Being Angry Well

How can we be angry well? I don’t know if I’ve ever learned that in my life. I don’t think my parents ever intentionally taught me how to handle my anger—their main rule towards the matter was that parents should never fight in front of their kids. I do think that’s better than displaying destructive anger in front of your children, but the third and better alternative is to fight well in front of your kids. Do any parents do this? Have I ever seen anger modeled well? When it came to dealing with my own anger, I think the implicit message was that it was bad to be angry. I was told what I did and said in anger was very wrong, and that I needed to simply control myself, but wasn’t taught how. How do we teach our kids about how to handle anger?

I think there are two main reasons why being angry well is so difficult. The first is that anger by nature is so explosive and blinding that it’s hard to handle at all. It’s like holding a bomb, or walking on a high wire—one misstep, and things can blow up and go to pieces. You can say or do something that you can’t even bear to mention later. It’s no wonder we go out of our way to avoid it, and tell our kids to do the same.

But the second reason it’s so difficult to learn about and model how to handle anger well is that anger is by nature private and deep. We only get angry about the things we really care about. Anger is love in action; it is our defense against a threat to the things we care the most about. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “the opposite of love is not hatred; it is indifference.” Many people are good at hiding or repressing their anger, or they simply don’t get angry at all until you get close enough to threaten what they care about. I was pretty good at never getting angry until I got married, until I had kids. Then I realized exactly how bad I was at handling my anger.

If I could teach myself, and my kids, something about how to be angry well, I think it would be these three things:

Be angry for the right reason. When you become angry, ask yourself, what am I defending? And that will show you what you love. This is the hardest point, because most of the time, I find that what I am defending is my ego, my pride, my comfort—and in order to change my anger, I really have to change what I love. I have to rid myself of those idols. I have to be more absorbed in God’s character, his commands, to truly feel and believe and love righteousness. Because that is God’s anger; it is a righteous anger—anger at evil, at sin. Ephesians commands us to “be angry”—but it must be for the right reason.

Be slow to anger. God’s anger is not explosive; it is not absent—it is slow. The analogy used throughout the Old Testament (Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, Isaiah) is that it has to be “kindled” before it “burns.” It is held in contrast to his “abundant lovingkindness” (Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17). Proverbs says, “a fool’s anger is known at once” (12:16); “he who is slow to anger has great understanding” (14:29); “a gentle answer turns away wrath” (15:1). The Bible speaks of God “turning away” from his anger, as from a state, as a result of choice—his anger is not described as an uncontrollable emotion, as mine often is. It is something nursed slowly, with great care and intentionality, never quickly. And love, kindness, and the gentle word should always come more readily.

Don’t sin in anger. It’s easy to sin in anger, so easy that the Bible tells us to simply avoid anger at times (Ephesians 4:31, Colossians 3:8). So practically we have to set limits and guidelines for ourselves. Some good ones I’ve heard are never to mention the word “divorce,” never to throw anything or act out physically, never to argue in the car or at the dinner table, to let go of the anger before going to sleep even if the issue isn’t necessarily fixed. Even in the heat of the moment, we must constantly ask ourselves: is my anger causing me to sin?

So we must be angry for the right reason, by learning how to love righteousness instead of self. We must be angry in the right way, by learning to nurse our anger slowly with deliberation and care. And we must be wary and establish practical limits for our anger, so that we don’t sin. All of this is such an antithesis to how it feels natural to handle my anger—for selfish causes, as an emotion, with disregard for the consequences—that in the end I suppose I need to simply ask God to give me the insight and power I need to transform myself in this area. At least that’s someplace to start.

Parenting Moralism and Self-Fulfillment, or Parenting the Gospel?

“I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, ‘Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,’ or ‘Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!’ But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality… We’re drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore. Our gospel has become a gospel of following your dreams and being good so God will make all your dreams come true. It’s the Oprah god.” –Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer

I’ve noticed that lately, when we discipline Ellie for something, she bursts into tears and says over and over, “wao3 yio4 guai1!” (“I want to be good! I want to be good!”) And of course I think, well, if you want to be good, stop crying!

Then Dave and I realized how often we use the word “guai1” when we praise the kids or reinforce good behavior. I think it literally means “obedient,” though I use it more like “good.” It highlights the emphasis upon obedience in Chinese culture: good children are obedient. They have filial piety; they honor their parents by doing their duty. I don’t mean to be throwing all that onto Ellie—I’m just using a phrase that comes naturally in Mandarin—but it does impute that philosophy, and she’s internalized it somehow, because what she’s really saying is, “I want you to say I’m obedient, because it’s the same as saying I have your love and favor.”

Then my friend forwarded this blog post, and I thought about how easy it is for anyone to unintentionally parent towards moralism and the American Dream, instead of the gospel. Success is reaching your own goals and dreams. You should be able to control your own behavior. The point of life is to be happy and achieve a lot.

