Not About the Medal
Monday @ Montpelier:
October 21
What is Maturity, Anyway?
I believe it’s important to let kids feel what they feel but BOY does it take a lot out of me. When faced with a child’s emotional explosion, Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 13 often come to mind: “When I was a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” I’ve always thought of this as meaning that children are immature and selfish and sinful and adults are better than that. Think about it: one of our go-to insults is to tell adults they are “acting like children.”
(Personally, I think that is more of an insult to children than to the adult being targeted.)
My view of children and childhood has dramatically changed over the past 8 years and this interpretation of that verse no longer fits with my philosophy. Firstly: to the dictionary! Maturity is defined as “ripeness; full development; perfected condition.” We tend to associate adulthood with this word, but legal adulthood starts at age 18 before the frontal lobe has reached full development (the part of the brain responsible for such things as speech, problem solving, social interaction, reasoning and emotional behaviors! Yikes). Even after that happens, I can hardly justify attaching a word that means “perfected condition” to the adults I know, myself included.
When I went online to look up the 1 Corinthians 13 passage, I happened upon someone’s exegesis that matter-of-factly included the observation that children are selfish and have a “me first” attitude that needs to be grown out of. Honestly, I can’t think of any child more selfish than many of the adults who have ascended to our most elevated ranks in society—”heroes” of literature, film, thought, and leadership in both churches and government.
Paul’s comment about childhood follows the famous passage about love that makes everyone cry at weddings. Thankfully, this love passage isn’t about human love at all, but about Divine love. We try to achieve its perfection by studying it, talking about it, practicing it, but those are the kind of things Paul says are eventually going to pass away. He is using the metaphor of the growth process from childhood to adulthood as a comparison to our growth in embodying that Divine love—all our imperfect attempts here on earth will reach final maturity when we enter the presence of Love Itself in Glory. Like our child-self, middle-school self, high school self, adulthood is just another another imperfect version of the true wholeness that is our birthright. Adulthood is just another stage of being in the growth process of the “plant” that is a human life.
Gaining, not Losing
In On Stories: and other essays on Literature, C.S. Lewis famously says “When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” In An Experiment in Criticism, he talks of adulthood as “the process of…being valued for what we gain, not for what we lose.” He defines “arrested development” not as “refusing to lose old things” but “failing to add new things”.
Because adulthood does involve a sort of gaining, strengthening, getting bigger, it’s easy for us to think that “smaller” means “less than.” But if we distain or discount the childhood perspective and self, we run the risk of being weaker adults, not stronger: like building new structures without retaining a foundation. That is precarious (and short-lived) business.
There is a volunteer plant growing on top of our chicken coop. A gourd, its looping vines are full of huge yellow blossoms. The maturing fruit is inside that delicate, beautiful flower, and now underneath many of the buds, I can see the swelling of the fertilized seed starting to grow. These fruits are taking their flower’s nutrients, pushing it aside—all part of its natural process. Fruit is just another iteration of the plant; it is not a separate entity from the bud and they cannot exist without each other. If the bloom doesn’t function as it’s meant to, the fruit will never develop at all.
Quiet Poison in the Veins
I fell into the trap of disdaining childlike emotion just yesterday with one of my own children. My boys had played the same sport but when the end of the season came, one got a medal and their sibling didn’t. It was for participation, not performance, so when the “un-rewarded” child immediately started to cry, I dismissed their feeling as selfish and petty. And of course, this emotion was inconvenient for me: It was a roadblock to us getting packed up and moving on to the next thing. And I can’t deny the embarrassment of possibly being seen as the mom of that kid who is so selfish that he’s sobbing over such a silly thing.
I’m not proud of it, but after I told my son that it was ok to be sad (acknowledging emotions, right?) I said that this moment wasn’t about him and that when he took some breaths and calmed down (another way of saying, “get over it”), he needed to congratulate his sibling.
Because my child’s emotions eventually calmed down, I fooled myself into thinking it was all over
.
I sure didn’t expect that a whole 12+ hours would pass and it would come up again. The medal went missing through the night, and it eventually resurfaced with the truth that the un-medaled child had hidden it.
