Remembering the Something More

What’s on your ultimate parenting to-do list? Here are just a few items on mine:

• Give my daughter a perfect, wonderful, perpetually happy, magical childhood.
• Make sure she has every opportunity necessary to become the best, most radiant, most confident, most joyful version of herself.
• Never harm her in any way or cause her any type of emotional pain, psychological scarring, or damage of any kind.

Does your list sound like mine?

If so, please join my support group for moms setting ourselves up for total failure.

No parent in history has ever achieved any single item on the list above, no matter how hard they have tried, and the pressure of a list like that can be crippling.

Sometimes when the pressure of being a mom gets to me, I do a little mental exercise:

I try to think of a few remarkable, kind, talented, extraordinary adults that I know who grew up in terrible circumstances.

I know some people like this. Don’t you?

Don’t you know people who are big-hearted and generous and creative and joyful and yet grew up in abusive homes, or were abandoned by parents, or were children of an ugly divorce, or had parents suffering from addiction, or grew up in any number of other terrible circumstances?

Stop reading and think about it for a minute.

Haven’t you met someone who, upon learning about their childhood, you thought, how in the world did you become such an unbelievably beautiful person?

I bet you’ve met a few people like this. Maybe you are this person.

Maybe you’ve even met someone who grew up in the midst of suffering that is almost foreign to your imagination, growing up in a war zone or a concentration camp or in extreme poverty fighting each day just to survive.

Some of these people live the rest of their lives scared, in pain, tethered to the ground. But somehow, some of these people manage to show their unbelievable, remarkable, radical beauty to everyone around. These people make me think of what Thomas Merton writes in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

These people might be the exception, not the rule. I’m not sure.

But either way, their existence proves a very valuable thing that I try to always remember.

It’s not that childhood or parenting doesn’t matter. It’s that there is so much going on within the human person outside of and beyond parents.

I think some of us parents, (and conventional wisdom, and modern parenting advice) actually have a problem with giving ourselves too much credit for our kids. We take ourselves too seriously, and it’s not good for anyone.

Betty Smith has a beautiful observation in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the end of chapter 8. She is talking about Francie Nolan, the 11-year-old protagonist, and writes that she is the result of both of her parents, her experiences, and also “something more.”

She was all of these things and something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only- the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life- the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”

Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I believe in the magic of this something more. Everyone has it. No human can give it to you. People can suppress it or silence it, but no one can take it from you.

I think it is maybe this part of us that does not rely on perfect parenting or a perfect childhood. It is this part that can even be strengthened by suffering and adversity. It might not be that hardship adds to the something more, but times of suffering can give a person courage to truly show this something more to the world.

When I get stressed, I remember that the best, most beautiful, most unique parts of my daughter will have nothing to do with me. And that is actually very good news.

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