Parenting is balance. It's a constant high-wire act with repeated recalibrations and frequent falls. Lean too far to the right, fall. Get back on, favor the left, fall. Climb up one more time, focus on the center, wobble left, move right, tip-toe forward and then back again, only to crash towards impending doom once again. There's no way to get off the wire, either, no matter how many times you fall; each new day calls you to get back and wobble towards the next day again.
On a bike ride with a good friend and fellow aspiring father, I spoke about that balance and struggle for me. He asked for examples. I had plenty. Too stern, too demanding, and my children fall tear-ridden into a perception of a hard to please father. Too loose and playful, and we're one fart joke away from total anarchy. Or the balance between making Bible reading for them intriguing and required, their faith both a family habit and their own. Or giving them the freedom to play and explore and create and imagine on their own absent my influence without abandoning them completely and losing out on the precious few hours of their lives when they are still interested in spending time with me. I'm getting wobbly just writing about it.
Impossible? It certainly feels that way. But I'm fortunate to have role models in my life who have made it seem easy or downright pedestrian. It's ironic that the woman whose genetics gave me my intense motion sickness would be my model for the balance I strive for. But when I look back over 37 years of being a son, I see the balance I seek in all that my mother has done for me.
What does that balance look like?
That balance is someone who spoke of my value in one breath and how I can or should or would be better in the next with the same love behind each statement. It's a mother who wouldn't let me be limited by how I felt or what I thought was good enough, who never let my peers be the standard of excellence, who instead spoke value into who I was (and am) and then said go be that good, put in that kind of effort, don't settle for the half effort you're trying to get away with now.
It's the kind of balance that made my mother committed to her job and proud of her work without ever being too busy or too tired or too distracted by it to be a mother.
It's the balance of caring so much to worry constantly but speaking of the worry sparingly.
My mother showed that balance by loving and being invested in what I did without ever trying to live through me, without being defined by my success or failure. She showed up and cared and served.
That balance means working hard to clean the house but still using the home to play wiffle ball and ping pong and UNO. It's demanding that your kids care about a clean house too, that they not be too helpless or absent-minded to pick up after themselves and put away some dishes, and it's using the freedom of that order to play.
The balance was there in my childhood, and it's there in my adulthood as well, as she's given me the independence to live and explore and do as I best saw fit, and she's been there to talk on the phone once a week, 8:30 pm on Sunday nights, to offer commentary and advice and stories and a listening ear. It's the magic of influencing without demanding, of effort without opinion, of being there when needed, of that being statement enough, that and a million acts of love that include saying yes many times and no some times but always at a balance, a settling balance, that has leveled even the choppiest of waters in my life.
To be emboldened by the trust and confidence of a loving mother and comforted by her presence at the same time is that art of the balance, and it's certainly something that no 10 or 16 or 21 or probably even 25 year old can readily grasp. At least I couldn't. I took it for granted as logical and common. Of course that's what happens, right? With two children of my own, challenging my concept of time as they speed through life in an uncontrollable assault on my fictitious grip on the days of their upbringing, I realize how hard it was and is. I get up each day and wiggle right, and wobble left, and rub the scars from yesterday's falls as I try to get my footing. And on days like this, I realize how much steadier my balancing act is because of the stability of my mother.
Happy Mother's Day.
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