Confessions from an Intermediate Parent

Parenting has reached a new level of difficulty for Matt and me. I accepted the role of assigning the reading assignments for our children this summer. For my 8-year-old son, it was pretty easy. His second grade teacher finished off the school year reading C. S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe with the class and watching the movie, so he is all into reading the rest of the series. Matt and Haydn read together most nights and I have him read independently some in the day. He’s into it. And we feel great because we know the reading level is good for him, and the message is on target. But then there’s my girls. I wanted to get them more into some classics this year. My oldest is entering high school in the fall and I noticed that Solanna’s required reading list for the summer was full of choices I didn’t recognize. Where were the classics? I remember around her age reading To Kill a Mocking Bird, Of Mice and Men, and The Catcher in the Rye. So I ordered all three. I thought the story Of Mice and Men would really be something my second child, Zaidee would connect with. She is going into the 6^th grade but I thought, why not take it up a reading-level notch for her? She was way too comfortable on her own reading level and needed a push outside of her horizons. Well, as I was working on my own writing I announced an independent reading time for the kids. Of Mice and Men just arrived in the mail and I made the sell to Zaidee. After all, we’ve been calling her Lenny for years. And I know that she’s seen many carton renditions. It was time to learn of the rich source they borrowed from. Zaidee interrupts me. She performs what an intelligent reader should before investing their time, the size up. “Mom, there are some bad words in this book.” I reply, “Well, the characters are depraved, ungodly men. When you see this kind of language, the author is revealing the condition of their characters.” She looks on the back cover and immediately assesses, “But mom, why is the author shown with a cigarette?” I try to explain that is was written in the 30’s when smoking was in vogue and authors were characterized as banging on a typewriter with a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And then another interruption…"But mom, I don’t think I should read this book, look!” There it was, the words that make every believer cringe in disgust peppered all over the page, the “GD” bomb. Total mom fail. How could I be so remiss to not just skim through the book first on my own? Even after seeing it for myself, I still don’t remember that language when I read it in high school. And even in my most rebellious teenage years, I was sickened by those words. I had to apologize to my daughter, and step up my mom duties. Unfortunately, she returned to her Hunger Games series. Fast-forward to Solanna. After this warning, I did remember that The Catcher in the Rye had some issues. I had been smart enough to make the mental note to thumb through that one again. I decided that it wasn’t worth Solee reading, but did give her To Kill a Mockingbird (of which Zaidee was stunned to find out that it wasn’t Tequila Mockingbird). After reading that, she became interested in my Flannery O’Connor short stories. We’ve had some good discussions. Now she is on to her “official” school list. I’m at a much more complex stage of parenting. The girls are now growing out of the innocent-keep-them-in-a-glorious-bubble stage. They are learning about life. While many new circumstances are great opportunities for Matt and I to have a “teaching moment” and see how the gospel can be applied, it’s also painful to see our kids awakened to some of these realities. It’s also difficult to discern what we allow them to be exposed to and where we still need to shelter them as they grow. And of course, sometimes things we’d like to still shelter them from come creeping in despite our best intentions. As our children grow, we are confronted more with the fact that our job as parents is to raise our children to be functioning adults that will not need to depend on us as a child does anymore. This is both heartbreaking and scary. At the same time, I want them to know that their total dependence on Christ is something they will never outgrow. Parenting takes on a whole new level when your kids leave elementary school. It’s like we need to move on from elementary parenting into intermediate and advanced levels. We are learning just as much as they are. Is this the part when our own parents get that big, “I told you so” grin because we are now appreciating at a whole new level just how hard raising us must have been?