Miniaturist

Over the summer I try to have themes for the kids to structure our lessons and activities around, and currently it’s plants—memorizing the fruit of the Spirit, nature walks, growing seeds, learning about famous botanists—but I may have picked this theme so we could make terrariums. We ordered an online kit and made closed terrariums with layers of rock, charcoal, moss, and potting soil. The kit came with small, easy-to-grow plants and we decorated with figurines and rocks. The boys made a landscape for dinosaurs and Ellie made one with a princess and horses.

I love working in the miniature. I always have to hold myself back when the kids get assigned to do a diorama—the first time this happened, when Eric got assigned to make one of a doctor’s office, I used cardstock and glue applied with toothpicks to create a perfectly diminuitive replica complete with wall-mounted otoscope and direct ophthalmoscope, a tissue box with miniature tissues, a white coat draped over a chair, and tins of lollipops and tongue depressors. Then I realized most other parents were grabbing life-sized objects related to their topic and putting them in a box, which may have been what the teacher meant. You know, grabbing a few extra syringes or medication samples from the office and gluing them in.

I suppose in the end cataract surgery is working in the miniature too: removing an object no larger than three by five millimeters from a tiny space without breaching a membrane tenths-of-a-micron thick. On someone who is awake and may talk or shift their feet without realizing the tiniest of bodily movements looks like an earthquake under the microscope.

As usual, making the terrariums involved a little more mess and comparison-driven bickering than I had envisioned, but it was fun. The boys seem unable to resist taking the lid off theirs to look and feel inside, but otherwise they’re doing great so far.

Reaching The Heart

I was listening to Tim Keller give a workshop on preaching to the heart on the way to work this week, and it made me think about what it means for something to reach our heart. He gives the example of a depressed teenage girl he counseled once, who could verbalize all the tenants of salvation, but in the end said, “what does all of that matter if there aren’t any boys who like me?” She knew about Christ, but it was just an opinion that hadn’t reached her heart.

Keller outlines the tension between mind and emotion: in the past, our hearts were perceived as the exertion of will and thought over feeling or desire; now, the heart evokes emotion over the mind.

The biblical concept of the heart, of course, goes far above all of that. The heart is the seat of what you trust the most, what you are committed to the most—trust in the Lord with all your heart; where your treasure is, there your heart is also—the heart is what you most hope in, what most captures your imagination. It is what you face, the center of your attention, your main commitment. Whatever those things are affects your mind, your will, and your emotions. Your thinking and your feeling.

What does it take for something to grab my heart? What has reached my heart? I’ve always been a cerebral person; God strikes me in etymological study more than in song. I am as awed by an intellectual discovery in a bible passage as I am by a mountain range. So I seek him with my mind, and the danger has always been acquiring truths that I know, but not that I know. Someone once said, “interpretation without application is abortion.”

This all made me think too of what it means to reach our children’s hearts. There’s a lot of talk about this—about how you can enforce rules, but if you don’t reach your child’s heart, it doesn’t mean anything—and there are lots of books out there about this (most of which I haven’t read).

I do pray regularly for the hearts of our kids. I pray for safety and health and a straight path, but what I really want is for their hearts to be after God, more than anything else. How that lives out may look different for each of them, and the nuances of how I reach them for that may differ, but in the end I keep coming back to this: the children see my heart. They see my heart every day, and that more than anything else at this stage will affect what they desire. Maybe when they get older we’ll have more complex discussions regarding cultural narratives and personality types and specific influences, but right now, they are turned inwards, watching me every day. What captures my imagination captures their imagination; what I commit to they commit to; what I treasure, they treasure.

So it all cycles back to: what has reached my heart? If an alien came to observe and record my daily actions, words, and thoughts, what would they conclude about what seats my mind, emotions, and will? What would they infer about my hopes and desires? When I discover a truth about God, am I meditating that truth into reality, internalizing it into the muscles of everyday life? Engaging it in my imagination? Am I being affected today by the hope I have in the future?

