Training Baby Thugs

I was working in the living room when I heard a crash and then “Oh Findley, I cannot believe you did this, why did you grab my cup!” Her voice rose into a shriek.

I ran to the kitchen and there it was. A very frustrated girl, a surprised baby who had no idea what he had done and a very big mess of hot chocolate.

“No, stop talking” I said urgently to my daughter, “but MOOM, he dumped my hot chocolate!”

I laughed, “sweetheart just stop and get completely in control of yourself so you can think logically “.

“Why did he do it Mom, I just turned my back for a minute”.

“Honey, he is a baby. He has no idea that it’s naughty to reach as high as he can tiptoe, put his fingers over the cup he saw you drink from and pull it down. Look I will help you clean it up and you can make another cup”.

We grabbed a roll of shop towels and in short order the huge splash of hot chocolate was cleaned up. As we sopped and mopped and wiped we talked.

“This was so good for you that it happened, it is good training for someday when you will be a wife and a mother. Because you will need to learn to control your tongue right in the moment just like I had to learn it.”

“But Mom, it’s so hard” she looked pleadingly at me, a laugh pulling at the corners of her mouth.

I burst into laughter. For one, it was funny, and for two, teaching moments don’t soak in as well with frustration, irritation, and sternness. Laugher does a far better job at lowering defenses, smoothing irritations, and opening the pores of a child’s heart. Of course laughter isn’t always appropriate, but it could be appropriate far more than it is.

Now she is laughing with me as we clean together. Her heart is wide open, and I know this chat will bring fruit. My own heart is full of longing to hand down the fruits growing on my tree, but it’s not possible. Fruit is not earned or grown with hard work. It is not passed down to generations, or saved and kept with bragging rights. Nor is it meant to be saved for the future.

I remember well the day that I first realized how utterly helpless I was to stop walking down the path I was on, to go back, and walk a different path. I was stuck in an awful pattern of herding my children with threats, yelling, and frustration being the number one emotion they saw. I was not nurturing them or raising them by leading.

I called it “mistakes”.

“I made so many mistakes today” I told my husband wearily. “I don’t know why I can’t get control of my voice”. I asked God for help, but I had no faith he actually would.

““The human spirit can endure a sick body, but who can bear a crushed spirit?”
‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭18:14‬ ‭
”

— God

But then I realized, finally, it was not a mistake. It was a sin. Calling it sin was integral to embracing the truth. So I did. “Let me see this sin the way you see it,” I told him. And then I waited.

When he showed me, I was appalled. I was crushing my children. They were being traumatized and felt like they could never be enough for me. I didn’t even have faith I could win this battle but I sure was going to try.

I decided to pretend I had company all the time, because I could control my tongue in front of people. I knew it was a crutch…a bandaid even, but I was determined to break the habit. For weeks I pretended I had company, and after several weeks I realized controlling my tongue was much easier.

I asked God to poke me before I raise my voice. He delivered. I cannot tell you how many times my mouth opened and I shouted “AJ”… ugh, poke! “..I LOVE YOU SO MUCH” I finished while whispering a heartfelt grateful prayer.

I started praying for compassion for my children, and my weak faith grew a little bit when compassion flooded through me rescuing me and them from a tongue lashing.

I practiced and practiced until tempering my tone was instinctual, the louder the crash, the quieter I talked. I was completely done with the stress and strife my tongue was bringing into our home, and as I grew, God revealed more to me.

Is it actually possible that Gods principles could work in parenting, now, year 2010? And if so, how does one go about doing such a thing? I asked him, this time expecting an answer. “I’m not going away, I want to know” I told God as I hung on tenaciously to his sleeve. “I want to win so my children can win.” I was as stubborn as a little donkey as I looked for the truth.

He started to show me.

“And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.”

‭‭Deuteronomy‬ ‭6:6-7‬

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.”

‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭6:4‬ ‭

“Don’t fail to discipline your children. The rod of punishment won’t kill them. Physical discipline may well save them from death.”

‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭23:13-14‬ ‭

“To discipline a child produces wisdom, but a mother is disgraced by an undisciplined child. When the wicked are in authority, sin flourishes, but the godly will live to see their downfall. Discipline your children, and they will give you peace of mind and will make your heart glad. When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild. But whoever obeys the law is joyful.”

‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭29:15-18‬ ‭

“Fathers, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged.”

