies is incurable. It’s the stubborn child who won’t keep his mouth shut around the impossibly cruel bully at school.

And all you want to do is help your stubborn child, if only he would listen. But of course he won’t. Sometimes it feels like all your warning words only serve to increase his interest in the forbidden fruit.

Every child is like a river, and his will is the river’s depth. The thing about a deep-running river is that it runs fast. It’s a matter of hydraulics and velocity and other words I don’t completely understand, any more than I understand why so many of my children came out stubborn.

And the thing about that fast-running river is you’d best not try to dam it. Because maybe you actually could, but then you wouldn’t have a river anymore. You’d have something else. Something it wasn’t meant to be.

If you don’t want to bottle up the river that is your child, all you really have to work with are the banks. It’s the patient, hard work of shoring up those banks that is your only hope of directing your child the river along a path that doesn’t smash through every town in sight before careening off a cliff. You want those banks strong enough to keep the river flowing toward the destination that only it knows. Which means you have to accept that the destination isn’t yours to decide.

A postcard of the Niagara Falls Gorge

We’ve all seen parents who can’t abide this lack of control. They craft retaining walls, hard twists and turns, dam after dam, trying to direct their rivers to the larger river they believe it should belong to, or to the ocean that is their dream. Many of those rivers comply, but their spirits are broken. Other rivers smash every restraint in sight in an effort to survive. To keep being a river. The broken river and the untamed river both lead to a kind of heartbreak, I think.

I wish I had some applicable piece of parenting advice, but I’m afraid I have none, other than to ask yourself whether you’re building dams or banks. Whether you’re helping your child develop the depth of will she’ll need to leave you a strong-running force in this world, or a dissipated and shallow swamp. I don’t suppose any of us are river engineers, or that we’ll get all the little decisions that shape a river right. I only know that as a father, my job isn’t to direct these rivers in my care to a final destination. It’s to send them off strong, purposeful, and unbroken. Not into safety or predictability, but into life.

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It goes without saying

One of my children used to own a little digital device. Afflicted with the double-liability of being not only a child but a boy child, he often handled this device with reckless abandon. We developed our own litany around this device. He would tuck it between his chin and chest to carry it because his hands were full, and I would remind him how much the device had cost. He would leave it lying on the floor, and I would remind him that its screen had not been designed to resist the heels of his older brothers. After every exchange he would make a surprised noise, as if this were the first time he was hearing about the eggshell quality of digital screens. It was like living with an Alzheimer’s patient who is continually surprised to learn that he is in possession of a kitten.

And so the inevitable happened, as inevitable things tend to do. I didn’t hear about it from the boy. Instead my wife came to me and relayed the bad (but gratifying) news. He had indeed been carrying it carelessly, and it had indeed dropped, and lo and behold, the screen had cracked, just as his sage father had foretold. I was hearing it from her, she explained, because he was afraid to tell me.

I was only just getting into a practice run of my sermon when she held up her hand. “I told him he has to be a man and own up to it,” she said. “Your job is to not be a jerk when he does.”

Well then.

I allowed that she had a point. I can get overzealous when it comes to helping my children see all the ways that greater attention to my strictures and advice can spare them (and more importantly, me) many of life’s hardships. And besides, the little tyke was already suffering, what with his Angry Birds now indistinguishable from their arch enemies the Bad Piggies. I resolved to hold my tongue.

A few days later the boy screwed his courage to the sticking post and came to me, eyes downcast, to confess his error. Even with my wife’s forewarning still stinging my pride, I felt a sermon welling up within. But I restrained it, and instead thanked him for coming to tell me.

I couldn’t resist pointing out, however, that I’d warned him. He nodded. This was the part he’d been expecting. Ah well. I never said I was perfect.

And as if God himself wanted to illustrate this point, the very next day I was standing beside this particular child when I took out my far more expensive device using just two fingers, because my hands were otherwise engaged. It tumbled from my fingertips and struck the concrete in a manner that is gravely warned against in the owner’s manual. The resulting crackreverberated between us, the boy and me.

And this son of mine, bless him, didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. Which is how I learned from an 8 year-old that most of our criticisms are unnecessary.

It’s not the first lesson I’ve learned from my children, nor the last. Sometimes I think maybe I’ve had this fathering thing all backwards. That the purpose isn’t so much for them to learn from me, as for me to learn from them. Or maybe that’s just how it goes for we less than perfect men.