Thank you for not smothering

When I was pregnant with our first child, Jacob, more than 15 years ago, I came upon this quote by author and mother Elizabeth Stone: “Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Overly dramatic, I thought at the time. Surely Stone is exaggerating. While I didn’t doubt that having a child would change my life, a heart walking around outside of my body was a ridiculous idea. My child would have his identity, I would have mine, and while I would certainly care and be concerned about what happened to him, there was no way I would feel like my own heart was walking around.

Then I had Jacob. And within a day of his birth, I understood that Stone was not being overly dramatic or sentimental. She was simply stating a fact. The investment of parenthood is so intense and intimate that the line between where a child ends and where the parent begins becomes blurred.

And it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I was able to unpack the metaphor of God as Father. If my heart was walking around outside of my body because of my love for Jacob, did God have that same feeling about me? About all people on earth? The idea that God cared as much what happened to his human family as I did about Jacob was staggering.

So how did God do it? Six billion hearts walking around? The obvious answer—God loved us so much, he set us free. Looking at baby Jacob, I wondered if I could ever let him grow and make his own mistakes, or would I need to swoop in and make everything right? Tiny, vulnerable, newborn Jacob: I wanted nothing more than to protect him from all harm.

Now, with teenage Jacob and three other younger children, I still want nothing more than to protect them from harm. But I’ve been a parent long enough to realize that both my children and I benefit when I recognize and claim that spot where I end and they begin, blurry as it may be. When I look at successful parents who have moved out of the beginning stage of parenting—moms and dads with teens or college-aged kids—what I see is balance between a heart-outside-my-body love of their child and a deep respect for that child as an individual with gifts, talents, and responsibilities separate from the parent.

These parents have learned to acknowledge their child’s struggles and problems without being consumed by them. They offer support while recognizing that it’s not up to them to be the problem solver each time, that even the heart outside the body needs to make its own way.     …continued next week

—by Annemarie Scobey  from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence award from the Catholic Press Association. Here’s a sample issue.

We offer very low rates for parish use, as well as our free Moms’ Night Out monthly discussion guides.

And don’t miss our popular single-page parish handouts on handing on the faith, helping kids understand the Mass, Lent, and Advent.

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Got givers’ remorse about kids’ tech gifts?

If you’re experiencing post-purchase anxiety because the Christmas gift you bought for your child has taken over his or her life, you are not alone. Help your child use your electronic gift as you intended—in moderation.

Keep the handheld in your hands. Decide what level of use seems reasonable—perhaps three times a week for a half hour at a time—and have your child ask to use the device. Keep a record on the fridge of when he plays; when he uses up his time, he has to wait until the next week.

Tame the texting. Perhaps your cell phone gift has confirmed why you were reluctant to buy one for your daughter. The average teen sends more than 3,000 texts per month—about six per hour. While a good communication tool, texting can also interfere with your teen having time alone, concentrating on homework, or being present to the people she is with at the time. Discuss with your teen what place she wants texting to play in her life and what your concerns are, and then develop a plan to have phone-free times of the day.

Get filters and check the history. While you may believe you can trust your son not to go to inappropriate sites on his iPhone or laptop, installing strong filters will protect him in a moment of weakness or from a buddy who wants to show him a porn site when they’re in a hotspot after school.

—by Annemarie Scobey  from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence award from the Catholic Press Association. Here’s a sample issue.

We offer very low rates for parish use, as well as our free Moms’ Night Out monthly discussion guides.

And don’t miss our popular single-page parish handouts on handing on the faith, helping kids understand the Mass, Lent, and Advent.

Follow Homefaith on Twitter.

Peace on earth begins at the kitchen table, part two

Peace in the marriage: If the path to peace in oneself is spending some time in silence each day, the key to peace in a marriage is just the opposite—communication is vital. Spouses who talk well with each other will be effective co-leaders of their family and are more equipped to help the rest of the family communicate peacefully as well. The Handbook for Today’s Catholic Family (Liguori) recommends that married couples spend two hours a week in true dialogue. “My husband and I don’t spend anything close to two hours a week in real dialogue,” says Amy, mother of three school-age children. “But I do notice that when we take even 15 minutes to talk about anything beyond the immediate schedule—our future plans, or our faith, or something else that’s serious—I feel taken care of. And when I feel taken care of, I am better able to take care of our children. The whole family benefits when we talk more.”

Peace in the family: “Pockets of peace” are most likely to occur when everyone in the family is present to the same event. Arguments are most likely to break out during times of transition—as some members of a family move from one activity to another. Building more small events into family life is one way of making room for peace. “We recently had a fire together on a Friday night,” says Anne, mother of three. “Everyone just enjoyed roasting marshmallows and talking outside. It was so simple—and everyone was so happy—as I was sitting there I wondered why we didn’t do more of this.”

—by Annemarie Scobey  from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence award from the Catholic Press Association. Here’s a sample issue.

We offer very low rates for parish use, as well as our free Moms’ Night Out monthly discussion guides.

And don’t miss our popular single-page parish handouts on handing on the faith, helping kids understand the Mass, Lent, and Advent.

Follow Homefaith on Twitter.

Peace on earth begins at the kitchen table

Beth, a mother of four children ages 5 to 12, admits that her children may see her as June Cleaver. “I don’t know that they’ve ever seen me in my pajamas in the morning,” Beth says. “By the time they get up, I’m showered and dressed, with my makeup on.” Far from being an aspiring 1950s housewife, however, Beth explains that getting up an hour before her children is something she does for herself—not her kids.

“Once they get up, my life is crazy,” she says. “Taking the time in the quiet, before that first kid wakes up, gives me the peace I need to start the day.”

For parents, peace can be elusive. New parents struggle to have a thought or sleep for more than three hours without a baby interrupting. Parents with toddlers and preschool-age children can feel life has become a test of wills—from putting on shoes to getting in the car, suddenly nothing is easy anymore.

School conflicts snake their way into family life, and a once-close husband and wife can find that the sheer speed of life with children and teens can reduce their once-thoughtful conversations to barked instructions.

Yet amid the noise and the chaos, most families enjoy pockets of peace—those times when everything aligns—and we glimpse the family we’d like to be all the time. Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was asked, “What can we do to promote world peace?” She answered, “Go home and love your family.”

If family peace can bring about peace on earth, as Mother Teresa says, we better figure out how to get there.

Peace within the parent: As my friend Beth intuitively understands, we cannot lead our children toward peace if we ourselves are feeling unsettled. When family life starts leaning towards the decidedly un-peaceful, our first instinct may be to look toward the child who seems to be causing the most problems—the 7-year-old who is incessantly tattling; the sulking teen.

Yet if we first check for peace in our own heart, we may find that fear, stress, or anger have taken up residence there instead. Peaceful parents can better build a peaceful household. “I find that just lighting a candle on the kitchen counter and praying for a few minutes in the morning sets a completely different tone for my day than when I don’t make time for it,” says Carol, a mother of four.          …continued next week

—by Annemarie Scobey  from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence award from the Catholic Press Association. Here’s a sample issue.

We offer very low rates for parish use, as well as our free Moms’ Night Out monthly discussion guides.

And don’t miss our popular single-page parish handouts on handing on the faith, helping kids understand the Mass, Lent, and Advent.

Follow Homefaith on Twitter.

The more the merrier: Celebrating the 12 days of Christmas

This year, hand on heart, I saw Christmas decorations for sale on October 1. When I was little, we didn’t even start thinking about Christmas until after Thanksgiving.

My family would spend most of Advent getting ready. We’d shop for a tree, pull decorations down out of the attic, stock up on wrapping paper, and make lists for Santa. Most years the grownups would gather for a Christmas Eve party, and we kids would struggle to stay awake late into the night.