‭‭Colossians‬ ‭3:21‬ ‭

When our babies are tiny, we aren’t prepared for the rigors of raising a person. We hold this little vegetable (as a friend of mine says) and they are wholly dependent on us for everything. Slowly, understanding starts to grow. Needs are expressed and filled. Mama flounders when another child enters the mix and she no longer reaches all the way around. Baby becomes smarter and starts to push mamas buttons because Mama is not giving him as much attention as before. Mama starts getting frustrated and raises her voice. Baby is startled and obeys. Next time Mama raises her voice without getting up to handle the situation, baby realizes it’s just a trick.

Children are rarely tricked.

Children are whip smart without the guile most of us learn from navigating a world full of guile.

As Mama to seven, I believe in this process. The crushing is a good thing. To be stretched beyond your ability creates brand new muscles and strength in places and ways you can’t begin to imagine now.

It teaches you what is actually important, how to prioritize, what’s actually important, what really needs to happen.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is pretend you don’t see the toddler scribbling on the wall with a marker.

I know that just blew your mind. But listen. You are breastfeeding in your rocking chair. Your baby has been on a nursing strike, and finally she is eating. You look up and that’s the moment your little CIA agent toddler has found a marker and is creating a masterpiece.

You have three choices.

Yell….. that brilliant little toddler knows you aren’t going to get up, and he will go right on with his little Bob Ross impersonation. As your voice urgently screams at him, his little ears hear you as if from a long distance, and what he is thinking is …. “let’s put a happy little sky right here, just like that”.

Get up and go handle it calmly and efficiently….. now your baby is screaming and returning to her nursing strike.

Ignore the happy little sky and the mini thug…… the only fallout is you will have to clean that wall. You have not hardened his heart, you have not yelled, your baby nursed well, and peace still reigns supreme in your home.

Of course if this actually happened, you would want to schedule an intervention of training. Leave a marker laying around, sit close by and appear distracted. When your precious little pudding picks that marker up, you get up and immediately teach and train.

The Lord allowed this truth to be cemented in my mind when I was still a very young mother. A friend told me how important family dinner, together is, but the problem, her husband was notoriously late. Always, every day he was late. She never learned from it. She continued to have dinner ready at six o’clock every day, and forced her ravenous, hangry children to wait until her husband came home. She admitted by the time they would eat, she was exhausted and bitter, her children were starving and angry, and her husband was short tempered because everyone was mad when he came home.

Sometimes the right thing to do, does not look as noble as the impressive thing.

Its an upside down world of priorities and what is truth.

The truth is this. Your children are born not knowing anything. You know all the things. You have roughly 14 years to teach them all the things. Everything has to be taught, verbalized, and trained into them.

You will dream of going on a family vacation and not having to tell anyone to put their sandals on, or not lick the tv, please don’t put your hand up my skirt. (not my husband either, that was a toddler)

Talking about skirts. I had an incident at the chiropractor. As I stood talking to my cousins wife who I see rarely but always enjoy, I was bouncing my baby, and my toddler was behind me, I was unaware of what he was doing until I felt a cold draft directly on my bum. Absentmindedly I reached back and was startled to discover he had carefully rolled my skirt in the back all the way up to my waist. I had on thin tights that hid nothing. There I was with my bum hanging out for all to see.

Just out there. All the way out there.

We didn’t move away from this house, nor did I switch chiropractors, which is something I’ve congratulated myself on.

The popular saying is if you don’t laugh, you will cry.

But Moms know better.

If you don’t laugh, you will die.

Gluten Free Cake

“Babe”, my husband looked up at me from the bed where he was curled up with his iPad and a low-grade fever.

I paused looking for my birthday chocolate to give him my full attention. “Shall I buy first-class tickets this time?”

I snorted “No, we are peasants, sit us with the peasants”.

“But I have always wanted to fly first class,” he said.

“Then buy first-class, that would be fun” I laughed.

“It’s double the money!”

I gasped! “We are peasants, for $200 we can sit with the peasants!”

“That’s what I was thinking” he gulped.

It was only a year ago that we were surviving the last dredges of a completely crashed economy. Milk prices were so low that farmers were not even coming out even. We had spent months working at home, doing jobs that allowed us to pay our employees, but not always ourselves. I didn’t buy the children summer clothes at the Goodwill. I couldn’t. There was no money for such frivolities. The children cut off sleeves and pant legs and were happy. I was amazed when a random person at a campground lugged two trash bags full of summer clothes to my camper. Plenty for the three girls to fill in a few holes in their wardrobe. “God, why do I even bother to worry ahead of time,” I told him later.

We didn’t worry or stress. We just lived, knowing God had every single day in the palm of his hand.

Always there was enough.

Always.

