Every parent wishes good things for their children. If you’re a Christian, likely, you pray for them. It is, of course, a temptation to pray that your child will have friends, be successful in their endeavors and careers, be kept from harm and spared from illness or disaster. Perhaps the most tempting and popular prayer of any parent for their child is keep him safe. It’s a prayer that transcends religion. If there are no atheists in foxholes, I imagine there are equally few atheists with teenagers out past their curfew.
Since my son, Henry, was born I have tried to pray
for the best things I could imagine for him. I’ve resisted the temptation to
pray for election to prom court, football scholarships or perfect dental
hygiene. Instead, I have prayed that he would be loving. I have prayed that he
would be wise, that he would love God more than anything else, and that he
would be brave and compassionate and just. Those are long term prayers, prayers
that I may not see come to fruition for a decade or maybe not at all in my
lifetime. God willing, though, I will see some of the seeds, some of the tender
little shoots springing up from the ground that will grow into the fruits I
have prayed for. But just as the first tiny sprig of a sapling bears no
resemblance whatever to the peach or pear it will one day produce, the raw
materials of character are rarely recognizable as such. So
the question is, will I recognize them? Further, will I have the
perception and the wisdom not to pray with all my strength against those little
seedlings when they appear because they will look nothing like the fruits they
portend, instead they will be small and vulnerable, easily crushed
and terrifying in their fragility. Will they frighten me? And thus will I
uproot them, clip them, throw them aside as weeds?
Henry is developing a stutter. It might be
absolutely nothing. It might disappear in three months, replaced by the
graceful, fluency of Tom Brockaw. Or it might get worse. It might blossom into
an all-consuming handicap that makes him self-conscious and self-hating,
socially isolated, angry and withdrawn, the next Dylan Claybold. The mind of a
parent tends toward the morbid in regard to their children, like Steve Martin,
in Parenthood, imagining his son one day spraying bullets from the top of a
bell tower because he had to wear a retainer at age eight.
At first it was infrequent and cute. He was a very
late talker, not saying more than a few words well past two-years-old. Now
three, he talks a little more, but it’s still mostly set phrases. He tends to
repeat questions rather than answer them. He’s not conversational. And now the
stutter. It used to just be the occasional odd phoneme that tripped him up. The
S sound was a common culprit. But now it’s spreading. His favorite book at the
moment is, Maurice Sendak's, In The Night Kitchen. We read it
multiple times a day, and every time he asks for it, he struggles, eyes closed,
tongue pushing strenuously against his teeth:
Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni,
pause, try again,
Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-night Kitchen, please?
Speaking is starting to look, for him, like a
cardio workout. It doesn’t seem to bother him, thank God. And Peter and I don’t
act as though we notice it at all, but the truth is, sometimes it looks
painful. Sometimes, watching his head bow under this invisible opponent’s
strength, it almost makes me cry. It hardly seems like a malady worthy of a
mother's tears. Worse things could happen to a child, but at the
center of my mother self, the truth is, I don’t want anything, ANYTHING, to
be hard or painful for my son. Perhaps, more importantly, the problem is that
I, like most human beings, have trouble recognizing fruit before it’s fruit.
***
Charlie-something, or maybe it was Charles: the kid
in first grade, with the stutter. Looking back, as an adult, I can recall that
he was actually quite a cute kid, a nice one too, well-behaved and gentle. If
he hadn’t had a stutter he might have been popular, whatever that means in
first grade, basically he might have been chased by a lot of little girls at
recess. Instead, he was the kid with the stutter.
I remember him mostly for the moments when he was
trying his hardest to be unmemorable, to step back out of some spotlight, to
fade into the background. Popcorn reading, is a particularly clear
recollection. The class would sit in a circle, and we'd take turns reading from
a gigantic and unappealing textbook with some stuffy name like New Horizons in Reading. Plenty of the
kids had trouble reading. They labored over unfamiliar words, fumbled over the
odd multi-syllabic riddle, yet they lurched wearily on across the page, heads lowered
and beleaguered like convicts in a chain gang. Then, always last, when there
was no one else to call on, it would be Charlie’s turn.
It’s amazing at what an early age the human
specimen becomes acutely aware of the slightest variances in social dynamics.
We, some twenty first-graders, would all collectively brace ourselves, as
Charlie opened his mouth and froze that way. It looked as though he were
coughing silently, head jerking back and forth gently, eyes pressing closed.
