On Parenting | Sarah Markley

Breakfast for Dinner

December 10, 2012 by Sarah Markley 19 Comments

It happened in the kitchen.

Around a skillet of cheesy eggs and another one full of turkey bacon. Breakfast for dinner only happens when Daddy is home late from work.

Everything else in my life has been calling so loudly. The children’s homework. The house that does not clean itself. The laundry baskets and Christmas trip-planning, the holiday parties that need wrapped hostess gifts and the school programs. The other job I do each day even when I don’t have time.

It all screams so big and loud so that even my own brain cannot fix itself on anything for more than a moment.

And I must write. I must. Not for my blog or my {unwritten} book or for anyone else. But for my own sanity.

And there hasn’t been a stitch of time. Each stolen minute is filled with the loud calls from everything else in my life.

I sat for an hour with a blinking cursor while I answered everyone else’s calls except the ones that would calm the urgency inside.

Tonight I lost all sense of adulthood and crumpled once again into a folded mess of a cardigan, jeans and boots in the dining room. It was then I decided that breakfast for dinner was just as good as anything.

I asked the ten year old to make the eggs and the six year old to empty the dishwasher. And they sensed I was needy. I’d already apologized forty-five-thousand times in the last hour. So they obeyed with wide, empathetic eyes.

I pulled the bacon out of the refrigerator and retrieved the skillets from where I’d hidden them inside the oven.

“Maybe you need a few minutes by yourself, Mama.” The oldest said as she swept crumbs from the counter. “I can make dinner.”

My heart. My grief at my own brokenness. My whole spirit begging not to be a failure as a mother.

It was all that it took to break my sense of urgency and mania.

“No. Let’s do it together.” Burners on. Skillets hot. Bacon dropped onto the heat.

And we moved in the kitchen together. All three of us, two generations of sensitivity and womanhood and youth as we worked together to create a simple meal. She beat the eggs.

“Like this, Mama?” She used a fork instead of a whisk.

“Yes, now add a bit of milk.”

The six-year-old found a step stool to reach the high cabinet. She put the glasses away while her little voice sang a happy song she’d heard on the way to school this morning.

“The princess and the frog…” she sang while her sister poured eggs into the skillet.

There was peace in the making, in the creating and even in the working tonight, beauty in the simplicity of a meal made and a meal eaten together. There was redemption in the whisking of yolk and white and in the sizzling of meat on a stovetop. There was grace in the teaching and in the praise and in the song.

And these girls teach me over and over again what it means to be a woman.

Filed Under: on forgiveness, on grace, on parenting

The Summer We Didn’t Take Swim Lessons

August 15, 2012 by Sarah Markley 25 Comments

My kids have been in summer swimming lessons since age three. We don’t do swim team year round, but I have made sure that for at least the last seven summers, we’ve been at the city pool for lessons.

Except for this year.

In May {or maybe it was June — The end of school is a haze now} I got online and searched for available classes. Nothing was available until the second session which didn’t open for registration until July 1.

I put the date on my calendar and wondered if we really, sincerely needed lessons this year. They just make the summer so busy.

I have what I like to call Activity Guilt. Maybe it’s the sports culture in my geographic area, maybe it’s the media or maybe it’s my own personal hang-ups, but in the last decade plus six months of parenting, I have had to fight the growing monster of giving my children every possible experience, class and lesson at our fingertips.

All the good dancers/pianists/swimmers start at age 3 right? And I’ve missed it somehow. If they haven’t begun it by now, they will never have a fighting chance.

Sometimes thoughts like this gnaw at me.

There is a growing tension in this culture to turn our children into these titans of sport or art and that they must choose their forever path by age nine or ten. And I am fully aware that my “activity guilt” is a result of this culture.

I was the mom who took her 18 month old to music-play time at the city activity center and who signed her 2 ½ year old up for dance {way too early, I might add. She ran laps around the ballet studio and yelled like a banshee}. I’m sure that those early classes did not come from a place of guilt, but from a sincere desire for my tiny person to learn and for us to learn together.

But as they’ve grown and more and more of their friends are in soccer/volleyball/cheer and girls scouts, youth theater and fine arts classes, the pressure to push them into more things is tangible. For the most part as a family we have not succumbed to dozens of activities or weekend-long tournaments of any kind, but many families around us do.

On one hand, I believe there isn’t anything wrong with giving a child the tools she needs to get better in an activity. The life lessons that can be learned from participating in teams and the personal discipline that is learned from working hard in an individual sport can be priceless.

If she’s a natural ballet dancer and we can afford it? Take her to class.

If he loves soccer? Sign him up for AYSO.

If she comes alive when she’s on a horse? Do what we can to help that grow.

