Hannah and her husband started parenting on the right foot. Stable tech jobs in Silicon Valley, child-safe home, and hearts stoked with unconditional love. They’d read all the books, prayed all the prayers, and gotten everything they could do, done.
Best practices for language development: check.
Training in emotional intelligence: check.
Saving money for college: check.
They arranged five-year-old Mia’s world the way they arranged everything else: deliberately, thoroughly, determined not to make a mistake they’d come to regret. They were, as my daughters would put it, parentmaxxing.
My coaching engagement with Hannah started six months earlier. By the third month, coaching a promising leader had turned into coaching a parent. She was hungry to learn, and her husband would chime in now and then to make sure he was tracking too. Once we had built enough trust, I allowed myself to speak more freely.
“You will never be perfect parents,” I said.
“Of course!” they said, a little annoyed I’d even bring up a truth so obvious.
“Neither should you be,” I added.
“Of course,” they said, for they knew the perils of perfectionism.
“Even if you could be,” I added, “You see, your child is in dire need of imperfect parents.”
I might as well have said something in Klingon. I elaborated, and I paraphrase here:
“What your child needs from you is not your best self, but your real one. You will fail to love your child some days. Your child needs that. You committing blunders. You being sorry. You saying sorry. You failing them. You failing each other. You failing yourself. And then recovering from that failure. Sometimes not. Sometimes just fucking up completely with no redemption in sight.”
WALKING OFF THE MAPS
After I defended my doctoral dissertation on how children, youth, and adults experience the meaning of life, my mentor and “my American dad,” Prof. Roy Naden, told me, “If you ever want to teach others about parenting, now is your time. Before you have kids. Once you have them, you’ll realize you don’t know how to do it.”
Roy was right. Since then, I have coached more than a thousand parents and grandparents, across the religious and philosophical spectrum, on how to raise grounded and inspired children and practice the art of disappearing, leaving the world to them. My confidence, founded or feigned (I can no longer tell which), survived all of them. It did not survive my own two daughters.
My wife and I raised Leta, now 28, and Ena, 31, as good pastor’s kids, running around the sanctuary. They grew into curious atheist teenagers. In the pastoral trade, that counts as a failed performance review. I counted it as a test drive. Then they walked off the maps of what they thought they were supposed to think, feel, be, or do, into the treacherous landscape of life, growing into ordinary mystics and discovering for themselves how little they, and not just their old man, know.
Roy also told me that, somewhere around sixty, not knowing would turn from a liability into an asset. He was right about that too. If I ever wrote a book on parenting, I now fantasize, I’d call it Beautiful Unknowns: The Muck and Glory of Raising Good People.
Let me make a claim. Parenting is simpler than it seems. It is about conveying to our children, “I loved life. Now it’s your turn to love life.” That’s it. Nothing else needs to be said. Or done.
Parenting success is the succession of one’s love story. (When I say parents, I also mean grandparents.)
Simple, yes. And yet I have seen it a thousand times. Parents wake up one day and say, “Oh crap, I didn’t pass the magic of life to my child!”
YOU THINK ABOUT THEM AT NIGHT
We are in love, with life and with them. Let’s admit it.
Remember the astonishment of their first appearance, of their jerky movements, their first sleep. Remember the vision of your child’s metamorphosis from a bag of leaking bodily fluids to an adult of consequence in the world. Remember watching their chest rise and fall, and realizing that a part of your heart had left your body forever.
Then come the worries, the guilt about things left undone, the doubts and the regrets, all of it inside the seeming banality of daily life.
At the same time, there’s light hanging in the air, and there’s music everywhere, moving us all along, bright day to bright day, dark night to dark night. Muck and glory. And we want our children to “get it.” That life is a gift, beyond measure. That it appears, and overwhelms, and then moves on in the lives of others, tying us all together and making us all immortal.