These years of young childhood are precious. The kids want to be close, so close, all the time. They want to ingest everything I do and say and think. They set their whole worlds in my orbit; they revolve around my center, so I have to be extra-vigilant about that center. They may hear my words or obey my commands, but what they really internalize is my heart, and that is something I live out.

Nostalgia and Newsletters

I was reading through some old blog posts today, which I don’t do very often. Unlike Dave, I’m not a very nostalgic person. But I liked reading these posts (Sovereign Mysteries, Isolation and Intimacy, Guts and Glory). Goodness, I was so meditative back then. I wanted to write like Annie Dillard, or Annie Proulx.

And my life was so much about medicine. I skimmed through a copy of Wilmer’s latest newsletter lately, instead of ditching it straight into the recycling as usual, and it was like looking at a strange alternative version of how my life could (should) have ended up. They had bios of new hires, and mine would have trumped every single one there, except it would have stopped after residency, just ended like an awkward amputation. Instead of she is an associate professor of comprehensive ophthalmology at [insert elite academic institution here] whose research is making advances in the cure of [insert obscure eye disease here] under the funding of [insert major grant here] and the efforts of generous donors, it would read she works two days a week at a small rural clinic providing general eye care. Being honest, it would read she is now an expert on the best cleaning appliances, worthwhile children’s books, and quick-and-healthy family meal recipes. It would practically have switched to another genre, another channel. From full-scholarship Harvard to—what? This isn’t what I paid for!

Inexplicably, to Dave’s consternation and sometimes my own surprise, I have no misgivings about where I am. This is the channel I want to be on. It’s just odd sometimes to take myself back, to before. A little jarring. I guess the appropriate back-story of my current narrative would have been taking home-ec in high school and going to a local college and medical school, but that wouldn’t have been me (an understatement; I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that at the time). And yet, here I am, local again, at a place where people who see me with the kids assume I’m a home-schooling Christian who has never worked, where I have to say “eye doctor” instead of “ophthalmologist” (you mean, like glasses?), and where no one knows how to pronounce Esme (which I joke correlates with level of education and/or literary knowledge).

Yet, like I say, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. I look at my former colleagues chasing after the next thing, hardly seeing their kids, and I look at people here who so thoughtfully live out their lives with principle, and I wonder how much that newsletter-stuff matters in the end anyway. In many ways, personally and relationally and practically, I’ve gotten to the heart of being Christ-like more now than I had in all the earlier glitz and glory.

But sometimes it does get lonely. I miss having friends and colleagues who push me intellectually, though I think if I did, they wouldn’t understand the decisions I’ve made in my career. I’m grateful for godly mom friends here, but while they can suggest a fun place to take the kids, they can’t empathize with the stress of difficult surgical outcomes or a challenging patient in clinic.

I wonder if my narrative will change again some day. I wonder how much of myself will have changed by then, or whether I’ll mostly still be the same (probably both). I look back on how easily I articulated why I loved medicine, and remind myself to do the same now about being with the kids. Articulate to myself, and them, what I enjoy and what they make me think about. And I should probably keep ditching most of those newletters.

Letter To Ellie

Dear Ellie,

You did something pretty amazing yesterday and I want to tell you about it.

So a few weeks ago, you and your brothers were playing with the train set on the floor. Esme came over and toppled everything over and you yelled at her. You had sort of been off the whole afternoon, just tending to complain about things. When I ask you these days about school, you tend to give me the “I don’t want to talk about it” line, but just then you told me about something that had happened at gym. You didn’t hear the instructions for a game, so you didn’t know how to do the game right; you had to do it over, which made your team lose, and everyone laughed at you. You were crying as you told me and I felt so bad for you, at the thought of everyone making fun of you. You hate gym as it is and dread every Monday and Wednesday because of it.

We debriefed—you didn’t hear the instructions because everyone around you was talking too loudly. You tried to tell them to stop talking but that didn’t work. The situation was such that you couldn’t raise your hand to ask the instructions to be repeated.

