Biting Our Tongues

a Mother’s Day sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor

May 13, 2001

Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

My reading is a poem from Judith Viorst’s collection of poetry, Suddenly Sixty,” Just a Few Words of Advice, Just a Few Helpful Hints.”

So your son has announced that he’s going to marry that woman,

You know he’ll be making the biggest mistake of his life.

For a daughter-in-law even Lady Macbeth deserves better.

And even a Henry the Eighth should be spared such a wife

So before you begin to arrange the rehearsal dinner

From cocktails to capons to chocolate-covered mints,

You intend (without being critical) to (diplomatically) offer him

Just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So your daughter is leaving a job with an excellent future.

She’s pulling up roots and she’s moving out West to create,

Unencumbered by furniture, money, or health insurance.

This is surely a game plan any sane person would hate.

So before she trades in her office and East Side apartment

For wind chimes, a futon, and maybe some cactus prints,

You intend (without seeming skeptical) to (quite respectfully) offer her

just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So the parents of your new grandchild are spoiling him rotten.

He’s never heard “no” or “say please” or “don’t do that again.”

It looks like he’s worn the same shirt from last May through November.

It looks like he’s going to breast-feed until he is ten.

So before his mother and father are too late to stop him

From growing up to be someone who’ll make the world wince,

You intend (without sounding horrified) to (very tactfully) offer them

Just a few words of advice, just a few helpful hints.

So our daughter ands sons and their spouses are no longer children

They reach their decisions without ever calling us first.

They often unreasonably tend to look on the bright side.

While we’re always asking ourselves, What if worse comes to worst?

So before they do something too fatal we will rush in with

Anything from a big hug to a check to a blintz,
In addition to which we’ll continue to (oh-so-unintrusively) offer them

Just a few words of advice,…just a few helpful hints.

[For the following sermon, I am indebted to Judith Viorst’s book, Imperfect Control, especially the marvelous chapter, Permanent Parenthood.]

I suspect many of you have been in the shoes of such parents.

Certainly we all have known the overzealous control of our own

While we may have wanted on many an occasion to fire our own parents,

With our grown kids, should we be biting our tongues, thus muting those few helpful hints?

I was talking with one member of the church who told me that she was especially looking forward to this service. She also told me that she asked her two adolescent boys to accompany her as a Mother’s Day present. They weren’t thrilled with the idea—until they heard the topic. Janine, Jim, and David, I especially welcome you all today!

Shortly after arriving in Woodinville, Jan Radoslovich gave me a reading. I can’t find it, and I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was about how children as they grow into adolescents metamorphose from dogs into cats. Whereas children love to be companioned, play, get into your face, run around, and generally have a fun time, somehow they gradually become less interested in all those things. They shed their inveterately happy, energetic selves. It’s as if the first decade of parenting you have a puppy to take care of and who constantly expresses love for you, and then somewhere in the second decade of parenting, the darling little creature becomes emotionally aloof, regularly retreats to one’s bedroom or friends, no longer likes being hugged or kissed goodnight, and wants full control over when and how to be interacted with by the parents. I am curious, how many of you have known this canine to feline shift.

By the third decade of parenting, the darling children certainly don’t want to be treated as darling children. Jean Davies Okimoto and Phyllis Jackson Stegall, in their book Boomerang Kids, writes, “Respecting your adult children as adults, as separate individual human beings who are entitled to make decisions on how they will live their lives, is the single most important task to master if you are to move out of old parent-child interactions… It’s a job so difficult,” they add, “that many parents never quite get there.”

Parenting is great fodder for spiritual growth. Countless situations occur that test patience, boundaries, empathy, and the ability to balance setting limits with respecting their autonomy, and over time loosening one over the other. It is completely natural to feel, a lot of the time, like a novice. It doesn’t surprise me when a parent expresses grave concern about whether they are being too lenient on their growing children and then two minutes later express a similar concern they are being too strict.

Parenting, and especially motherhood, is one of the greatest spiritual tasks. Initially, a child is entirely dependent upon the parent for its physical and emotional needs. Then the parent must deal with letting go of this young life to find his or her own path. For many women and men, parenting gives them a sense of joy and meaning as well as a role which offers a sense of purpose. Parents must eventually face difficult questions: now that my children don’t need my mothering other than friendly support, what is the meaning and purpose of my life? Now that the beautiful babies for whom my entire existence nurtured and to which I fully devoted myself, and now these children are leaving the nest, what has my life come to?

My father once shared during a father’s day service in Bakersfield that the most painful moment in his life was on the day he took me, his oldest of two boys, to college. While he was delighted I was beginning an exciting chapter of my life, he and my mother drove home alone, in tears, knowing that life would never be the same. Their baby had grown up. My father says he can’t understand parents who talk about how much they look forward to when their children are old enough to leave home. For my father, my brother and I were, and still are, his pride and joy. Yet he has to deal with our choices to not spend as much time on our vacations with he and my mom as they might like, to often miss Thanksgiving or Christmas with them, and to have tense moments when their deep desire for familial connection gets thwarted by our longings to turn away and live our own lives.