But IF we can’t afford it, IF there isn’t a internal love and desire for the sport or art, if the children aren’t getting any down time or IF it’s just too much for our family’s schedule and we’re missing out on family dinners, I believe we should stop and think. We should make choices and it shouldn’t be from a place of guilt.

My older daughter is built like a softball player. She’s got great upper body strength and the few times she’s hit a ball with a bat, she’s connected and it’s gone far. But we had to make a choice. At age ten, believe it or not, there are very few recreational softball teams. Most teams are at some level travel teams that require 3-4 (or more) days a week of commitment.

After a brief conversation, my husband and I decided that kind of life wasn’t worth it for her or for us.

But in our area that decision means she will probably never play high school sports. And we all, even the most guilty feeling of us, need to be okay with that.

July 1 came. I thought about it. I thought about our August and about how much summer should be about trips to the park and the pool and lazy pancake mornings and I simply let the deadline slide by me. Instead, we’ve had time for hikes and trips to the beach with the grandparents and afternoons at home surrounded by books.

And you know what? We’re all just fine.

** On a personal note, my daughters have one year round and one seasonal activity each. That is what has seemed to work for them individually and our family as a whole. I recognize that some children are capable of more and I also recognize that some families may even see our family as doing too much {especially larger families where more children equal more activities}. All in all, choices like this vary family to family and I believe each one of us should make the right choices for our families as we see fit.

How does your family fight against over-scheduling? What have you found that works for you and your family?

Filed Under: on adventure, on family, on parenting, Uncategorized

On Walking Out of an Amusement Park at the End of the Day

July 30, 2012 by Sarah Markley 16 Comments

Invisible nets of parental weariness gather wayward children as they leave the amusements. Fighting bouts of guilt and exhaustion equally, we adults wish we were seven or ten with the structure and dependence and energy of a child.

Oh to be able to fall asleep in the car on the way home and not to be the one who must drive! To not be the one who must work, even now, when we’d rather rest. To not be the one who must wrangle dusty children into bathtubs or kiss little I-don’t-want-to-go-to-bed cheeks for the seventy-second time.

To not have to be in charge.

Sometimes I look at my van keys and wonder, “Who trusted me with these?”

“When did I grow up and stop wanting to go down the water slides?”

“Who gave me the credit cards?”

We are a tired herd of people, stumbling at the end of the day to the parking lot. As soon as they realize their cries of But I Don’t Want To Leave Yet won’t be answered with their fantasies, children ask to be carried on shoulders or on hips the last bit of the way.

For now at least, I think, they want to be directed. They want to be given rules and boundaries. They want the border named TOO MUCH and they want to rest safely behind it. Even if they protest.

{Secretly I want the same thing.}

Maybe I gave myself the van keys. I grew up somewhere between twenty-two and now and entered the collective named Responsible or Dependable or Adult. I entered the place where my actions create a real life consequence. I walked right in and set down my things.

In my heart, I don’t know when I became an adult. The switch was never tangible. All of a sudden here I am. And I drive children all around the county all day long. Every day. And I have deadlines and due dates for bills and a dent in my hood because I ten-miled-an-hour someone at a stoplight.

But sometimes I don’t want to be in charge. I don’t necessarily want to eat Sees on the sofa all day and watch the Olympics. But sometimes I don’t want to be the One Who Knows Where Everything Is in the house. I get tired of being the one who is utterly responsible for walking the dog/doing the laundry/making sure the school supplies are purchased for September.

I want to be the one who falls asleep in the car on the way home.

Someday my own kids will be among the herd of spent parents as they steer their own littles out to the car on a summer night.

But until then I will still drive my kids around town all day every day, I’ll live with the dent in my hood and I will stay awake as the van makes it’s way up Interstate 5 on it’s way home with the most precious of cargo.

I will accept the responsibility of parenting and adulthood with awe and I will remind myself that all of life, even the exhausted, tired days of it are sprinkled with as much joy as pain and as much laughter as weeping.

And I will never cease to be amazed that Somebody, somewhere trusted me with the van keys.

Filed Under: on family, on parenting

For the Times We Don’t Have Any Idea What We Are Doing

June 27, 2012 by Sarah Markley 23 Comments

She got frustrated and I got frustrated yesterday morning. So I threw down the hairbrush and it bounced on the kitchen floor.

Not my best moment, I know.

My oldest daughter is ten-and-a-half and quickly heading toward preteen-ish-ness and I’m quickly heading toward being the mother of a preteen-ish girl.

I have no idea what I’m doing. In fact, I think neither neither she nor I know what we are doing.

There are manuals for getting babies to sleep through the night and books about getting toddlers to eat green veges. There are myriads of parenting seminars and classes one can take about how to be a better disciplinarian but there is no manual for this. Not for this: For the on-the-ground, we-are-both-crying, leave-me-alone times. For the times when we look at each other as mother and daughter and we don’t know how this is supposed to work.

