Tag: Luke

No Matter What

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2008Leave a comment

Dear Will:

My son is mad at me. It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, but he’s finally old enough (nearly 18) that he is confident in wielding his agency against me. And I’m not enjoying it.

I’ll spare you the gory details. But the essence of the disagreement that provoked his anger went something like this:

Luke: “I’m going to Australia with my girlfriend and her family. It will cost $2,000 or so. I will raise that money myself between now and July and it won’t cost you a dime. I just need your consent.”

Me: “No.”

Luke: “This should be my decision, not yours. When are you going to let me make decisions for myself?”

Me: “When you move out and pay your own way. Until then, you’re not spending $2000 you don’t have to vacation with your girlfriend.”

At this point you can assume that we continued to repeat these same thoughts over and over for several days and that he grew angrier and angrier the more intransigent I became. Finally he presented the following bit of desperate extortion: “If you don’t let me go, I will cease all activity with the Church. Immediately. Starting right now.”

And he has made good on that threat.

As you might imagine, I watch Luke’s rebellion with a mixture of sadness and bemusement. For instance, I wonder how this plays itself out. Does Luke put on a show for a few weeks and then come inching back into the fold, or does he dig in his heals, never to return? Will he retain a semblance of faith, expressed elsewhere and/or in different ways? Or will he drift into a state of agnosticism or indifference? And in all of this, what role, if any, should I take? And what’s my next move?

Now as one who for whatever reason has also chosen to disassociate yourself with the Church, perhaps you recognize a little of yourself in all of this. Or perhaps you merely see Luke as the rational one in the family. On the other hand, maybe you see him making a familiar mistake that’s hard to reverse. (In fact, I would be very interested in knowing your honest perspective on all of this. If you’re willing, drop me a note and let me know.)

Meanwhile, I take little comfort in the fact that throughout the scriptures there are stories of faithful men whose sons for one reason or another rebelled. However, I do take especial interest in the story of the Prodigal Son. In that parable, Jesus tells of a young man who asks his wealthy father for an early inheritance. Flush with cash, the youth “[wastes] his substance with riotous living.” Before long, he finds himself working for a pig farmer and coveting the pig’s food.

When he finally hits bottom, the young man decides to return to his father, beg his forgiveness, and ask to become one of his servants. The surprise (to him) comes during the journey home. Jesus says: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” Note that the son didn’t have to come all the way back. He merely had to head back in the right direction and his father came running to meet him.

So I guess that’s my task: Not to wait for Luke to come back to me, but rather to watch for signs that he is beginning to turn around. When he does, I must show him an outpouring of love. Whether he returns to church is almost immaterial. The important thing is letting him know that, no matter what, I will and do always love him. Now the question is: Can I pull it off?

PW

Just $160 Gazillion Short

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2008Leave a comment

Dear Will:

My children have the misfortune of being raised by a guy who doesn’t have a clue how to become wealthy. The making money part I can do. It’s the accumulating of money that has always baffled me.

No one is more upset about this fact than my son Luke, who now finds himself just weeks away from high school graduation. Luke is scary-smart, and except for a pathological distaste for math homework, he does very well in school. He also has the good fortune of doing very well on standardized tests. Add to that the fact that he has spent six years at the Orange County High School of the Arts (where he receives 10 hours each week in after-school creative writing classes) and you get the idea that he shouldn’t have too much trouble getting into college.

To validate that theory, Luke applied for admission to Claremont McKenna College, the ultra-prestigious private university about a half hour north of here. How prestigious is it? It’s generally regarded as one of the top 15 liberal arts schools in the country. There are only 1,150 students there—TOTAL—meaning that it admits only around 260 students a year (maybe 10% or 11% of those who apply). Needless to say, if you can get admitted to Claremont McKenna, it’s a big deal.

Well, Luke got in. I don’t know if I have ever seen him more excited. And I couldn’t have been more pleased. That is, before I got the letter from the Financial Aid Office. It will cost roughly $50,000 for Luke to attend CMC, they say, including tuition, living expenses, and incidentals. But not to worry, they told me. They would throw in $9,300 to help us out.

