We sit around the table, and we’ve just finished talking about what we appreciate about one another, and now we get to that hardest of hard questions, because this is our Weekly Reset: Did you hurt anyone this week?
I file through my days, tripping over all the ways I raised my voice, all the times I spoke my annoyance in the hearing of a little boy who had trouble staying in bed, the fight I picked with my husband just to get to the bottom line that said he’s not doing enough.
Yes. I have hurt people.
Will the answer ever be anything but yes? We are all in relationship, and relationship feels challenging when we’re such different people and we’re together all the time and we believe we know who everyone should be.
Sometimes, there are places I’d rather be than beneath the roof of imperfect love.
We fail to love well and we hurt unintentionally and we hold those expectations like they offer the reason to love, but it doesn’t matter how many failures we log in a week. What matters is what we do next.
Do we care enough to repair?
Their daddy goes first, apologizing for something the 7-year-old reminds him about, some words he didn’t think through before he loosed them in frustration.
I look out the window, into the backyard at that tree we planted nearly three years ago when their baby sister died. We tore into rocky earth to dig out a hole large enough so those roots could form strong and reach deep, and we packed the choicest dirt around it so that tree would stand secure. This repairing time does the same kind of work in the lives of our children.
This being available for our children, passing over jobs so we can all sit down to dinner together and talk through our Weekly Reset, protecting those dreams flapping our hearts so our children learn the precious magnificence of struggle and pursuit–these are the holes we dig.
Our forgiveness and acceptance and repair form the dirt we pack around their roots.
We can dig a foundation that’s shallow and already full of who we expect them to be, and we can forget to connect them to the ground of unconditional love with our repair, or we can dig them a foundation that is deep and wide and free, and we can pack that repair dirt so they stand tall when the winds blow and the storms rage and the enemies come prowling.
We are caring for one another, rebuilding that home of belonging, showing our children we love that they are not bound by our imperfect parenting but wide-open free to be imperfect, too. It’s not easy to do this work of repair, because it feels different, or we’re not so great at admitting our mistakes, or we fall back into our old thought patterns—that they are children and we are the adults, so why should we apologize for the words we say when they’ve gotten out of bed for the 300th time, or why should we apologize for the tone of voice we used when they interrupted their brother for the eighth time so he had to start all over again on all those places we’ve already heard, or why should we apologize for the toy-takeaway that surprised them into tears when they flat-out ignored our cleanup song.
We can care enough to repair or we can turn our backs and let that connection-tear grow every time we fail again, because we will.
Apology is like a bandage on the cut of disconnection, but back-turning is like a cut that festers without heal. We can see it in our own lives, in the ways others have hurt us, in the places we never spoke repair.
Maybe we’ll find it tough the first time or the second time or the fiftieth time we do our Weekly Reset, because it’s not easy for us to admit, in front of our children, that we shouldn’t have made their daddy feel so small when he didn’t unload the dishwasher and we had to do the unloading and the loading, and this is not the deal we made way back when; that we shouldn’t have told our son to shut his mouth when he interrupted our instruction so he could tell us why he didn’t want to do it that way before we’d even finished explaining our way; that we shouldn’t have scared the 3-year-old back into bed by turning off all the lights that one night.
The words, “I’m sorry,” are like a healing balm to a child soul.
And maybe it doesn’t matter as much right now, when the hurts are smaller and they can barely remember what they did yesterday and they bounce back from injury like that fall didn’t even hurt them, but one day it will matter, and something this hard and serious and sacred takes practice. So we practice while they’re young, and we believe this caring will make a difference.
There is a gift in the imperfection. Because it’s the new creation that counts. And if we are already there, or we act like we are, our children never get to see the beauty of progress, the beauty of a made-new creation, the beauty that is becoming.
“Parenting is about making a journey with our children toward wholeheartedness, and it’s about learning and growing alongside them…” says Brené Brown (Gifts of Imperfect Parenting). “…the most profound moments in our parenting that shape who they are and who we are is our vulnerability.”
May we always show our children vulnerability and choose the care of repair.
This is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 4: We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In All People. Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of the Family on Purpose series will release May 4.