Hair brushing is small compared to the issues we will be dealing with in short years but regardless the issue, it’s all new territory. But there are a few things that aren’t new:

It’s about love {it’s always been about love} and it’s about reconciliation. It’s about grace and it’s about forgiving the major and minor parts of our personalities that will never be easy.

It’s about me gathering her sixty seconds later and apologizing for my unpredictable behavior and telling her she didn’t deserve that.

It’s about her obeying me and then asking for forgiveness with sincerity.

It’s about both of us recognizing that we were wrong.

And it’s about reconciliation.

My hope for my daughters is that they would grow up to be responsible individuals who love God and others and are good stewards of their resources. But they may, no will, have a few hiccups along the way.

They might leave the Church or fall in love with the wrong guy, they might screw everything up, but if in the end of it, we are reconciled to one another the journey to that redemption is of lesser importance than the redemption itself.

We took our girls to see Brave the other day and, unlike other Princess movies {even Tangled}, Brave is not about a prince falling in love with a girl. And it’s not about finding your “true” self or following your heart. Brave is about redemption. It’s about reconciliation. It’s about the broken relationship between a mother and a daughter and how the courage to forgive and be forgiven heals it.

As silly as it sounds, as I held my daughter in the kitchen yesterday morning I thought about that movie and I thought about us and about our willingness as parents to be molded and shaped by our own children. I thought about my own failings as a person and a parent and how we must be brave enough to forgive one another.

That’s right.

When we don’t know what to do, forgive. When we don’t know how to move forward, love. When we don’t know how to fix it, seek to reconcile and redeem.

Lord, help us to have the courage to forgive today and help us to have the bravery to admit our own faults. Give us an appropriate understanding of our own failings but help us to reconcile and redeem the broken things of this world. Continue to bring reconciliation into our families and lives in ways only You can dream up.

Do you ever feel like you need a “manual” for this stage of life? Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you are doing? Does it take a lot of courage to forgive?

Filed Under: on family, on forgiveness, on grace, on parenting, Uncategorized Tagged With: on forgiveness

Summer Mothering Confession

July 14, 2010 by Sarah Markley 42 Comments

Yesterday was one of those lock-myself-in-the-bathroom type of days.

All summer discipline has been jeopardized by late nights and late mornings. The girls have already begun to grate on one another: the younger one too eager to play with the older one and the older one is just plain exasperated. I’ve been trying to pepper down days with sight words for said four-year-old and multiplication practice for my ingoing third grader. We’ve spent days at home, mornings at the local zoo and afternoons at swim lessons.

But no one wants to work at getting along, it seems.

Actually, no one likes to work.

And frankly, neither do I. At least not during the summer.

So my discipline lags and my daughters naturally follow suit. There is whining and crying and an occasional Get-Outta-My-Room! There might even be some scissors used in inappropriate ways, some left-out-of-the-container play-doh and many, many spilled cups of yogurt/water/diet coke {mine} and dog dishes. No one, not even me, is exhibiting much self-control around my house.

Oh I know it’s my own fault. I can see it on their faces.

By the middle of the afternoon yesterday, after I’d shut myself in my bedroom to dial off an emergency call to my husband. {So you know, I reserve these for the very most worst days totally only about 3 or 4 every year}

My littlest one followed me into the room. So I retreated one step further into the master bathroom, sat on the toilet seat and locked the door.

“I just can’t do this,” I tell him.

She pounds on the door.

“They are out of control. I’m out of control. That’s why I’ve locked myself in the bathroom,” I confess.

I’d like to say he calmed me down but he didn’t. He was just as stressed out at work as I was at home.

End Call. This wasn’t helping.

I took a deep breath, wiped the sweat from my neck and opened the door. My four-year-old stood outside the bathroom angry-crying that I wasn’t listening to her when I was on the phone with her father.

All it took was a few minutes by myself to get myself together. I guess I’d hit my “rock bottom” of summer parenting because I was ready to do whatever it took to fix the problem I’d created. I understood that the attitude in my home began with me. If I could be kind and calm with my words, they might be too. If I was disciplined, they would be more prone to it as well.

“Okay girls,” and I called them into my room. We sat on the floor and I doled out a few new rules, a couple consequences for what had gone on that day and I also confessed my own wrong.

I apologized for yelling and for allowing things to go on as long as they had. Then the three of us prayed together.

And then somehow in the mess and noise of the afternoon, a calming balance took over each one of us. We spent the rest of the day in {relative} harmony. Honestly.

There was one or two mishaps, but nothing like what had gone on before.

Tomorrow might be a different story but for now I’m working on my own attitude and discipline and watch it trickle down to my daughters.

Do you have a parenting confession?