Doing the work he has given us to do.

My father died seven years ago and last month I forgot. Last month, for the first time in seven years I didn’t mark the anniversary of his death. The day came and the day went and I didn’t even think of it until three days later. Each year in the last week of July since 2000 I have felt the acute loss of my father. I wouldn’t have expected it before he died. My father and I were not particularly close. We loved each other and we took care of each other but we only talked occasionally. We usually learned news of each other through my mother. He didn’t agree with many of my life choices and I didn’t always agree with his. Once he was gone I was shocked, stunned to realize the truth of it, the truth that he was really and forever gone from this earth. I had been independent of him for years, married, with my own children, mortgage, life, yet I felt the loss acutely for years.
My favorite memory of my father was going to the beach. When I was young we lived in Titusville and on many Saturdays we would all crowd into the station wagon with thermos of water and peanut butter sandwiches and plastic buckets and go to Playalinda Beach . The black and white VAB at Kennedy space center sat in the haze just to the south. Dad would hold me in one arm and my younger brother in the other and walk out to the “really deep” water, over our heads but just up to his chest and jump the waves. My brother and I must have been about 3 and 4 years old, respectively. The waves in the Atlantic can be rough. I can so clearly remember holding on to his broad shoulders as he jumped the waves with us in his arms. I felt absolutely thrilled at the tumulus surf and absolutely safe in his arms.
A parent’s importance in a child’s life is often under emphasized. Once they can talk a parent feels them separating, by the time they can talk back you can feel on the brink of being obsolete. Certainly the role we play in a child’s life is meant to diminish. A child should become independent; they probably should make some decisions we parents disagree with. It is part of the break but that break is never complete. The imprint of your parents, good or bad, lasts a lifetime. Their loss is a searing pain that eventually gives way to a mild yearning.
I sat at lunch with an elderly gentleman this week and as we were eating our dessert he said, “My grandmother made the best peach cobbler I ever ate”. That memory must have been half a century old. The small tug of the family from which he came was still there.
It is hard to remember in the day in and day out of parenting that what we are doing is making a lasting impression on our children. Parenting can become mundane, mind numbingly repetitive in the daily tasks of laundry and spelling words and music lessons and dishes. But like that peach cobbler and those minutes in the deep surf, hidden in the daily work of parenting are nuggets that will stay with your children forever. A memory that is a comfort or a habit that reassures. It’s a game of hide and seek, we don’t know and our children don’t know which moments are the important ones.
Staying the course, remaining focused, all that motivational speak dims with time. Nearly every parent has heard or read Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The stored wealth of comfort and wisdom from which our children can draw for the rest of their lives is being stockpiled now while they are children, while they are in our care. Parents are taken for granted and the duty and responsibility of forming another person’s life is seldom honored yet it is a noble mantel to carry to be someone’s mother or father, worthy of your attention. Decades from today your words and actions will be the memories that bring comfort and grace to your child’s spirit. As we would say in the legal world “Govern yourselves accordingly”.

God’s strength and peace be with you,
Michelle