So we turn to the books and videos of perfect parenting, fun parenting, relaxed parenting. We picture our children with safe families, successful careers, and actualized selves, whether they are newborn or in midlife. In the darkness of our bedroom, we weigh and plan our next moves.
By day, we photograph everything. Ten thousand pictures on our phones, and no story holding them together.
BEYOND MONEY AND MORALS
Now the good news: We are not alone.
Think of your ancestors, looking at you from the past, rooting, with their lives palpitating in your veins. A hundred generations of lovers. Yes, they were foolish, misguided, and self-centered. But they were also kind, and ridiculous, and generous. They forgave, and now we forgive them.
What would they love for you to pass on?
If you can hear their voices — try, and you might — you will hear those who took a risk to believe that love will have its way. They made an unreasonable wager. The others? Their voices get lost. Time washes away what matters less.
Parenting, at its essence, is about passing on this wager of love.
It doesn’t happen by passing on the money, the real estate, and the honor. Those are incidental. It doesn’t happen by passing on self-esteem, good health, and good morals. Those are lovely, but they are not the wager.
YOUR MESS: CHECK
I know. Before you come clean about your life and tell them your true story, you want to get it together first. So do I. Still.
Get rid of the pesky little addiction you have. Get more positive about life.
Maybe find a church, or temple, or yoga practice, some sort of support.
You say to yourself you need to get your life in order before you talk about it. So you work harder. Longer. Smarter. And you tell yourself it is for them.
These impulses are commendable. But magic doesn’t work like that.
Here’s what you have on your side though: everything.
Your love story: check.
Your mess: check.
Your ability to start telling your story: check.
The angel of heaven is appearing to you, right now, with your own Magnificat, saying, “Don’t be afraid.” The angel, we should note, did not mention the college fund.
Your regrets, your failures, your scars, and your unresolved parts are not merely OK. Needed and necessary, they contain the energy of your life. Telling your story is how that energy gets out, and your wisdom and beauty with it.
Here is the link I didn’t make for Hannah that day. Being imperfect is not enough. Imperfection lived in silence disorients. The child observes a tired parent, a closed door, a mood or an outburst, and has to guess. Imperfection told becomes a map. Call it storyparenting: letting your children know your story, the mess and the wager, so they can see what a human life looks like from the inside. Parentmaxxing optimizes the child. Storyparenting reveals the parent.
So here is your absolution, from one fumbling parent to another: You are not late. You are not too broken. Your story is enough.
Think of your story as the way you raise your glass. You lift it to all the kindnesses that you have received in your life. To all the challenges, to all the moments when you were lost, found, and then lost again. Even to that terribly mistaken call you made. Raising your glass to what life and love made you.
Think of your story as the pair of glasses you pass to your child. You gift them with the way of seeing the world, so they too can be enchanted with what has enchanted you, so they too can care about their own glasses, keeping them clean and imaginative, as they take their turn to love even better than you did.
THE TROUBLE WITH SILENCE
Don’t get me wrong, silence is powerful. A person who has learned to be quiet — and quietly present — has learned something essential about life. Without silence there is no listening, no hearing, no understanding of what is unknown in ourselves or in the world. Yes, words can crowd out experience.
But there is another kind of silence.
When you are silent about your inner life, people cannot access you. They cannot connect with you because you are not seen, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot connect with what is not there. Who are you, Dad? Who are you, Mom? Who are you, Grandma? Who are you, Grandpa? Who are you, Aunt? Who are you, Uncle? Who are you, my lover? Who are you, my friend? Without you taking the responsibility to be seen, you are not showing up. People in your life need you and want you. But you are not there. Being seen is kindness.
And if you are reading this as a son or daughter, these questions are yours to ask. Many parents are waiting for someone to want their story. Your asking may be the gift that finally gets it told.
One more thing. It’s tempting to think that telling our story is self-indulgent, and to call our silence humility. I did, for years. But your story was never about you. If you tell it right, you will be the least important character in it. Storytelling is a delightful excuse to bless our children, honor our elders, relish our friends, and love our lovers.
