As a mom, do I have a control problem? Maybe. Do I have a responsibility problem? Definitely.
I’ve taken the StrengthsFinders assessment twice in the past twenty years; both times, responsibility was way up near the top. If I agree to do something, I will do it, and I will do it well, so help me God – or lose my sanity, my sleep, or my good sense in the attempt.
Raising teenagers makes me lose all of the above.
I tried so hard to do All the Good Parenting Things. I made them drink Kiefer, read countless books with them, prayed and played, showed and shared. I taught them to come when I called; I re-learned pre-algebra twice; I put limits on their screen time. I take my job so seriously. I am the Responsiblest Mom of them all.
And now I have four teenagers, with adulthood lurking around every corner, and I feel the desperate urgency looming over me that my time left with them is short. So Gil and I made an Adulting List that they must check off, and we are teaching them to drive, interview, clean, and budget. As they begin to make their own choices, I warn and cajole, nudge and prod.
Raising you has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.
From the first day I laid eyes on you and you gave me your radiant smile, you have been sunshine in my life. Happy and fearless—that’s the way I would describe you from the time you were a baby. You sang “Amazing Grace” to an entire school full of kids when you were just two years old. Dad taught you to do backflips into the pool when you were three. You are always ready to jump into the next adventure with both feet.
But one of the most special things about you is your love for people. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone more people-oriented than you. When you were a toddler, I remember showing you the HOPAC school yearbook and being flabbergasted by how many names you knew of students and staff. As you grew up, whenever you met a new friend, you would always run into the kitchen and grandly announce, “I love [this person!] and I love her mom too!” I don’t know if you’ve ever met a person you didn’t like. God gave you the gift of loving others enthusiastically. 😊
My parents, Kim and Margaret Coutts, have been married 50 years this month, a milestone that only 5% of American marriages achieve. They have extraordinary lives, worth writing about.
My dad was serving as a pharmacist at a military hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey when a fellow officer knocked on his door and asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”
My dad was irritated – angry, even – but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just one of many instances in their early adulthood when God inserted Himself into their story, and it wasn’t much longer before they turned their lives over to Him. It wasn’t a flippant decision. It was the beginning of an entire re-orientation of their priorities.
About four years later, my mom and dad attended a missions conference at First Baptist Church in San Jose – the one whose foyer boasted the spiral ramp that surrounded the two-story fountain. When the speaker gave a challenge, while the background music played, they walked forward to the altar to offer their lives in missionary service.
They spent almost a decade of service in missions in Liberia and Ethiopia, despite my mom crying every single day for the first six months. It was a sacrifice: her own mother refused to write or speak to her for the entire first two years. My mom taught elementary school, and my dad served as head pharmacist at ELWA Hospital, then as hospital administrator.
The year we returned, while still working as chief pharmacist at Kaiser, my dad went on to revolutionize the missions program at Hillside Church in San Jose. He started the partnership with Tanzania that changed the course of my life and dozens of others. He began a missions prayer ministry that has continued for three decades. He led numerous other short-term trips and developed several other overseas partnerships.
Meanwhile, while my mom taught kindergarten, she launched a ministry in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. Thirty years later, that ministry has flourished and is thriving. My mom invested in scores of children in that neighborhood, including taking in two of them for several of their college years, enveloping them as surrogate daughters.
My parents have done some big things in their 50 years of marriage. But what strikes me the most is how they have been faithful in the little things, the things that most people don’t see.
“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”
I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.
My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.
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Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.
“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.
When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.
It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.
There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.
Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.
Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.
For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.
I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.
I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.
Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.
