Loving, not using, my children

So, Matt Walsh (who occasionally drives me a little bonkers when he gets on his oh-so-young high horse, wrote something very much worth reading here.

I can only whole-heartedly agree.

Expecting your kids (or spouse, or anyone else) to make you happy is USING them. It’s treating them as means to an end instead of people who are valuable and worthy in and of themselves, and it is, on a fundamental level, pretty screwed up.

During the worst period in my life, a ridiculously wise friend told me, kind of bluntly, to shape up and remember that my kids don’t exist for my sake or my husband’s sake or for anything but their OWN sake. You know how some pieces of advice hit you like a splash of cold water and then stick with you for years? This was one of those Holy-Spirit inspired bits of admonition (Thank you, dear Jenny).

I have the privilege of helping these people I love as they find their own purpose and grow into themselves. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even when they drive me nuts or when caring for them limits my opportunities and superficial freedoms. Parenting isn’t easy. LOVE isn’t easy. And none of it is about me, except inasmuch as the choices I make shape and form me. Do I want to be loving? Then I have to love. I can’t become loving by demanding that others convince me to love them. Do I want to be unselfish? I can’t get there by, as Matt says, demanding my kids make me unselfish. I can only get there by choosing to rejoice in other people’s victories and mourn other people’s griefs.

My world, tethered to the needs and limitations of these small people, isn’t itself small. Each of them are a world to explore, and so my life spans worlds. What is small is to be so painfully wrapped up in your own world of needs, wants, and passive desire that even other people become merely bit players in the stage of your own inward drama.

I’ll go one further- my children’s role on this earth is not to validate my parenting practices, not to affirm my beliefs, not to become who I think they ought to be. It’s possible that one, or all, of them may grow up and hurt or disappoint me in different ways. I may fail in love or wisdom and hurt or disappoint them. They will still have value, if that happens, and I hope I will not be the only one to see them and know that they are still glorious and precious worlds of possibility, worthy of love and dignity.