We talked about how sometimes you have to let hurtful things slide off and not get stuck deep inside your heart. We even talked about how maybe God gave you this experience to help you understand how other kids feel hurt when they get made fun of or chided, like maybe even how you had yelled at Esme a few minutes ago. You said being made fun of at gym had only happened one other time this whole year, and that it happens to other kids too. You said you never laugh at anyone, but everyone else does. I made you promise that the next time this happened, you would go up to the kid and give him or her a hug.

Yesterday was a Monday; as usual I asked about gym but you didn’t want to talk about it. Then today you told me that yesterday, a second-grader had made her team lose, and everyone started laughing at her. But you went up to her and gave her a hug. And after that, everyone else in your class started saying sorry to her. You didn’t want to tell me about this right away because whenever you talk about it, you feel like you want to cry.

I am so proud of you! I told you I’ve never been more proud of you. You did something really kind, something that took courage. I love how your heart is so soft, Ellie, that things touch you so much, and that you can sense how other people are feeling and care about them. You let me tell Daddy about it when he got home from class tonight, and Daddy said the person most happy about what happened was God, who loves that second-grade girl just like he loves you.

Love,

Mommy

Shaping The Will Without Destroying The Spirit

It didn’t take long for us to figure out Eric was a strong-willed child—in retrospect the sentinel moment was probably when he refused taking anything from a bottle when I went back to work. After his week-long hunger strikes, my dad finally drove him in every three hours (twenty minutes to our house, twenty minutes to my workplace, then all again in reverse) so I could run out in between cases to nurse him in the car.

It wasn’t long before I was in the bookstore taking notes from every book on the strong-willed child ever written. One phrase that stood out to me was how one ought to “shape the will without destroying the spirit.” Sounds nice, but how does one practically do that? I couldn’t find a great explanation anywhere. Maybe, I thought, it means to discipline in calmness instead of anger. Or to blame behavior rather than character. Or to give some options for choice to retain the child’s sense of self-will.

It’s been a few years since then, and I’ve practically come to realize that teaching a strong-willed boy basically involves three things: you identify the behavior and learn about your child to understand why it is he acts that way; you teach him what is wrong about his behavior; you teach him what underlies the behavior and redirect it to a good or appropriate outlet.

It’s pretty easy to focus only on the second part: his behavior is unacceptable, and you discipline him for it. In certain situations that’s all you can or need to do, but if we focus only on this step, I find the behavior tends to recur, leading to cycles of frustration, and sometimes bad labeling of the child in your or his mind. He starts to see himself as a bad person; he gets that what he does is wrong but doesn’t know how to change.

But I think the difference between “shaping the will” and “destroying the spirit” is like the difference between feeling guilt and feeling shame. Feeling guilt is when you feel bad about something you did. Feeling shame is when you feel bad about who you are. I don’t want Eric to feel bad about who he is, but I do want him to realize what he did was wrong—and so, I need to be able to separate the two myself. That means I need to learn and understand why it is he acts a certain way, and only then can I not only give negative consequences for bad behavior, but affirm and redirect the underlying good character traits and impulses underlying it.

It sounds simple, but I’m constantly learning more about Eric: there’s layers and layers, which all play together. There’s the strong-willed temperament; the highly introverted personality type; the gender predispositions (highly-competitive, more aggressive and active than his sister); the tendency to resist change, to rise to a performance; the physical touch love-language; the changing age-related developmental stage; and more.

Understanding him changes how I discipline and teach him: it influences my own expectations and views of him, and what I do to get through to him. For example, when he throws a tantrum, I don’t just give him a time out (works him up more) or spank him until he submits (ditto). We talk about how it’s okay to feel angry, or need time to cry, but that we don’t hurt people and eventually we do need to calm down. What seems to work best is shutting him in his room to give him time to cry and be mad, but then to promise beforehand that I will come to get him after five minutes (some folks advocate processing emotions physically with him but I haven’t found that helpful and it tends to make me lose my temper).