It was my husband who took the time to draw out that they did this because they were embarrassed that they hadn’t won a medal. That word completely took me by surprise. I would never have thought to associate embarrassment with the situation rather than selfishness. Even if I had correctly interpreted his emotional outburst as “I want the thing he has,” I was totally off-base about what the “thing” was: It wasn’t the medal after all, but the assurance that he is enough, even if he wasn’t tangibly recognized in the same way as his brother.
That kind of assurance is something I need. All the time! And despite the coping mechanisms I’ve developed with “maturity,” this need still comes out of me in emotional outbursts. When I am overwhelmed by my children’s needs and my inability to address them all, I start to rage. It might look like anger at them, but that anger is an arrow pointing to fear that I’m not enough or insecurity about the limits of my capacity and my need for help from others.
It was in keeping with this cultural habit of elevating adult emotion as “maturity” and the child’s emotional response as “immaturity” that I dismissed the incident as well as my son’s feelings about it. This certainly hadn’t allowed him to move forward: his feelings moved deeper in, not further away, and my response actually increased the amount of time he needed to fixate on the moment.
That morning, I had been praying from Douglas McKelvey’s third volume of Every Moment Holy. From the prayer “After a Child’s Meltdown” by Andrew Roycroft, I repeated “Thank you that our love gives [our child] a sheltered space in which they can express their heart, their fears, their hurts and confusion, rather than choking those emotions down till they become a quiet poison in their veins. Help us to be steady for them in such moments, not reacting abruptly or unpredictably from our own old wounds—even when we feel overwhelmed by this child’s outburst.”
The prayer also lead me to make this request: “Take us beyond the symptoms of this meltdown and lead us to what is really the matter.” Though I prayed this before the “medal meltdown,” my heart still wasn’t oriented towards that kind of compassionate framing of my child’s experience. Instead, my child led me beyond the symptoms of the matter, not only to what was really the matter, but to what really matters. I wanted him to “get over it,” for conveniences’ sake as well as out of fear that he was being selfish and too attached to material things; it was only by continuing to fixate on that material thing that he finally got through the physical experience to the spiritual reality on the other side.
He didn’t have the experience or the words to name what that other side was—he needed his parents to play our part, too—but I am so grateful that he didn’t just “get over it.” Pursuing the “why” behind his actions helped us to see that his hiding of the medal was just another request for us to listen to what he really wanted—what he really needed in order for that precious growing plant of his unique self to continue its unhindered progression from bud to fruit: assurance that he is loved just as he is.
Maybe the stunted/arrested emotional growth of adults is due to our tendency to undermine the value of childlikeness, merely defining childhood as a selfish, immature, inexperienced human state to be left behind as quickly as possible. How many of our own childhood emotions and reactions were dismissed, tamped down to become the “poison in our veins” that are now painful childhood wounds from which we perpetuate the cycle in the lives of the children around us?
Dare to Take a Chance
Due to our childhood woundings, and the added complication of our own need for emotional regulation, it might be hard to make a dramatic shift in our perspective towards children and their emotions. But it’s worth experimenting with. What if we chose to view their emotional reactions as natural responses that point to deeper things under the surface? If that “deeper thing” is no more profound than “didn’t have enough to eat,” at least we will have found a source more likely to restore them (and us) to equilibrium.
I admit, it’s hard work, and many people choose not to engage with children in any capacity because of these distasteful moments. I’ve heard adults say they are too “selfish” to have or take care of kids. But how can adults experience growth in areas of selfishness, or any number of other emotions, without facing things that trigger them? And who better to lead us to the heart of our emotions than children? Kids are easily triggered, and their reactions are big, but they can also show us how to follow our feelings into growth and health if we can manage curiosity and the humility to listen to them. The emotional reactions of adults are often immediately pushed deep under the surface, becoming immense pressure pockets that inevitably erupt as rage, greed, gluttony, violence, hatred of self and others.
Maybe that’s the sort of emotion my son appeared to be exhibiting as a medal was placed around his brother’s neck. But because of the childlike intuition and strength of being unable just to “let it go” (ie: ignore or bury it deep down), and because we eventually dared to be curious and listen instead of dismissing the incident, his emotional need beyond the physical trigger was able to see light. Once we were able to address the true need he felt, he no longer needed the medal: he already received the lack it was representing to him.
How many of us adults can say the same about the medals we’re collecting? What assurances and rewards are we actually craving that would be far lighter to carry than these shiny bits of temporary reassurance? That kind of freedom is worth the wonder.
