Last night my stomach tightened as I pulled Johnny’s red jacket out of the dryer. This is the jacket I described to the police officer. Will I ever be able to look at it the same way again?
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This past Sunday morning at 8, I holler at the kids to get moving. Johnny isn’t in bed, but that is normal. As the youngest, he usually is out of bed before anyone else on weekends. Routine bedlam ensues, with teenagers jostling for the bathroom and grumbling over who ate the last piece of banana bread. At 8:40, Gil and I bellow for all to get into the car.
Only when everyone is clambering out the door do we realize Johnny isn’t in the house. I huff, questioning why he would go out to play when he knows we are heading to church.
Johnny is my independent, curious one. He’s the child most likely to make himself a spinach and mushroom omelet for breakfast, experimenting with spices. The night before, he was obsessed with conquering a new Rubik’s Cube. He told me recently that he is too old for hugs and kisses now, and I conceded on the kisses but declared that I will hug him for as long as I live, so too bad for him.
His three teenage siblings are often too busy for him, and Johnny doesn’t like playing by himself. His screen time had been confiscated for this weekend, so that’s likely what drove him outside. He loves roaming the neighborhood on his bike or hoverboard, but today both of those things are still in our garage. Plus, he knows there are three rules: Don’t leave the house without telling a parent. Don’t leave the neighborhood. Don’t go inside anyone’s house.
Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors.
His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.
All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation.
Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row.
He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds.
In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives.
Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.
I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock.
Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting.
Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”
Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.
As a young person, I was colder than Elsa to guys my age. I avoided talking to them at all costs, and when I was forced to, I used sarcasm. In high school, one guy told me that I made him cry and another rebuked me for being mean. These interactions have been embedded in my memory for 30 years because I remember how stunned I was to hear them. In my head, I was a nice person. I never set out to be a jerk.
My harshness was not for lack of attraction; I had as many crushes as the boy-crazy flirt. I was simply terrified of people. I was not timid; I loved being on stage and performing when I had a script telling me exactly what to say at exactly the right moment. Real life gave me no such script.
I gained confidence in college, though even Gil remembers that my first interaction with him was intentionally distant. So it is pretty miraculous that I figured out how to be friendly enough for him to fall in love with me.
I now recognize that my reticence was very much connected to insecurity. Around people my age, I was easily intimidated, and I felt young and insignificant. I was too proud to be nervous and groveling, so it was easier to be cold and sarcastic.
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is always the secure who are humble.” My insecurity made me unkind, anxious, unfriendly. As I’ve aged, I see in myself the link between growing more secure and how well I love others.
Of all the things a new mother stresses about, her kids’ hair is usually not one of them. But for me, it was.
I felt an invisible weight upon me that if I was to be a good mom to my girls, I must get their hair right. This was not a completely imagined pressure. I learned early on that in both African and African-American cultures, well-maintained hair is important. I already knew my competence as a white mother to two black daughters would be questioned in many ways. So I was determined to prove myself capable of at least caring for their hair.
I read Black hair blogs. I watched YouTube videos. I even bought and read a book on the subject. I tried a ridiculous number of hair products. Yet still, I was anxious. It was harder than I thought, and despite my best efforts, I could not turn myself into a Black hair artist.
“I never knew it would be so hard to win my children’s hearts,” recently lamented a friend with adult children.
In my younger parenting days, I idolized those parents who were five or ten years ahead of me in parenting. You know the ones–their kids were polite, respectful, happy, Christian kids. I longed for my little ones to grow up like them. But now I have teenagers, and those older friends have young adults. It’s been with increasing dread that I’ve watched these further-along families crushed under a mountain of sorrow over their young-adult children who are walking into destruction.
Not all of them, of course. But also not just an occasional prodigal; there are far too many to count. These are families who did all the “right things”: gave their kids boundaries, were actively involved in church, ate family dinners, limited media consumption, guarded against porn, played games together, were intentional about their kids’ education, taught family devotions. They trained up their children in the way they should go, but when they were old, they still departed from it.
