Category: PARENTS

  • Parents feel like their friends without kids have left them behind and are flaky. Kid-free people feel like their parent friends only want to hang out with other parents and are also flaky. Parents feel like society is incredibly hostile to them; single people feel like society is incredibly hostile to them; partnered people without kids feel like society is incredibly hostile to them.

    …

    This is where I say very clearly: parents, I know it feels like you live in a never-ending hurricane season. You need to talk to your friends without kids, and you need to figure out ways to be in their lives, even if you think their lives are easier and should naturally bend towards yours. 

    And people without kids, I know it feels like the world thinks we’re weirdos and parents don’t understand the very real struggles and fears that accompany our lives. We also need to be more understanding of our friends with kids, and figure out how to balance our own often more flexible lives with some of the more inflexible demands of their lives.

    How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents

    ANNE HELEN PETERSEN

  • As I began to work on getting my own life back on track, I relegated time with my mother to every other Sunday and holidays, holding her (and our relationship) at arm’s length. What seemed at the time to be self-care and boundaries was also a mixture of avoidance and burden—but I didn’t truly know this until a Tuesday afternoon one day in November.

    She’d called me the night before and I’d ignored it; she was lonely and called me a lot, and I’d decided that I couldn’t always stop what I was doing to answer. But the next day I got a call at work from my brother, telling me to come home at once. When I got there I found that she’d died in her sleep the night before.

    I checked the voicemail that she’d left me. In it she’d asked me to come over and see a movie with her.

    The guilt caved me in.

    The following weeks and months were a blur. I was beside myself with grief, regret, and the illogical thinking that can come with loss: Maybe if I’d come over that night she wouldn’t have died. Maybe if I’d been around more, called more, or been a better daughter, maybe that would have changed things.

    When a Wrong Can’t Be Righted: How to Deal With Regret

  • 4. Brother and Sister

    Try to blame yourself, yourself only and not your relations, for all. Be certain that none can offend or hurt us without God’s permission; and whenever God permits it, it is always for our good. Punishments, tests, temptations, are all equally good for us.

    You may ask your brother for help; but do it courteously, gently, without insistence. Besides this, pray, have faith, and abandon yourself-and the whole pattern of your life-to God. Pray fervently that peace may be restored in the family.

    Although I have not the honor of knowing you personally, I have heard so much from your distressed townsfolk about the exemplary life your family led during your father’s lifetime and of the bitter enmity which now divides you, that I am writing to beg you to come to your senses.

    Stop these endless quarrels and bitter insults! Do not provide the enemy with this delight: he enjoys nothing better than the distortion of family life, the mockery of it.

    Remember that you are pupils of Christ; of Christ who teaches us to love not only our friends, but even our enemies, and to forgive all who trespass against us. But if you forgive not mere their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matt. 6:15). What a frightful prospect!

    And so, I beg of you, leaving all recriminations, make peace among you and strive for the greatest boon of all: strive for the inner peace.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • If you’re angry at somebody, if you’re bitter at somebody, prayer is the first step. Something mystical happens in prayer: the person you’re angry at, the person you’re annoyed at, when you start praying for them, God melts your heart. If you’re consistently praying for that person, when you approach that person, your demeanor is different, your mentality is different, you’re not looking at that person the same way.

    —Fr. Timothy

  • Indeed, what can God forgive this righteous’ Pharisee? Which sin can He forgive this person who is righteous in his own eyes, who did not mention a single sin before God so as to seek His forgiveness? If he were a sinner like the tax-collector, he would have asked for mercy like he did, but boastfully he said, “I am not… as this tax-collector”. He did not confess any sin that required forgiveness and did not seek forgiveness, thus alienating himself from forgiveness and from justification by the Blood of Christ. 

    Similarly, the Scriptures did not say that God justified the elder son who also did not find anything to blame himself for, but moreover was angry, casting blame on his brother and on his father, saying, “Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk. 15:29). Truly, what forgiveness can be given to the one who says, “I never transgressed your commandment”? This same son did not ask for forgiveness, because he did not see in his behaviour a single mistake that needed forgiveness! But his younger brother was justified because he reproached himself and said to his father, “I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Lk. 15:19).

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Before the Just Judge

  • If you are faithful in loving your relative, God will set you over loving the enemy. He will give you the grace which enables you to love your enemy.

    —Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • Becoming a parent has lifted a corner of my blindfold and let me glimpse what God’s love looks like. My son, Jaden, is incapable of doing anything—anything at all—that could make me stop loving him. There is nothing he could say or do, or forget to say or not do, that would ever diminish the love I have for him in my heart. He can’t out-sin my love, just as I cannot out-sin God’s love.

    —Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale

  • She had a lasting ambivalence towards him through her life, albeit one that evolved. As she grew older, she began to realise how much of him was in her.

    Virginia Woolf on her father

  • Parents, after all, recognize their imperfections, yet they strive to shield their children, even if the façade eventually unravels as kids grow up, detest their all-too-human parents, and understand and hopefully forgive them.

    Bimbo Ubermensch, The Ocean

  • This virtue is related to the opening up of our heart, to an increase in its capacity. Other people’s faults have to find room, there has to be space for whatever they’ve done to our detriment, even their excuses, never mind whether we find these sufficient or true. All their weaknesses have to fit in.

    It’s often such a struggle to accept others as they are. Because we demand that they be as we want them to be. But it’s not like that. They’ve done us some harm, wittingly or unwittingly, They’ve got some strange habit or other.

    They may have been brought up differently from us, they may have certain external habits which jar, certain weaknesses, certain expressions of fallen, sinful human nature, just as we most certainly have, too. So God calls upon us to open our heart and to put our fellow human beings inside, as they are, so that we can love them as our brothers and sisters.—

    —Metropolitan Nikolaos (Hatzinikolaou) of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki