Thursday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Bill, my husband, had a fun conversation with a friend of his recently in which his friend announced that his youngest child, a son, would soon be working to secure his Ohio driver’s license. With that, Bill’s friend announced, his son would be independent. He could basically take care of himself.
Bill responded, and this is nearly a direct quote: “Forget it, my friend. Once a parent, always a parent. It never ends. Parenting just takes different forms over time.”
When you and your partner are thinking about the possibility of having a baby, you’re not thinking that 42 years later, you’re still parenting. But there it is. And it is a gift, if you are lucky!
I’ll never forget the day I was shopping at a Kroger in Kettering. It’s not my usual grocery shopping spot. I love Dorothy Lane Market (DLM). But I needed something DLM didn’t have in stock. So, I’m walking down this aisle looking for some ingredient that I need for my recipe. And there’s this woman with a couple of kids, and she is supremely irritated. I had no idea what her kids’ supposed infraction was. But she was really mad. She laid into them right there in the aisle. She wasn’t the slightest bit subtle. Other shoppers be damned! She was going to have her word with her “disobedient” children. They were maybe 4 and 6 years old. Something like that.
I went about my shopping, feeling bad for her kids. It’s hard to imagine a grocery store infraction that justified that kind of response.
I head up to the cashier lines, and I encounter her again. She’s still yelling at her kids.
Now, of course, I have no idea what she is up against. Why she is so mad. Could be a lot going on there that is well beyond what I can witness that has put her at her wits end. Or maybe this is just the kind of parenting she was raised in. Maybe this is “normal.” Spare the rod, spoil the child. There can be no margin of error. If your kids defy you, you let ‘em have it. Doesn’t matter if you’re at home or in the care or in a grocery aisle at Kroger.
I know that I am focusing on just a few lines of the reading before us from Luke. But they really struck me.
Parenting. Nursing, burping, diaper changes, baths, highly selective food preferences, spills of this or that, homework assistance . . . on and on it goes. It can be absolutely exhausting.
—Susan Trollinger