Sometimes there was even a little leftover. But not often. Not often enough to get frisky.

Finally, work started rolling in. And we went to work. The whole crew dug into the harness and pulled. We were gone for months at a time. The men got fresh blisters, calluses, and thick muscles from heaving steel. We missed social engagements and spent hundreds of hours on the road traveling. We cooked massive loads of food for the hungry, and in the evening threw back shots of whiskey to try to warm up again after freezing on top of a roof in 20-degree weather. Alternately the heat was brutal, and water ran through the workers like a sieve.

Eventually, we come home. And it feels so good!

But invariably the comments start.
”You guys must have so much money”.

“You must be raking in the dough right now”.

Years ago when the world was young and we still thought money had spiritual value, the Lord took all our money away. For years he allowed us to fall short every month. We were forced to prioritize and scrimp and scratch and save and eat rice and beans, so much rice and beans. For a treat, we sometimes had venison that someone gave us.

But slowly something magical started to happen as we pressed into the battle. We lost our appreciation for money, while also gaining fresh respect for it.

The two are not mutually exclusive. We can build our barns, fatten our bank accounts, buy property, hoard and scavenge and grasp for every dime we have. But it’s never truly safe. Moth and rust, robbers and cheaters are always standing by to take it away. Gripping money tightly with your hand closed will create a miserable life of counting, recounting, and stress.

The very same thing happens for a frivolous lifestyle without respect for hard work and the laws of income versus outgo.

I’ve always been fascinated with the story of misers.

Daniel Dancer came from a family of skinflints, but he outdid all of them. He refused to bathe or wash his clothes lest he be forced to spend money on soap. He once found a sheep that was partially decomposed. His sister busily transformed that old dead sheep into meat pies for the next two weeks.

“A very different type of stinginess qualifies Wellington R. Burt for our list. This timber baron from Saginaw, Mich., was one of the richest men in America at the turn of the last century. He lived well enough, though not ostentatiously, and was a generous philanthropist in Michigan. Yet what he's most remembered for is his tight-fistedness toward his own family. After his death in 1919, his will was found to contain smaller annual payments to his children and grandchildren than to his domestic servants. A "spite clause" specified that none of Burt's descendants could receive the bulk of his fortune until 21 years after the death of his last grandchild. The outraged offspring appealed but to no avail. The condition was finally fulfilled in 2010. Just last year, more than $100 million was distributed between 12 of Burt's great-, great-great-, and great-great-great-grandchildren.” This story is especially fascinating. What caused him to do such a thing? I cannot see many reasons for this, even if his children and grandchildren were spoiled.

Yossele the Holy Miser is one of the great stories of Jewish folklore, and it does seemingly have a historical basis. Yossele lived in Kraków, Poland in the 1600s and was famous as the richest and stingiest man in the city's Jewish community. The people resented his hoarding and when he died they delayed his burial and threw him in a pauper's grave. But then all the charitable funds in the community mysteriously dried up, and it turned out that Yossele had been anonymously supporting the poor villagers, never allowing his involvement to be known. So be careful before you judge another's generosity; the purest charity of all is given without thought for reputation.

Several years ago while visiting a little church in Georgia, a little old lady sidled up to me. She didn’t ease into the conversation. She just walked straight forward into the deep waters. This happens to me often. Because of this blog, via my online presence, many people feel as if they know me, but forgetting that I do not yet know them. Still, as an introverted enneagram 5, this is my preferred method of meeting and conversation. If you try to small talk me into the deep waters, I might actually die.

Back to my little lady: She slipped her hand into the crook of my elbow and said earnestly “I cannot bring cakes to fundraisers” her eyes glinted with a tear. “Nobody eats the cakes I bring”. I feel my brows pull together as I involuntarily react to her pain. “Why does no one eat them?” I ask. “Well, you see, it’s like this, I am gluten intolerant and diabetic so I always use spelt flour, and sweeten with apple sauce”. She leans back triumphantly.

“Do people not like spelt flour?” I ask, trying to get on the same wavelength.

“It makes my cakes heavy and not as sweet, and people are spoiled, they like sweet, fluffy cakes.”

“Help me understand,” I say, “Why don’t you just use sugar and flour for when you bake for a function like this?”

She looks shocked and aggrieved. Clearly, I am not getting it. “People don’t eat my cakes, so I have to eat them all myself. If I don’t eat them they will go to waste.”

My head turned one side and then the other like a quizzical dog. “Are you telling me that you use spelt flour and apple sauce because people won’t eat your cakes, but they would eat your cakes if you used sugar and flour, but you don’t because you cannot eat sugar and flour, therefore no one eats your cakes”?

