Tag: Bryn

The Sort of Thing Good Parents Do

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2007Leave a comment

Dear Will:

My daughter is standing beside me—right over there—waiting for me to make a difficult decision so that she doesn’t have to. It’s the sort of thing I do too often: I tell my kids what to do instead of letting them figure it out on their own. It’s one of the things that makes me an ineffective dad.

But tonight—ever so briefly—I actually exercised some restraint. It was an imperfect effort at best inasmuch as I started to tell her what to do before catching myself, but at least this time I showed a little more forbearance than usual. For once it occurred to me (as no doubt it occurs to most parents on a regular basis) to ask her to lay out for me her various options, even while knowing that none of them was any good. Then I asked her which solution sounded like the best one to her.

I know what you’re thinking: Duh. This is the sort of thing that good parents do. They guide their children and help them learn to make decisions for themselves. But what I too often do is swoop in to solve the problem for them, depriving them in the process of an opportunity to grow and learn. I read somewhere that we males have a strong tendency to do that in relationships. We’re always trying to fix things, even when no one has asked us for a fix. We come up with solutions at times when maybe we should just shut up and listen.

It occurs to me that this little family vignette—of absolutely no consequence in the eternal scheme of things—is really not all that different from the way God oversees the activities of his children in this world of ours. The cynic or the agnostic wonders why He doesn’t simply intervene in the affairs of men and women on earth, eliminating the suffering, counteracting evil, solving our problems for us. “If He’s all powerful,” the thinking goes, “then why does He allow so much bad stuff to happen?” The flaw to that reasoning, of course, is that it fails to recognize that life has much more purpose than to get us from birth to death without too much misery. In fact, we are here upon this earth to learn for ourselves, to grow and become, to face tests and challenges and (one hopes) come out the other side better people for the experience. Were God always to intervene—to solve our problems for us in the same way I tend to for my children—there wouldn’t be much point to our earthly existence at all.

Meanwhile, my daughter has picked up on some subtle behavioral clues (namely, that I’m typing and not talking to her any more) and she’s headed off down the hall, perhaps to mull over her options (or more likely to see if she can get my wife to make the decision for her instead). I think ultimately I know which way this is going to go—as God pretty much knows ahead of time what our next move will be as well. Hmmm. Perhaps there’s food for thought in that as well.

PW

Who’s the Moron?

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20073 Comments

Dear Will:

From where I sit in my upstairs office, I look out of a large window onto our backyard. I get a fairly clear view of the overgrown trees and the patch of now-bare turf Seth uses for home plate when he plays his imaginary baseball games. And on a day such as this one, which started out chilly but has since turned sunny, I can also see Barnum, The Moron Dog, relaxing in the midday sun.

Although he normally lives as if to embrace his Moron Dog moniker, today he looks up at me as if to say: “Who’s the moron?” He knows—because he hangs around here—that I am not likely to move from this chair for several hours as I pound furiously on my laptop, alternately working, emailing, and writing a letter to you. Barnum, meanwhile, will spend the time until the kids return from school moving from one patch of sun to the other, carefully shifting his nap in order to follow the warmth.

If you have stayed up too late working (as I did last night) and have too much to do (as I do today), it’s easy to think that the dog’s life is a good one. Let’s review Barnum’s daily routine:

  • 6:20 a.m. – Take a walk with Bryn. Relieve yourself with enthusiasm.
  • 6:40 a.m. – Hang out briefly near the kitchen hoping for a handout while the humans eat breakfast and make lunches.
  • 6:50 a.m. – Give up on the snack and go back to bed.
  • 6:52 a.m. – Nap until bedtime.

There may be a little more to it than that—including an occasional growling, come-play-fetch-with-me frenzy—but that is the essence of it. As the saying goes, it’s nice work if you can get it.

In truth, I wouldn’t last a day on Barnum’s schedule. There is just too much to do. As an alternative, however, I have come to revel in the divine mandate to set aside one day a week as the Lord’s Sabbath. In Exodus 20 we read:

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

I admit that when I was younger, I found the practice of “keeping the Sabbath day holy” both annoying and restrictive. However, when I started college I decided that if it qualified as one of the Ten Commandments it might be worth a try. The short version of this story is that I discovered, even as a UCLA freshman, the sweet, restorative benefits of giving myself permission to take it easy on Sundays. Now these many years later, I look forward to Sundays because I have come to rely on the chance to not do, and I find that as a direct consequence I am actually much more effective at the doing during the other six days of the week.

In our increasingly hectic existence, it has become somewhat uncommon for people to indulge in a day of rest. No doubt the practice seems somewhat decadent, not too different from a dog lolling in the sun on a glorious afternoon. Which, when you think of it, sounds pretty good indeed.

PW

Pretty Heady Stuff

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2006Leave a comment

Dear Will:

It’s not often that a child gets to live out his or her childhood fantasy while still a child, but that is essentially what is happening to my daughter Bryn. Bryn, who is 12, is a ballerina, with quite a bit of talent (if you are willing to take the word of her various teachers over the years). When she was just 3 years old, Bryn started taking dance classes and appeared as an angel and a mouse in her ballet school’s annual Nutcracker production (which in many ways was more like a recital since the only ones in attendance were family members). I’m sure you can envision the contribution of the 3-year-old mice and angels in such a production—they stole the show every time.

Since that first performance, Bryn started collecting nutcrackers. She now has a couple of dozen (or so) of various shapes and sizes. And over the years, she continued appearing in that same annual production, graduating from angel to bon bon to flower girl along the way. All of the girls longed some day to be given the role of Clara, the nightgowned girl around whom the entire production revolves. No doubt it has ever been thus.

When Bryn’s ballet school was sold last year, we were forced to find her a new place to take her lessons. We settled on the Academy of Ballet Pacifica, Orange County’s resident ballet company, because it was affiliated with some of the most famous dancers in the world (ever heard of Ethan Stiefel or Amanda McKerrow?) and because her teachers continued to insist that she had a natural talent that might best be cultivated at a more serious conservatory.

Of course, it’s one thing to stand out in a smallish, neighborhood ballet school and quite another to try to make your mark in an academy that draws students from all over Orange County and beyond. To our delight (and my bemusement), when we got to the Academy we discovered that Bryn really is as good as we had been told. Even in a room full of hard working ballerinas, Bryn seemed to stand out.

Thus we were not entirely surprised to learn recently that Bryn has been cast as Clara in Ballet Pacifica’s December production of the Nutcracker. This production will include several professional-level dancers and is certainly a notch above anything she has done before. Rather than appearing a couple of times before family and friends at the local community college theatre, this time Bryn will be dancing several nights throughout December at the Irvine Barkley Theatre.

Pretty heady stuff for a 12-year-old, don’t you think? (Pretty heady stuff for her parents as well, I suppose.) Alas, the consequence of this great honor is that now Bryn will be dancing more than ever, with weekend rehearsals to go along with the 10+ hours of weekly dance classes she is already taking. It’s too much, really—more than I would ever stand for were it not for her manifest passion and talent.  At the same time, I am troubled by the implications as more and more of her time and attention is devoted to ballet and less to school and family and church activities. I worry about her becoming one dimensional, about her wearing out her tiny body, about her losing touch with friends and disconnecting with the variety that should enrich the life of any 12-year-old girl.

More than anything, I pray that she recognizes that she has been given a rare gift, and that that recognition inspires in her not the conceit of a diva but rather the humility of a girl who sees in her talent a direct connection with her Heavenly Father.

PW