After five minutes, I come in and ask if he wants to be held (love language, and I find it almost always is fruitless talking to him before I hold him a bit). We talk about why what he did was wrong. Usually I can tell he feels embarrassed or bad about it and we pray to say sorry to God.

But then I also talk about the things inside him that can make him this way. Instead of “stubborn” or “strong-willed,” I say he has a “strong heart,” and sometimes it makes him want things a lot, or get very frustrated if he doesn’t get things, and that can be a really good thing. I talk about how Mommy is like that. But I talk about how sometimes in our lives, God doesn’t give us what we strongly want, because he wants us to learn something important, because it’s not the best for us and he loves us, and ultimately even if we don’t know why, we have to obey and respect God, and that’s why I ask him to obey and respect me. We talk about not letting our strong wants blind us to what others need.

I go through some variation of this often, and sometimes I can’t get him to say much other than he wants me to hold him, but sometimes I see a light go on, or he asks a question that shows he’s been processing it (during this last conversation, “no, Mommy, my heart’s not there, it’s there!”—moving my hand from the center of his chest to his lower left chest. It’s metaphorical, buddy).

It’s a work in progress, and what works now may not be what works in another year. But I do think understanding your child, the hows and whys behind how they act the way they do, is the key to not just enforcing behavior, but reaching their heart. At least that’s the hope. We’ll see how it goes.

Dates

When I used to work full days, Dave and I would regularly meet for lunch, and I think he especially enjoyed that: seeing me in professional garb, in my confidently-positive work mode, mentally distanced from home matters. That habit evaporated after I transitioned to shorter days after Esme was born, but today we managed to meet after several cancelled OR cases left me with some extra time. Dave talked about his dissertation, which I (sadly) finally understood and was able to process some with him.

It’s strange how sometimes it takes getting out in a new setting to connect in certain ways. I always used to think, well, we can just talk after the kids go to bed—and sometimes we do, but more often we don’t. He’s getting steps and doing homework; I’m finishing chores or reading a novel. There’s something to be said for being creative about in-home dates, and with intentionality they work, but probably one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that paying for regular dates outside the home, where we are away from the kids and try not to even talk too much about the kids, is worth the effort. Which for me mostly means it’s worth paying a sitter for: as any couple with kids knows, it’s not just the cost of the actual date, but the not-insignificant cost of hiring a sitter for that time. People without kids must take for granted how easy it is to get out.

There’s so much about marriage that changes with having young kids, and one thing can be that you’re so busy, or depleted, meeting the needs of your kids that you lose focus on your own needs, and your spouse’s needs. There’s being attentive to expressing respect and love. There’s figuring out how to have a fulfilling sexual life in an environment where spontaneity and energy are scarce. There’s being aware of how your spouse is doing spiritually. For Dave, I figured out a major need was one of recreational companionship: where we do something new together, or have some experience outside of the house together. Traveling together has become harder and harder the more kids we had—not that some couples don’t pull it off—but we decided to hire a regular sitter every week. It’s time we use to lead a small group, or when the groups aren’t meeting, meet with other couples, go sit in a coffee shop together.

But today’s conversation was a reminder to me to be more proactive about finding new or different things we can do together. I’m more likely to get excited about reading a good book in bed than going out anywhere, so it’s some effort, but I sometimes think back to our dating days. How adventurous we were! And we still relive those memories. So it might be time to make some new ones.

Raising Kind Kids

“After all, when’s the last time you saw a bumper sticker that said PROUD PARENT OF A KIND KID?” – Michele Borba, TIME magazine article “Why Kids Need More Empathy”

If you had to pick whether your kid would be the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most athletic, or the most kind, what would you choose? I remember talking about this with Dave once during a car trip around the time we were having our first kid. I was tempted to pick most beautiful. I think I ended up picking most intelligent.

Dave didn’t think twice about picking most kind. This wasn’t a hypothetical for him; he genuinely would feel most proud of our kids if they turned out to be kind people, more proud than if they were smart, or pretty, or athletic.