And like every real kindness, it carries some risk. Once you are visible, you lose some control. You cannot guarantee the response. It is, in that sense, an act of faith in life and people. It gives them a way to find you, and judge you, and forgive you, and pay you a tribute, and ask you for forgiveness or help.
What I have noticed over and over again is that people experience our honesty as presence. Your honesty is like the ritual of an embrace. You spread your hands in the air and wait for a moment. Now the other person has to make a decision whether to raise their hands too, and whether you will both step forward to each other and clasp your arms around each other.
When my daughters were growing up, I learned to catch myself when I’d done something wrong. Hurting them, their mother, or a neighbor. I would say “Sorry” to my child before they ever could. I wanted them to see someone they love fall. To see me be awkward, sad, selfish, even ashamed. To see me being seen by them, without controlling it too much, with the trust that their love for me can take it, and that they can forgive me and allow me to continue to love and let myself be loved.
When you are seen, everything becomes possible. Nothing is too late to forgive, or heal, or celebrate.
I can hear some of you. Yes, Samir, stories are lovely, but mine is different. There’s a fracture between me and my child, a disruption, something bigger than what happens to the parents you usually work with. I don’t know how to tell a story like mine.
It isn’t easy. But I have watched stories do what nothing else could. A story can hold contradictions that an argument can’t: the love and the harm in the same chapter, the person who hurt you and the person who held you, sometimes the same person. It can hold a question that has no answer yet, and still move forward. A friend once called this work “therapy in writing.” It isn’t therapy, but I know what my friend meant. If anything can move you forward, it is your story.
Who is going to teach your child how to fail well? How to have a healthy amount of self-doubt? How to lose meaning, harbor rage, and lose this, that, and the other thing? Who is going to teach your child how to be powerful well? How to have faith in oneself, others, life? How to give generously, and bless others by receiving? Who is going to do that?
You are.
STORY INSURANCE
The most universal regret of people on their deathbeds is not that they have made big mistakes. It is that they did not dare to live out their own lives.
End arrives, always, and always unexpectedly. Like life insurance, telling one’s story makes sure the story is there and will not be made up by circumstances, conjecture, or drift.
To exist, your legacy has to become more than the quilt of vague memories, ethical slogans, and guesswork about the most sacred moments of your life. Your story has to leave you and become an artifact. An arti-fact is a piece of art that is real. As in written, recorded, ritualized. With a life of its own, it can travel through time and space.
I didn’t tell you how that conversation with Hannah ended. After the Klingon look and my elaboration, there was a silence long enough to hear Mia’s play-talk in the background. Her husband tilted his head. I said the last part quietly, almost to myself:
“Things break, people break, you break, and sometimes, toys, relationships, and hopes are lost forever. Your job is to be imperfect parents. How else will they learn to be human?”
RAISE YOUR GLASS
Where’s the magic of parenting?
The magic is in your story. Don’t wait for someday to tell it.
Your children will forget most of what you have declared to them. They won’t forget who you are, if they get to see you. Your story is how they come to understand who you are, and who they are.
But few of us tell our story on our own. We don’t know where to begin, or we keep waiting to be ready. That’s the work Jordan Soliday and I do at Epic Ordinary. Through a series of personal conversations, we listen you into your life and shape it into a memoir in your own voice. No writing required, and no getting your life in order first. Do it for yourself, or give it to a parent or grandparent whose story you don’t want to lose. See how: www.epicordinary.com/guide
Your children don’t need the story of a perfect parent. They need something better: the story of a real one.
P.S. Not ready for a whole memoir? Start with An Hour to Be Seen: one recorded conversation, and within 72 hours, a one-page portrait of who you are. It’s 20% off this holiday season, for yourself, your mother or father, or the grandparent who keeps saying, “One day I’ll tell you about that.”