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.
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.