My adolescent years were pretty boring. I was a teacher’s pet, virtually a mama’s boy. Before going away to college, the hardest day for my father, the humanist intellectual he is, was during my junior high years when I came home from a Christian revival service and told him that I had devoted my life to Jesus Christ and accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, without really knowing what that meant. Maybe that’s why, when in ninth grade, with the assignment to do a critical reading of any book and standing in my father’s library, he gave me Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. My rebellion came subtly with the choices to spend summers during college away from home, to major in religion when I had outstanding skills in math, and then to travel to India a few months after I graduated from college. I remember my parents wanting to be supportive but not knowing how to respond to these life choices.

It was during college, that I became irritated with my parents. I didn’t want to spend time with them. So I limited my time in Bakersfield, and when I was there, I went out with friends. At one point, I started feeling like my parents weaknesses had doomed me for life. I even harbored anger that my parents had not given me more structure. Anything I mentioned on the subject were like daggers, as they certainly expressed great dismay that they weren’t all they feel they should and could have been.

I had taken my cue from books I read. So many self-help books today encourage us to see how our parents have limited us. While such speculation is easy to do on one’s own, it may be out of touch with reality. And it can be quite disturbing that our children, when old enough have the same access to those books. Looking at this from the other perspective calls these books into question. But to make matters worse, there is an assumption that good parenting breeds progeny who are successful in the world. While good parenting improves the odds of a child doing well, there are no guarantees. Likewise, some great people have emerged from poor parenting. But what I think we all need to remember, whether we are thinking of our parents or our children, is that parenting is not easy and that no matter our familial connections, we need to look first and foremost to our own selves for responsibility. And further, parents are in a no win situation—no matter what they do, the children by their very nature of needing to test their environment, must resist their parents to discover their own selves and autonomy. It is completely natural for children to want to fire their parents, if not outright hold them in contempt. Regardless whether parents are good or not so good, adolescents will find plenty of reasons to be upset with them.

While guilt is a burden parents may lay on their children, it is also often a burden that parents often put on themselves, especially when grown children are having difficulties. Another Judith Viorst poem:

Quality time and vitamin C and a book before bedtime at night,

I did everything right

Then why, when I reach out to touch him, does he hold me at bay?

Something inside of me dies

When I look in my son’s shuttered eyes,

So far from here. So very far away.

Tricking and treating and soccer games and second grade’s Halloween show,

I was sure to go.

And yet he is stumbling through jungles of bitterest black.

Lost in the fog that he buys.

Wearing a rebel’s disguise.

Unwilling, or unable, to come back.

I never claimed to be the perfect mother.

I made mistakes. Well, everybody did.

But God, I was so glad to be his mother.

And God, oh God, oh God, I loved this kid.

I love this kid.

Patience and laughter and trips to the beach and tickles and song,

Did I do something wrong?

Am I kidding myself? Am I simply rewriting the poem?

Telling myself a few lies,

While somewhere a frightened child cries,

And I wait, and I hope, and I pray that he’ll find his way home.

If only there were foolproof recipes that guarantees a happy, healthy child. While we may understand in theory that parents aren’t the sole creators of children, and we may understand in theory that the nature they were born with, and that tempting perilous world outside their door, have shaped them too. But it is difficult to believe this when something goes awry in one’s own family. In her book, Imperfect Control, Judith Viorst writes,

When our children confront us with their complaints about our past behavior, we must recognize that this is how they experienced it, that whether or not what they’re talking about is objectively true, it is true for them. We can listen sympathetically, non-defensively. We can tell them that we’re sorry they’re in pain. We can try to explain what was going on in our lives at the time. And we certainly can apologize where it’s appropriate. But what we certainly shouldn’t do is allow our adult children to completely shift the blame from their shoulders to ours, allow them to make us responsible for the sorrows and the troubles they’re going through now.

For whether or not we blame ourselves (or our children blame us) for the troubles they are in, they must begin to see these troubles as theirs—their divorce, their business disaster, their drug problem. They—and we—also need to know that we’re being loveing, caring, respectful parents when we allow them to solves these problems themselves, instead of—as a friend puts it—“always needing to rush right in with the mop and the bucket.” But what if they don’t solve their problems? And what if they can’t solve their problems? And what if they ask for our help in solving their problems?

We cannot play God in our children’s lives. We cannot be in charge of their lives. But we can make an effort to be in charge of our own. Parents may always be intensely and lovingly invested in your children, but you can also have aspects of your life which they are not a part. Whether it be work, play, social concerns, or fulfilling non-motherhood relationships, this turning from them to something else, “something they couldn’t touch or be a part of” is, says Judith Viorst quoting novelist Mary Gordon, “the ‘tremendous mercy’ of autonomy.” She goes on to say that the more a mother achieves autonomy, the better she is able to grant it to her children, though that’s got to be much easier when we’re talking about an uncongenial lifestyle rather than drugs and crimes and cults and other threats to their bodies and minds.

I close with her words, “Parenthood is a double bind. It requires us, at the same time, to live with our fierce and undiminished love for our children, while making peace with the limits of what we can and can’t and shouldn’t try to do for them, while making peace with the limits of our control.”

Happy Mother’s Day!

Blessed be. Amen.