One of my favorite Father’s Day gift from my children is an unusual grouping of four photos in a single frame that I fondly call “The children of my yesteryear’s dreams”. The photos show each of my four children with me – Pizza and me while dipping in a beach somewhere; myself as I hold Nico up high near the seawall in Luneta; Dana and me; and finally Mae and me at the porch of our old house in Valenzuela. Each photo was taken in a different year and place while each one of them was still a toddler. The frame of photos now sits here before me in my computer desk.
I still do not know what made my children give this unique gift to me as a present. In any case I always take delight looking at them in these photos as the realization of my yesteryears’ dreams.
Now, as I see myself holding my children as infants/toddlers in my arms, I realize with a tinge of remorse, however, that I had them only for so short a time wishing I can go back in time to do what I failed to do then...
They have since grown up and left my embrace, either physically or emotionally, and have started to live lives of their own as in the case of Nico and Pizza, or about to live her own life as in the case of Dana. And as for the teen-age Mae, she already has started trying her wings!
I am not complaining. I realize that parenting’s goal is ultimately looking at separation of children from their parents. And I remember something from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: “Your children are not your own”, he reminds us. This means that my children do not belong to me! They belong to somebody else, God, and even more to themselves than they ever belong to me.
It is just that, I suppose, like most parents, I have always found myself resisting to understand and to accept this truth although I have always taught and preached even as a priest that the best gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.
I kind of resolved this dilemma when I recently read Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, discussing in a column (Not Our Own Children, 2006) that accepting it can both be a challenge and a source of consolation for us parents.
Fr. Rolheiser says that if we accept this as a challenge, “we will be less inclined to act as ‘owners’ of our children and we will be less prone to manipulate our children for our own ends, to see them as satellites within our own orbits, and more inclined to love, cajole, challenge, and correct even while giving them their freedom”.
If you remember, Rahim in the The Kite Runner says the same thing as he admonishes Baba regarding his relationship with his son Amir: “Children aren’t coloring books! You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
And in a similar vein, Amir also in The Kite Runner speaks of our children’s disdain when we parents act like we “own” our children: “(Baba) molded me to his own liking, in the same way that he molded the world to his own liking seeing the world as black and white and deciding too what was white and what was black”.
Fr. Rolheiser then focuses on the consolation part: “When we realize, in the healthy sense, that our children are not really ours, we also realize that we are not alone in raising and caring for them. We are, in a manner of speaking, only foster parents. God is the real parent and God's love, care, aid, and presence to our children is always in excess of our own. God's anxiety for our children is also deeper than our own”.
He then concludes that there is no such thing as a “single parent” since God is always there with us whether we have a spouse or not! “God, like you, is also worrying, struggling, involved, crying tears of solicitousness, trying to awaken love. What is consoling is that God can touch, challenge, soften, and inspire at levels inside of a child that you cannot reach.”
Then he says finally: “Moreover, your children cannot, ultimately, turn their backs on God. They can refuse to listen to you, walk away from you, spit on your values, but there is still another parent from whom they can never walk away, whom they carry inside all the time and for always.”
Consoling thoughts indeed!
Allow me now to go back and glance once more at the children of my yesteryears’ dreams.
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