Little Bites of Blessing

A Thanksgiving reflection on the many things I have to be thankful for

Image Credit: Leonardo.ai

Dear friends,

When I was growing up, my mom kept a little plaque over her desk: “Motherhood is like getting pecked to death by a duck.”

Now that I am in her position, I see what she meant. The challenges of motherhood—or fatherhood, or parenthood, particularly when said parent is the primary caretaker for small children—are seldom large, traumatic events. It’s the chronic blunt-force trauma of the accumulated stresses that are endemic to the job.

It’s the daily grind of the treadmill of dishes and vacuuming and tidying and toilet rings and lawn mowing and meal prep and laundry—a marathon race against entropy in which you are always losing. It’s the never-ending mediation of small disputes that would be comical in their pettiness if they didn’t require your constant attention. It’s the challenge of figuring out how to simultaneously meet the personal, emotional, behavioral, and educational needs of multiple children at multiple different ages and vastly different stages of development. It’s the questioning of one’s judgment after each small parenting decision and wondering whether this decision is making it more or less likely that my children will end up needing therapy someday. (Hint: as I wrote last week, they almost certainly will, regardless of what I decide. That’s either depressing or liberating. Take your pick). It’s sitting down to take five minutes to write, or think an uninterrupted thought, or just zone out, and immediately having a two-year-old grab your index finger and insist that there is something urgent—URGENT!—that requires your attention.

In sum, it’s the duck bites.

Duck bites take an outsized amount of space in my reflections about parenting. For one thing, writing about these daily annoyances is easier than writing about the daily joys because the annoyances so much more readily come to mind when I’m trying to therapeutically process, and writing is for me largely a cheaper substitute for a shrink. For another, they’re easier to write about entertainingly than the joys, which usually have a “you kind of had to be there” feeling to them. For example, to describe how my two-year-old took advantage of my momentary inattention (because I was attempting to unload the dishwasher) to make his way up to the upstairs bathroom, climb from the garbage can to the toilet to the bathroom counter, get into the bathroom sink (fully clothed), turn on the water, grab every hand towel within reach, and then use these sopping hand towels to attempt to wash himself, the counter, and the mirror (all the while causing a small flood on the floor) before I finally noticed the suspicious silence and raced upstairs to intervene, brings to mind a vivid picture that any parent can probably identify with (whether from experience or from trying to avoid the experience), and any non-parent can laugh with a kind of good-natured schadenfreude and congratulate themselves on their lives’ relative simplicity. To say that that same two-year-old later (after I had thoroughly changed him and attempted to clean up his mess) reached up for me to pick him up, nuzzled his head against my neck, and whispered, “I yuv you daddy,” takes a lot less time and is a lot less interesting to read about.

However, if I just left my annals of parenting as simply a compendium of duck bites, that would be deeply misleading. Many look at the prospect of parenting and see only certain drudgery and an uncertain future (which, coupled with the high cost of child-rearing these days, could explain why approximately one third of Gen Z is not planning on having kids). But if all you see is the drudgery, you miss out on the fact that parenting is in fact the greatest long-term investment that it is possible to make. And even if it is a long-term investment, it pays dividends in the meantime that more than compensate for the duck bites, if only I will stop to notice and remember them.

So, in honor of American Thanksgiving, here (in no particular order) is a small selection of these parenting “dividends”—the moments of parenting that not only make me thankful, but fairly make my heart burst with joy.

I am thankful for the dance parties. When I was about three or four, I can remember when the song “The Jolly Beggar” from Lifescapes: The Emerald Isle (if you want to experience this magic for yourself, you can listen here; “The Jolly Beggar” starts right at minute 14:00) or Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line” came on my parents’ CD player. I was transported. My feet started moving. The sheer joy of the music was impossible to contain, and I wouldn’t have wanted to if I could have. My dancing was never anything beautiful; it was never anything other than ridiculous. But it was the ridiculousness of pure joy. When I grew older, the world became a less magical place. Music could no longer overwhelm my senses and make my feet move just for the joy of movement. Until I had kids. Now, once again, I can remember why the music once made my feet move and my hands shake and my body spasm, because my kids still know what I had forgotten: that the heart of music is joy. And as long as I have these little guides to unstop my jaded ears, I will happily dance like a fool whenever I have them to lead me.