Ninety-three hundred dollars. A generous offer, perhaps, but it still leaves me $40,000+ short. And that’s just in Year One.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $160,000 set aside to send my kid to the college of his choice. In fact, I don’t have $16,000. I tried pleading my case to the school, but they weren’t about to contribute enough to make it possible. Luke, of course, is devastated; and I feel as though I arrived at one of those critical dad-moments and was completely unprepared.

But not just unprepared. Inadequate. Helpless. Having fallen so far short of the mark, I found myself unable to conceive of a solution to help him out. I want so badly to send him to this great school, but I can’t pull it off. It is not within my power to do so.

In the many hours of soul-searching I have spent over the last few weeks, I have more than once reflected on the incomprehensible miracle of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. In this life, we cannot begin to approach our Heavenly Father’s divine nature. No matter how hard we try, we will be so unholy that we could not dwell in His presence. Christ, in his infinite love for us, makes reconciliation possible, enabling us to overcome that which we could never overcome on our own. It is as if he came along and paid the $160 gazillion for me. Not because I deserve it (perhaps, in fact, because I don’t). It is His free gift to me—to all of us—which he grants in exchange for our best effort to live the gospel and show our faith in him. No amount of hard work and effort will make us worthy of that gift—rather it is through grace that He makes His Atonement available to us.

Perhaps that analogy is a little strained, but it seems very real to me. This painful, disappointing experience has deepened my understanding of and gratitude for that Great Act of Love. And for that I am grateful. It doesn’t help Luke pay for college, but it does help.

PW

A Note for Your Mirror

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2006Leave a comment

Dear Will:

The other day I took my three kids to Cold Stone for some ice cream while my wife Dana was at her ballet class. The four of us—Luke (15), Bryn (11), Seth (7) and I sat at the table outside snarfing down our ice cream and working together on an ill-conceived crossword puzzle Bryn had to turn in at school the next day.

While we discussed the possible solutions to yet another poorly-written clue, a woman sat down at the table with us and asked to borrow my cell phone. She made a bizarre call, ostensibly informing her son that she was calling him on someone else’s phone and therefore would talk to him later. (Huh?) Then over the next several minutes she commented on my “incredible eyes,” asked if I go to church, and then finally, as I was heading to my car with my children, inquired whether or not I was married.

It was only then that I realized that this woman had been hitting on me.

My 15-year-old, of course, thought it was perhaps the funniest thing he had witnessed since kindergarten. He quite accurately pointed out that I am one of the least likely candidates for any woman’s attention: I’m bald, middle-aged, and travel with a pack of sniping children. I’ve been married for over 20 years. It has been so long since I considered the possibility that anyone might want to flirt with me that this moment seemed like something out of “The Twilight Zone” or “Candid Camera.” He and Bryn laughed and teased me about it all the way home. It was hilarious.

As we unloaded the car, however, I discovered that Seth was in tears. These weren’t the dry tears he has mastered as part of his daily tantrum routine. These were the big, plop-on-the-ground-and-form-puddles kind of tears, complete with the trembling shoulders and uneven breathing that can only be associated with genuine, heartfelt sadness. None of us had any idea what had put him in this state.

Fortunately, by now Dana had returned home, first to hear Luke and Bryn’s report on Dad’s unlikely encounter at Cold Stone, and then to give the kind of comfort to Seth of which only a mother is capable. She held him for a few minutes while he sobbed, telling him that, whenever he felt ready, she hoped he might tell her why he was so sad. So it was that when he composed himself a little, he disappeared into the study, where he wrote the following note:

“It’s what Dad and the others were talking about.
I want you as my mom and NO other!!!”

As you might suspect, once Dana read Seth’s little note she gathered him up once more to reassure him that she is the only mother he will ever have and that she and I would not want it any other way. It had not occurred to the rest of us that this incident had been anything but funny, but to Seth, even joking about some other woman with his dad—no matter how preposterous the notion might seem to just about anyone else—was no laughing matter at all.

What a nice reminder Seth gave us of the importance of a happy, stable home. Not that ours always is either happy or stable, mind you, but even so: Seth would clearly prefer the status quo to any other configuration one might devise. Would that every father had a copy of Seth’s note taped to his mirror to remind him that what kids need more than anything is a safe, familiar place to call home, a place in which they are surrounded by all of the people they love the most.

PW