Patience and faith are not necessarily in my wheelhouse, yet here we are, a year and a half into a pandemic and the parent of two teenagers, plus one just barely out of both his teens and our house. We could always use a lot of things, but perhaps patience and faith most of all.
Parenting will always benefit from a surplus of patience, and when the kids were wee ones, it was a special kind of patience. As an infant cried to be fed, a toddler cried for attention, and an 8-year-old cried because homework is hell, I found myself the begging the universe for even a few more ounces of patience... patience with the kids' individual needs, which were always immediate and always in conflict with each other, and patience with myself, because it was easy to feel constantly overwhelmed and insufficient in those early years when I couldn't imagine a future that didn't involve wailing children.
These days there's a significant decrease in the wailing, though not a complete disappearance because, teenagers. Hormones and anxiety and depression and isolation have all been hallmarks of the last year, and all we could do was try to summon up even more patience as a return to anything even resembling our old, familiar way of life couldn't be pinned on a specific calendar date. Patience was in short supply worldwide, yet we tried to cultivate it as much as possible.
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| Nature showing patience and faith in its every move... |
Faith, however, is a word with which I have a tricky relationship. Back when I was last a practicing Catholic in my own adolescence, I fought to be able to take this non-saint's-name-of-a-word as my Confirmation Name, just a few years before I finally came to the conclusion that religion, even in the buffet sense of 'take what you like, leave the rest behind', just wasn't my bag. A word that had been so meaningful to me was transformed to a word that I found no place for in my life anymore. And yet, these days, I'm finding a renewed sense of attachment to the word that has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with relationships.
Right now, as I watch my kids finding themselves and their individual paths I'm realizing that all I can do is have faith. Faith in them. Faith in their hearts and their convictions, and faith in the relationships that we have with each of them. Oh boy, this faith may be more challenging, but definitely more rewarding, than anything I ever experienced with organized religion.
Simply put, I have to have patience with the day-to-day world of parenting adolescents, and I can find that strength in my faith that these kids are becoming who they were meant to be.
You nailed it. This idea of faith is so complex. Erik Erikson wrote so eloquently about this idea of becoming. He wrote that the role of the parent is to “be able to represent to the child a deep, an almost somatic conviction that there is meaning to what they are doing.” Your young ones are so lucky to have a mom who gets this viscerally. Carry on Mama Bear!
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