This is somewhat countercultural. Just consider the selfie, which didn’t exist back when I was a kid. Our one year-old knows about selfies. Studies have shown that we are an increasingly self-absorbed culture (one rated narcissism as occurring 58% more often among college students as compared with three decades ago). And this seeps into our parenting: we arrange our lives around our kids, monitor whether everything around them is for their best, praise them constantly whether they actually do well or not. In one study, 80% of youth said their parents cared more about their achievement or happiness than whether they cared for others.

At the same time, there seems to be an increasing number of articles out there about how important it is to raise kids who are kind. An article in the current issue of TIME highlights empathy as the trait most important in determining happiness and success. David Brooks discusses the “eulogy virtues” as opposed to the “resume virtues.” A NYT article titled “Raising The Moral Child” suggests instilling kindness in children by praising character over action. A blogger I read discussed how she never publicly brags about her kids except when they do something kind.

The more I think about it, the more I buy that Dave is right. It’s certainly biblical. And interestingly, it’s the one thing that I face teaching the earliest as a parent. I don’t really have to face teaching our kids to score the most goals or be first in their class or do their makeup right: I struggle every day, from the time they are infants onwards, to teach them to be kind. To share, to clean up after themselves, to be generous, to speak edifying words, to choose not to escalate a fight. To identify, process, and deal with their emotions in an undestructive fashion. To guard their noise level in consideration of a sleeping sibling.

How does one raise kind kids? On one hand, we are all born with a sinful nature, and the Bible is clear that we need Christ to redeem us, and the help of the Holy Spirit living in us to transform us to live the way we should. It’s not in my kids’ natures to be kind, and ultimately they can’t do it without Christ. So I continue to pray that they come into and one day be inwardly transformed by a saving knowledge of Christ.

On the other hand, kindness can be taught to some degree. Certainly, when we prioritize and model kindness as parents, it comes through to our kids. When I drop Ellie and Eric off for school each morning, I say “be kind to someone today!” When I see them doing something that involves putting aside their own preferences for someone else, I comment on it. We discuss kindness if we read about it in a book or story; we try to practice gratitude. We do projects together that involve giving gifts or thinking of how we can help someone else. When they kids get in fights, I try to help them understand how to think about what the other person may be feeling, both in the immediate setting but also more deeply in the context of their development as a person. Some day it would be great to take the kids on a missions trip or at least travel enough to broaden their ideas of others.

I guess that’s one good thing about having a lot of kids: they’re always having to think about others. This morning Elijah ran down the stairs screaming because Eric had “left him behind,” which woke Esme up, and I got him by the shoulders and asked him to consider how his noise had disturbed her. I got to thinking how Esme will never have to worry about waking a sleeping baby, whereas Elijah has had to be aware so often of that. Even Esme’s experience now as a baby is so different than Ellie’s just because she has three siblings instead of none.

Still, it’s good to be intentional about it, and to know we are doing something important in those days when it all seems like an uphill battle. Ellie got her first love note the other day. The boy wrote, “Ellie you are so sweet and kind to me that is why I am giving this to you.” I couldn’t be prouder.

The Boys

Have I written yet about how the boys bicker the most of all the kids? I read somewhere that children tend to fight the most when they are close in age, the middle child, or of the same gender. Well, the boys are two years nearly to the day apart, and both middle kids. There you go. It’s always, “I got big one!” “I got new one!” or Elijah running over with, “Eric… Eric say mean thing!” then running back to say, “Told you!” (by which he means, I told on you!)

But when they play together, it’s so sweet. Eric adopts this sort of higher-pitched, lisp-y little-kid cajoling voice (“you wanna play ‘dis, li-jah?”) and Elijah runs along copying everything he does with his tummy sticking down and his head bobbing up and down in the air. They play boom-the-bad-guy, build-nests-in-the-fort, masked-spies, driving the train/bus/truck, stranded-on-the-island, orphans-gathering-food, running-from-Chewbacca (for some reason Elijah loves running around screaming, “chew-bacca coming!”).