I am thankful for cousin time. I grew up without being very close to most of my cousins. My closest cousin—and still one of my best friends—ironically lived farthest away, so I saw him only twice a year (and that almost entirely due to the heroic efforts of his mom—my aunt—to prioritize family, even from the other side of the country). But my siblings and I have grown up with a deep appreciation of the importance of family, and even as we have moved to different cities and different political or religious worldviews, that commitment has not changed. So it is one of my greatest joys these days to see my children’s eyes light up when they hear that we are going to visit their cousins, to hear them beg to spend the night, to know that they know that they have a family who will be there for them even beyond the confines of our four walls. I love seeing them becoming best friends with their cousins, colonizing my parents’ basement with labyrinthine forts just like my siblings and I did years ago, and growing up knowing that they are loved. I love becoming closer to my own siblings as we watch our kids grow together, and the arc of intergenerational healing continues into the next generation. In an age in which, due to shrinking family sizes and growing rates of family estrangement, a loving extended family is something that fewer and fewer people will ever know, seeing my children grow up knowing and loving their family—all their family—fills me with an inexpressible joy.

I am thankful for the joy of learning. As a teacher, one of the joys of homeschooling is the privilege of being present to witness those lightbulbs go on. This last week, I was working on multi-digit addition with my oldest daughter. The culmination of her lesson was to add 2,352,034 + 3,430,342. We figured out that it would take her a bit over a year to do it just by counting. By adding digit by digit, she successfully solved it in fifteen seconds. I asked her afterwards (with genuine excitement) “Wasn’t that cool?!” And she answered, with equally genuine childlike sincerity, “Yeah, it was. Thank you, Dad.” And she gave me a big hug.

I am thankful for the Little House books. At the beginning of this school year, we started reading through a chapter of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books every night before bed. It was a bit slow at first. Wilder’s unfamiliar world required mental work to even be able to comprehend, much less to enter: a world where electricity was only seen in bolts of lightning tearing across the summer sky, where transportation was at the speed of walking feet, where food was grown or raised or hunted or fished rather than bought from stores where it magically appeared shrink-wrapped, where the only resources (and limits) for children’s entertainment were those of imagination. Now, we are halfway through Little House on the Prairie, and every night the girls beg for another chapter after our first is done. I do not mean to blindly romanticize the past; I am grateful for indoor plumbing and modern medicine. But I am also grateful to see a window into a world where work was meaningful—where there was an obvious connection between your tasks and the food you ate—where the rhythms of nature directed the rhythms of life. I never would have seen this world if not for the rapturous eyes of my daughters, snuggled close beside me, and begging, “Please, daddy, can we read some more?”

I am thankful as well for the Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. (Note: I am referring to the original books, not the BBC or Disney film adaptations, about which I am, at best, ambivalent). If Wilder’s books provide a window into the world as it is, Lewis’ books show the world as it could be. As I have argued elsewhere, I think that the Chronicles of Narnia are better understood less as children’s adventure stories or even fantastical fairy tales than theologically informed dreamscapes: a chance to experience the world as it would be, if all were as it should be. If nobility in character resulted in victory in battle; if the groanings of the natural world for redemption were made audible; if the arc of history consistently bent towards justice, and if faith were made sight (at least every few generations), then we all would live in Narnia. In the meantime, Narnia provides a reminder to me that there is a better world out there: a world worth hoping for, working for, and waiting for. And it has been thanks to my daughters and their insistence over this past year on listening to all seven books on repeat that I have been able to rediscover that world, and to understand this world through the lens of that one.

Finally, I am thankful for VeggieTales. For anyone who didn’t grow up with them, it may be hard to understand the allure of anthropomorphic vegetables singing ridiculously catchy songs about vaguely Judeo-Christian values. For me, it is a trip down memory lane to discover that after 30 years, I still know all the words to “The Bunny Song” from Rack, Shack, and Benny (a VeggieTales take on the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), or can quote the tale of Flibber-o-Loo (a VeggieTales rendition of the parable of the Good Samaritan) near verbatim. More importantly, though, it is a chance to remember the lessons that they taught. Specifically, I think of Madame Blueberry: the selfish berry who was “so blue/she didn’t know what to do,” and tried to cure her existential angst by shopping at Stuff-Mart until she learned that “a thankful heart is a happy heart;/ I’m glad for what I have, that’s an easy way to start/ For the love that He shares/ As He listens to my prayers/ That’s why I say thanks every day.”

Is it cheesy? Without a doubt. Is it obvious? Yes, but it’s the kind of truth that is so obvious that it is easily forgotten without regular reminders. Is it true? For me, it is. There are many things about life right now that I don’t understand and that I would change if I were to become Bruce Almighty for a day (although, like Bruce, my hunch is that I would quickly discover that I didn’t know nearly as much about what was good for me as I thought I did). But when I stop to look at the blessings that sprinkle my life, even in the middle of the duck bites, I know (as my mother-in-law reminded me last week after she witnessed one of our dance parties) that I am indeed a rich man.

I hope that this season is truly a thanksgiving season for you, wherever you are, and whatever your circumstances, and that you have a heart that is thankful, happy, and full.