Then it was more like choking. The muscles in his jaw and neck would strain,
standing out like rigging on a ship’s mast caught in a gale, until he finally
spit a word out. We would all let out a breath, as exhausted by the effort as
he was. Charlie would read two, maybe three words, and though none of the rest
of us could get away with such a skimpy contribution, the teacher never
objected when Charlie at last, and with mysterious fluency, called the name of
another kid to continue reading. We were all relieved when he was done. I don’t
believe any of us felt what could be called compassion. We were too young, too
primal. We felt irritation, or anxiety, or discomfort. Some rolled their eyes
or silently snickered to friends across the circle. For my part, reading was
the special area where I excelled. I was impatient with the reading of all the
other kids, and driven near batty by Charlie’s torturous performances, though I
at least had the raising not to let it show on my face.
As that year of school passed, and we each
accepted the labels and roles pinned on our lapels by one another, there
emerged a sort of tacit arrangement that Charlie would pretend to be invisible,
and the rest of us would pretend he wasn't there. It wasn’t just reading time
either. Speaking is a pretty pervasive element of all human activity, so
Charlie had to be pretty thoroughly wiped from existence. He could swing a bat
or kick a red rubber ball in the wordless realm of sports and P.E., but
that was about it.
Of course Charlie comes back to me now, and of course,
I recall him now with new eyes, the eyes of a mother, his mother even. I think
about her anguish over him, her concern with how he was fitting in socially,
progressing academically, how his confidence or self-esteem might have been
suffering. I think about how, to her, Charlie’s stutter was just this one
stupid, peripheral thing about her son, as meaningful as a hangnail, how she
saw his whole life and every vast facet of his personality and interests, how
to her he was so much more than a speech impediment, but to us that’s all he
was, and perhaps, as time went by, it's all he felt he was too. I imagine
how frightening and infuriating that would have been for her. I
wonder now if Charlie ever got past his stutter. I wonder what he sees when he
looks back at those elementary school years, how it affected him to grow up in
the center of an unspoken agreement that it was better for everyone, including
him, if he just wasn’t there. I wonder if for him his suffering was eventually
a blessing, like it was for me, if eventually, his mother was able to
see a great value in the years of pain her son, and thus
vicariously she, went through.
I never had any obvious egregious disabilities. No
cleft palate, no stammer, no weight problem or horrific acne, which in some way
may have made it harder. The confused plea of my adolescence was, what is wrong with me? I never fit in. I
was always on the outside looking in. I had always just missed the drawing up
of teams. During those early years, my mom took a proactive approach,
and I went along with it. I remember at the beginning of each year in
elementary school looking over the roster of my new classmates with her,
singling out potential candidates for friendship. Maybe Megan Lathey, she
seems nice? Or what about Chelsea Appel? No, she’s already got two best friends
in the class. Mom's tend toward the proactive when it comes to their
children's pain. We want to eradicate it, annihilate it, watch it wither,
shrieking, like the weeds in the herbicide commercials. We want to pluck it out
with tweezers like a splinter, see the offending shard slide out in tact. All
gone, all better, no more pain, off you go to play with a kiss on the head
and pat on the back. If that pain is caused by disease we will scour the
earth for a cure. If it is other children causing that pain we will swoop
in for parent conferences, consider restraining orders, and, in our darker
fantasies, hit men.
There was nothing, ultimately, that my mom could
do. There is often very little that we mom's can actually do. My
elementary school years passed in tears, both mine and hers, leading into worse
junior high years, and eventually sinking to their nadir in high school. All
she could do was listen and cry. And pray. Those were twelve rough years. Who
they were harder on, between my mom and I, I'm not sure. But. Looking back,
without a doubt whatever portion of compassion the Lord has worked in me,
whatever humility, whatever wisdom, whatever capacity to love, was born to some
extent from those horrible hard years. And if my mom ever prayed that the Lord
would make me good, and not just happy, some of those days spent wandering the
playground alone, hiding out in the school bathroom at lunch or later in my
car, were surely the long slow beginning of a granted prayer. How she must
have worn herself out pounding her fists against God's seemingly locked
and barricaded door while it was happening? How quickly would she have
obliterated my struggles had it been in her power? And what a great cost to my
soul if she had?
I wonder what Charlie gained by stuttering that
he couldn’t have gained any other way? What wisdom or compassion, humility or
sense of humor? The truth is that wanting the best things for your
child might also mean wanting some of the worst, or at least being
prepared for them in the bargain. It doesn't mean you can't help or
ease the pain. It doesn't mean there aren't time when children truly need
rescuing, but I have to remember that if I want my child to be
courageous then he will have to face danger. If I want him
to be compassionate he will have to be hurt. If I wish
him to be humble he'll have to be broken. If I want him to love he
will have to experience loss. And I'll have to remember that, to
really hold it close, so that when the danger comes, or the hurt or the pain or
the loss, I won't go charging into the fray like Rambo, waging war on
anything that stands against my child, and so that, inevitably failing that, I
am not so blinded by fear that I end up distrusting God, mistaking
for weeds the tender shoots of prayers being answered slowly.
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