bits and bants vol. 20
parenting ideals vs. reality
Hope you and yours had a lovely Hallowtide this week, ours was nicely fitted into a busy week otherwise, but isn’t that always the case?
I’ve been ruminating a bit about parenting this week. I have a podcast interview next week and I want to bring some of the questions I struggle with, and I’ve also been thinking about this(more on this later!) really interesting thread of thoughts and ideas which I haven’t fully unpacked.
I think what happens to me more than I would like to admit is that I get a bit caught up in my own ideals of what parenting, education, even the adult I’m trying to raise, but then feel discouraged by what my here and now in parenting real, human, individuals actually resembles. I have such lofty ideals and values, yet feel so often unable to bring that about in my confined, restricted, limited life. Which isn’t to say that I am not living out my values and ideals, I am, just in a varying degrees of success. Or my idea of success to be more precise.
This is a me problem, I know. It is definitely my personality to have a lot of information and well-researched understandings of the philosophies, and then be frustrated that the majority of my day is taken up with breaking up sibling squabbles. And when I say majority, I mean so. much. of. my. time. And then I’m foiled with my own lack of patience, energy, or simple ability to somehow mold real humans to lofty ideals on the daily.
This problem seems to have gotten harder to navigate as my children have gotten older. With their growing up they have so many more options, options which I still am responsible for, however. But they have different inclinations, or no inclinations towards these things. I am hampered by not actually having these options in a practical way available, but have the constant nagging thought “But maybe I should be making them available! Driving to the ends of the earth!”
I don’t mean to write simply about my parenting insecurities, because I do know through much experience of the past sixteen years that the important part is loving the child in front of you everyday even when you don’t have any patience or sanity left. But the ideals are still important. They still matter because this will probably be the most important job of my lifetime, I’m passing on culture, understanding, tradition, faith, and hopefully raising kids who know what it means to be human in an ocean of kids whose minds are being molded by TikTok.
Did I work anything out here? Do I make sense? This is riveting newsletter content, folks.
bants:
As mentioned above I’ve been really trying to unpack a lot of the wonderful substack
. I appreciated the article this week on how to apprentice a human. I especially appreciated the points about extended family; something that I think gets short shift a lot of the time in the discussion of “community” but is actually a challenging school of relationship. We don’t choose our extended family and learning to love them can be a huge act of charity and love, but also educational for our children. If we only develop community with our chosen perfect snowflakes and have the choice to simply walk away from them if things get difficult, there isn’t much community there. Now, I know this is very complicated and I don’t mean to simplify it, but I have seen this time and time again in my own life and in those around me.The second article this week from
was a thread from the Front Porch Republic conference which I look forward to watching. I really like the discussion questions because they are questions that I’ve thought about before, and to which there are no easy answers. I wish I had more answers! But I do look forward to further delving into these ideas.Highly recommend listening to
‘s podcast from this past week concerning the Rupnik scandal, and this interview with Larry Chapp. But also totally understand if you don’t want to be completely demoralized with the Church and not listen at all!I had more links, but then my computer crashed because we lost power for a bit, then I lost all my tabs and my terrible memory couldn’t remember what I wanted to share.
reading, watching, what have you:
basically watched nothing because the last couple weeks have been so busy! I honestly do need a good couple days where I don’t see any people and just watch tv. Wait, did I just spend copious amounts of words talking about how this very thing is terrible and I don’t want to teach this to my children?? My existential angst!
I started reading A Canticle for Leibowitz this week and frankly, I feel like I deserve a medal for reading important science fiction! I feel like I’ve been putting this book off for 20 years and I’m finally doing it. I’m reading post-apocalyptic science fiction about monks.
Finally finished Dracula last week, I enjoyed it more than I expected, although I do want to yell at anyone who wants to discuss their plans now. I don’t want to hear about any plans for a year!
Aren’t you glad you come here for such erudite and profound thoughts on such classic works of literature?
Thank you for making it this far. I have no excuse for this menagerie this week, but thank you for reading. Oh! I do want to recommend
roasted cabbage recipe. Much to my children’s chagrin, I am in full winter veg mode over here and thought this cabbage turned out deliciously even though I didn’t have the right cabbage and botched the cooking. The moral of the story is; you can add garlic, lemon, and parmesan to any vegetable and it will taste amazing.conflicted and crazed,
Christy
Listen, all I can read right now is P.G. Wodehouse and The Penderwicks. Sorry WRM friends, I’m just not doing it!
I could also use a day or two to just lie in bed and watch TV, ideals be damned. How about I listen to audiobooks of P.G. Wodehouse? Is that better?
I think about those gaps between my ideals and my lived reality alllll the time, and tend to think of them as being the core of where spiritual growth can happen, if I let it. I guess I have the opposite tendency to you, in that I’m very inclined to just let myself off with characteristic self-indulgence - but finding the sweet spot between pushing myself to live out my values in a tangible way, whilst also having the humility to recognise that I am much more limited than I’d like to believe, seems to be the never ending spiritual battle of my life.
I haven’t looked at those links and will check them out, but your reflection on extended family really resonated! One of the things I am always saying to myself and others is that if we want this “village” we’re always going on about then we have to accept the frustrations we have with the people who make it up. It’s a contradiction to say we want a village and then say we want it to be made up of people who exactly meet our Village Member criteria. And like you say, it is a really important value to model for children, to be in relationship with extended family and to love them in spite of often deep differences, annoyances, hurts etc. (I think about it a lot, but I am still terrible at it - I spend an extraordinary amount of time expressing my incredulity at various extended family members. Must get to Confession 🥴)