Things I'm Happy About

Below you will find a shameless list of Happy Happenstance and Real Rewards and brow-sweat flinging Phew! Findings. As I keep going on and on about, this is it for us. It's a sort of Finals Week for the Parents, Class of '07. So here it is. This is what I'm glad about.

1. All three kids understand the difference between ranting at general injustice (or bad luck or momentary disappointments or personal pain), and whining. In this house we do not do whining. It displays a lack of gratitude, and a deficient perspective on the world and one's own place in it, and on top of that, it's bad manners.

2. See this painting? It's by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and it's called L'Innocence. I am very pleased to take note of the fact that all three of our offspring have been able to learn the difference between being an unaware child (no matter what your age is) and being deliberately innocent. They know the difference between art (which this is, despite its politically incorrect draping of the subject) and things that are lewd, titillatingly, and gratuitous. So now we live with young adults (for just a little while longer) who protest (loudly) when the Globe Trekker or Rick Steves have to use a fuzzing filter just to show museum art or people on a beach. That's stupid. The kids know it.

3. It is Ernest Hemingway who is credited with the saying that "courage is grace under pressure." I note with pleasure, that each in his (and her) own age-appropriate, still-growing, and also firmly rooted way is a young adult who believes this. They admire people with self-control. They are becoming people with self-control. Recently, our young giants have been faced with older, and yet not wiser people. And they have been asked to listen to the lack of wisdom being imparted to them in some truly unpleasant ways lately. This has been a test, and I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen. Hallelujah, raise your hands, my kids have behaved with courage. In such pressure as that, they have neither stooped to disrespect nor compromised their integrity.

Three points of such gratitude and reward that I hardly know what to do with myself when I think about it. So many, many, many times we didn't know what we were doing. We just faced in the direction of stubbornly cheerful gratitude and optimism, and politically incorrect exposure to all the arts and creative endeavors we could find, and we tried to set a courageous example no matter what the pressures were. We prayed for wisdom. We said things like "we've never run out of food and money at the same time." (Yes, it was that dicey sometimes.) We believed the triad: God is good, God can do anything he wants, and God loves me - and we believed the corollary: this, therefore, whatever it is, is really and truly okay.

I do not write (and then publish) these thoughts in order to boast of my own triumphs -- I write (and publish) them to tell any parent of younger children who might be reading that even when it looks like there is no way - no hope - no prayer - no chance that this bit you're in right now - that even THIS will turn out for the best, you have a reason to keep believing. Face toward the Light and bring your kids along. They'll get the habit of the Sun on their faces. I promise.