“It is not your job to form your children.”

My spiritual director spoke those words to me in the middle of our last session. They sank deep and far. I teared up and had to breathe deep.

My eldest daughter is a spirited creature. She is extroverted and loves life. We are such a wiring mismatch, her and I, that parenting her is my greatest challenge. I keep a visual list on my fridge of negative labels turned positive, as a reminder that God made her unique and I want to parent in a way that doesn’t shame her for being who she is, even if it is so other from the way he made me that it takes lots of creative thinking and boundaries to find a way to make life work well enough for both of us.

Wild becomes energetic.

Stubborn becomes persistent.

Loud becomes enthusiastic.

Needy becomes a deep desire for connection.

Needless to say, I am constantly re-evaluating how I parent her. Partly because everything I know of my experience and what I would’ve wanted or needed as a child doesn’t work with her. When I was two years old and was suddenly displaced by the birth of twins, all I wanted was lots of physical touch, snuggles, and somebody to be present more often with me in my distress. When my second daughter was born, I was highly aware of the potential developmental trauma such change brings. At the time my eldest was two, and she lay on the floor yelling at me, “Go away. I want to be alone. Don’t touch me!” So how can I provide her with secure attachment when the methods I know to offer it are not what she wants?! These are the types of questions I constantly face monthly, weekly, sometimes daily.

The result is that I often feel like a failure. Or at least feel like I’m coming up short. When I sit on the couch in the afternoon and long to just be introverted and read my book but my four-year-old is begging me to play with her, she’s bidding for my attention in a way that fulfills a valid need for her. Playing alone exhausts her. Yet playing with her exhausts me. So many times I see her need, and my own need prevents me from being able to fulfill hers. What am I to do with this? I go back to the drawing board and try something new again. Maybe attempt number seventeen will reveal something different.

The result of all this is that often I face anxiety about how my children will turn out. I have ideas about what I want them to be.

I want them to be kind and respectful.

I want them to be able to manage their bodies and not hit people at school.

I want them to be emotionally intelligent and able to communicate their needs.

I want them to work hard and not be entitled.

I want them to have a varied diet and eat healthy foods.

I want them to learn to self-sooth and channel their overwhelming emotions and energies in non-destructive ways.

I could go on.

Working to accomplish these goals often winds up feeling like a series of never-ending battles. When I experience resistance and whining and children being dismissed to go upstairs so my husband and I can finish our dinner without meltdowns over what they don’t want to eat, I have to wonder: What am I doing wrong? Am I supposed to be fighting this battle? What if I have children that never eat dinner the way I think they should? What if…. fill in your own blank.

My husband likes to remind me, she’s only four. Almost five. All of this is probably developmentally normal and appropriate. Yet still I have anxiety. I have to work to resist the shame.

What this reveals is that somehow I have internalized it is my responsibility to shape my children, and if they turn out “wrong,” somehow it will be my fault.

Woah. Slow down. Holy crap. I didn’t realize that’s what I was carrying. But when my spiritual director spoke those words to me, I suddenly realized that I had been carrying that very burden.

I’ve learned a lot about boundaries over the past decade. With my husband I have mostly learned this lesson that he is not mine to form. His journey is his journey to walk. It’s not for me to control. I have a responsibility to set boundaries and communicate when his yard starts to encroach on my yard in unhealthy ways. And vice versus. But it’s not my job to walk his journey for him. Even if I tried, I can’t. And it would just make a mess of things. His journey is between him and God.

But with my children, my role is different. Don’t I have a different responsibility to them than I do to my husband? My husband and I are equals. It’s a mutual relationship. With my children, we are the authorities. All of this is true, but that still doesn’t mean it’s my job to form my children. It’s impossible for me to do so, and trying will only frustrate us both.

It is my responsibility to show up for my children, to provide attachment security, to model my own journey in a way that gives them opportunity to learn. It’s my job to set boundaries or guardrails on what is acceptable and not acceptable in our home. It’s my job to provide security and consequences when those guardrails are crossed. I’m not saying I’m off the hook as a parent. In many ways my responsibility is just as great as ever. But what I am realizing is that I have to completely surrender the results and the control of what happens from these efforts to someone bigger than I am.

God formed my children. He is forming them now. He will continue to form them till they take their last breath. They might choose to participate in that forming. They might not. But he holds them, either way. I get to surrender to the process.

My spiritual director offered me this practice that she adapted from a passage by Henri Nouwen.

1. One turns this moment of surrender over to God, giving up control to allow God’s plan to unfold.
2. One waits with openness and trust in our living God.
3. One is present in this moment, hopeful and expectant in God’s grace and action in one’s life.
4. One lives in expectation that new things are happening for them beyond their own imaginings.

The truth is, I can’t control my children. They are who they are. They will become who they will become. I will have some influence on that process—for good or ill, or perhaps a little bit of both—but to think I can control it is foolhardy. It will only make me resent my children or my children resent me. It will tangle up my own ego in what I project to be “God’s will,” when it might just be my own fallen ideas of what should be. Even if I could form them, my imagination isn’t big enough to imagine what they can and will be. Whatever comes, it will be beyond me.

The spiritual journey is to rest in that.

It is not my job to form my children.

What a relief. And what a courageous act of trust.

“Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.”

-Henri Nouwen