She nodded, gratified that my thick skull finally downloaded her information. I turned abruptly and walked away with my brain juice trickling out my ears. “I ain’t got nuthin” I told my husband in my most Amish-redneck accent. “I can’t help her, the Lord needs to do some groundwork first”.

“Could you not have told her the truth?” My husband asked.

“No” I replied flatly.

He sighed. He understood all too well.

Why am I ending with that story?

Because that kind of mindset springs from two tightly closed fists, and the confidence that God is in heaven, and has very little power all the way down here on earth. It is the attitude of “I must care for myself because no one else will”.

Open your fists people. Let go of your need to control. There is no sweeter friendship than that of a person who lets God do his work, who loves you enough to be honest, and who is confident enough in God’s power in heaven as well as on earth.

He hears you, he listens. Have a relationship with him. He’s a real God with real power and real love.

He has already won.

Everything But the Thing

“Honey, you have to really concentrate on what you are doing, and think about it while you do it so you don’t get distracted,” I implored my 12 yr old.

She looked at me absentmindedly, “I think I could handle waiting on leather working tools until Christmas “ she replied.

I feel a sigh start in my toes and push its way up. My voice rises “Sumyr, what are you doing right now?”

She looks down into her hands at the towel in one hand and the dripping cup in the other. “Oh right” she gasped as she headed towards the bathroom where we are washing dishes while our kitchen is being renovated.

“But Mom” she stops at the door.

“So close…” I laugh to myself. “Yes?”

“If you guys buy me a leather tool set, will I have to supply my own leather?”

I reach for the cup and the dish towel. “Listen to me” I say urgently, “you must get done now, it’s not fair to Lolly for you to get so distracted then she has to do everything”.

In amazement I watch as she bites her lower lip and nods…….completely absent minded.

She didn’t steal it, you know. I have it on good authority her own mother is like this. In fact, this last week I did absolutely everything except the thing I was supposed to do.

The thing I was supposed to do was pack my closet, all the books in our house, our bedroom, and sewing room. I comforted myself with the knowledge that my B would be home to help. For days and days I didn’t do the tasks, piously doing everything except that.

And then B’s uncle died and he headed to the funeral on Tuesday. I still had Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to do it. So when the mailman brought me my patterns that I had ordered from the print shop, I sat down and cut out every single pattern.

I still have Wednesday and Thursday… piously.

Except that when the mailman went on Wednesday he brought me my packet of crisp brown envelopes and right then and there I sat down and put all my new patterns in the envelopes, neatly marking them by maker and name and printing out the picture of the line drawing that correlated with each pattern.

It took most of the day and made me feel very happy.

Except that now it was Thursday and it was down to the wire. Most of the jobs had been started, but were nowhere close to finished.

I felt ashamed of myself, and overwhelmed so I sat down for a big cup of coffee. “Mom, how can I help in the best way for you” my son asked.

I shuddered, “I have no idea, let me drink this coffee and gather my thoughts”.

“Ok Mom” he said kindly, almost concealing his exasperation. I hid my nervous giggle by sipping more coffee at the very very bottom of my ocean behind a bit of seaweed that was fluttering gently back and forth.

“Why am I so overwhelmed?” I asked God. He just looked amused. He really didn’t have to say anything. “The patterns look amazing though” I feel pleased in spite of myself.

As I sip, my children prepare and eat their breakfast and just like that I get it. I raised these children to be hardworking and helpful. At my disposal I have the equivalent of three adults that are prepared to roll up their sleeves and make dust fly! And I realize I’m in the habit of being overwhelmed. I’m not actually overwhelmed.

“Ok, I’m ready to work” I shout. “Let’s do this and get done.”

I send Lolly to give Ana a bath so I can love her better, (rule #1 in mothering 101) My man sized son carries a chair to the dumpster. My distracted daughter is brought with me, so she can dream about leather works while being effective for the cause.

A few hours later we are done. Rooms packed up and put in storage in the bedrooms, RV packed and ready, and all the magic marker tattoos washed off of Anas face. #thuglife

B came home from the funeral and we sat down together and ate popcorn and talked for two hours. Which is what happens when you’ve been together for 17 years.

I already dread the next time I will avoid a task.

How do you overcome procrastination and when does it somehow correct itself? I’m 40 now, I expected to have had some modicum of successful adulting down pat by now, but to my disappointment so far it doesn’t seem to just happen.

Perhaps I will think about it later and go back to reading my book I’ve been waiting for months to read.