I listened to a great sermon by Tim Keller on the way home today in which he talks about the great tension between law and love: God saying, on one hand, you’ll be cursed for generations if you don’t fulfill the law, and on the other, I will never leave or abandon you. This is such an apparently unresolvable contradiction that nearly all Christians fall more on one side or the other—we believe we can live life our own way and God will always love us (self-fulfillment), or all we care about are following the rules (moralism).

This contradiction is resolved on the cross, and the more deeply we understand and apply that, the more deeply we grasp the gospel. Christ fulfilled all the conditions of the law, yet offers unconditional love. God made the terms of the covenant, yet he walked down the bloody aisle between the animal parts himself. In response, we care more deeply about following the law than before, because we know what it cost God, and we understand his hatred of sin; yet we never cripple ourselves with condemnation when we break the law, because we understand his mercy and grace.

What does it mean to parent the gospel? With a two and four year-old, you pretty much have to constantly reinforce boundaries and guidelines for behavior. But if I stop there, I’m teaching moralism. Teaching them the gospel means I also explain that our love and God’s love does not depend on their behavior. It means I remind them that we can’t do everything on our own but we can turn to God, who takes the badness of our mistakes from us and helps change our hearts. It means I try to take just as many moments to do that, as I do to reprimand their behavior.

In the end, my kids will understand the gospel as much as I understand and live the gospel. They will understand success as I understand and communicate success. And that’s the tough part. I can’t mime the gospel: I have to believe and live it. I can only offer grace as I’ve been given it; I can only love as I’ve experienced it. So I’m going to try to be more intentional about the words I use, about what I’m saying, but I’ve also got to ask God to transform my heart, to obey in love and be free in grace.

Hobbies

The tough thing about motherhood is remembering who you are. Not who you are in an existentialist sort of way, but who you are as in: I am someone who takes exercise classes. Who experiments with gourmet dessert recipes. Who works on Chopin’s ballade in F minor. Who goes to the mall and movie theater. Who reads magazines in bookstores. Who swims. Who makes up songs on the guitar. Who reads poetry.

Just because I have to plan in advance to go to the bathroom nowadays, much less naturally have time to do any of those things anymore, doesn’t mean I’m not still that same person. Just because in the past, I was too busy studying for a big test, or didn’t have access to a guitar or a pool, doesn’t mean I wasn’t still that same person. But often those things fade out of your life so gradually you don’t even realize they’re gone.

I’m sort of cracking open the door on some of those things. I bought a lovely bound sketchbook and have been filling it up with pencil drawings (bad ones of the kids, better ones of still life) and ink doodles. I’m working on that cable throw. I cracked open our Norton Anthology of poetry. I make some effort to write every day. I did an exercise video.

In a life filled with work and kids, where everything boils down to what is functional and necessary, it feels good to do a little something just for its own sake. It’s like using an atrophied muscle. It feels good in a healthy, restorative way, and it brings something of myself back that I’ve lost. I’m learning that it’s okay to donate some time and energy for these things. There is some part of me that is what I do, or that becomes what I do, and it feels good to remember.

He Has To Be The Loveliest Bald Person That I Know

Journal Excerpt

Speaking of stories, Ellie has a... slight... obsession with them. Her longest-standing obsession has been with the nativity story, which lasted about two years: enacting the story by stuffing balls down her shirt, calling Eric "Joseph" to the point where he would turn around if we said it. Maybe the story was so popular because it involved being very "tired" while pregnant and having to lie down for long periods of time. There was also usually the birth of a stuffed animal that required a lot of attentive care. I haven't had the heart yet to break it to Eric that he probably shouldn't be stuffing balls down his onesies and exclaiming, "going to have a baby!"

She's currently in a Peter Pan phase, instigated by her delight in getting to wear necklaces on her head in imitation of Tiger Lily's headband. Now she is Wendy. She made us call her Wendy all night, and call Eric John, and call Elijah Michael. Dave gets confused a lot ("no, Daddy, he's not Eric, he's JOHN!"). When we tucked them in, Eric said, goodnight Daddy-Captain-Hook.

For a while there I was making up bedtime stories, each night an installation in a saga that involved, by demand, sparkly princesses and rainbow horses, with the occasional injection of a moral story (persistence in reaching a goal, discovering inner beauty, befriending an outcast, learning to share). Unfortunately, her favorite plot development was pregnancy and birth, which led to an extremely convoluted family tree that she nevertheless kept eerily straight ("no mommy, Princess Violet's mother was Sparkly Rainbow and she gave birth to Little Violet!").

It really is marvelous, though, how expansive their imagination is. I could enact a story with rocks and they'd think it was amazing. I could tell them anything, paint any kind of picture with my words, and somewhere in their minds it is real. When we take a bath, they are mermaids, or fish at the aquarium at which I throw grapes which are really fish food. When we huddle under a blanket, we are a family of rabbits hiding out from a predator. When I drag them around the house on a blanket, they are the only survivors on a lifeboat in the ocean. It's probably one of my favorite things about this stage and one I'll surely miss when they grow up.