At the end of the evening, we’d bundle up against the cold and drive over to the church for Midnight Mass. Early the next morning my brothers and I would clatter down the stairs to the living room to tear into our presents. And then Christmas was over. For the next week or so, we played with our new toys and waited for school to begin again.

In the church calendar, however, Christmas does not end on Christmas Day. It is only the beginning. In an earlier time Christmas lasted for 12 days-a tradition from which we get the famous Christmas song.

Three reasons to extend yourself

Drew, my brother-in-law, understands my son Liam in a way that I cannot. I first realized this about three years ago when Liam was 7. We were sitting at the kitchen table at my sister’s house, and Liam came in seething about his older brother scoring eight goals to his one in the backyard soccer game. I was about to send Liam away from the table until he calmed down, but Drew stepped in. He started a conversation about how when he was younger, it seemed to him that his big brother was better at everything—faster, stronger, smarter.

Your Christmas presence

Presents are a dime a dozen this time of year. But presence—that’s another matter entirely. The ability of family members to be truly present to one another is under siege—from kids’ over-the-top sports schedules, extracurriculars, sometimes even too-abundant homework. The other culprits sucking up family time, however, are devices we’ve bought and introduced into our children’s lives, often heedless of what we are unleashing. Some true stories:

My friend takes her adolescent daughter and her classmate, Susie, out to breakfast after they served at early Mass one Sunday. Susie slumps throughout the meal, head down, hair drooping over her face. “Wow, she’s so shy,” thinks my friend. Finally she realizes the girl has been texting all during breakfast.

Lighting more than Advent candles

The celebration of Advent took on a whole new level of seriousness and meaning for me a few years after I became a father, as my kids reached the age where they could understand what was going on around them. The observation of these days, the colder weather, and the early darkness encouraged a slowing down in my family’s life, and conspired to create tender, quiet evenings.

When my kids were still little, just around the time they had started to walk and talk, we began our Advent tradition. Each evening we’d send the kids off to their bedrooms, then silently stroll through the house, turning off each and every light, eliminating anything that could steal away their attention.

Make holy the family day

My husband and I decided that our family was having trouble keeping the third commandment: Keep holy the Sabbath day. Aside from Mass, we acknowledged that our Sundays didn’t really look that different from any other day of the week. Chores, running kids to activities, last-minute projects from work, errands.

It’s not that what we were doing was so bad; it just wasn’t especially holy. We live in a neighborhood with many Orthodox Jewish families, and Bill and I noted that even as we struggled to give our Sabbath any time at all, they were managing to set aside sundown Friday through sundown Saturday for their Sabbath each week.

Serve gratitude for supper

A recent study out of the University of California-Davis and the University of Miami showed an extremely strong connection between gratitude and high levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, and energy, and low levels of depression. For the study, several hundred people were required to write daily in a diary. One group recorded experiences of their day; a second recorded negative events; and the third made a daily list of things for which they were grateful. The study found that the “gratitude list” group reported increased levels of optimism and lower levels of stress, made more progress toward personal goals, exercised more, and were more likely to feel loved than the other two groups. Parents who want to bring the results of the study into their own home can try one of the following:

• Gratitude journal: Encourage children to write a list of things they’re thankful for that day. If bedtime has too many tasks attached, try right after dinner.

• Gratitude as prayer: Go around the table before a family meal and have each person mention something they are thankful for from the day.

• Count blessings out loud: Parents can model thankfulness by making sure their thankful comments outweigh complaints.

—by Annemarie Scobey  from the pages of At Home with Our Faith, Claretian Publications’ print newsletter for parents on nurturing spirituality in the home. Winner of the 2010 and 2011 General Excellence award from the Catholic Press Association. Here’s a sample issue.

We offer very low rates for parish use, as well as our free Moms’ Night Out monthly discussion guides.

And don’t miss our popular single-page parish handouts on handing on the faith, helping kids understand the Mass, Lent, and Advent.

Follow Homefaith on Twitter.