We live in Washington, D.C. For three weeks this past fall, our family, along with everyone else in the region, experienced the terrorism generated by two twisted individuals known worldwide, at that time, as “the sniper.” Although, my fifteen year old daughter, Emily, does not attend high school in Rockville, Maryland, the epicenter of the shootings, her school in Washington, D.C. became an armed camp over night. She and the other children in our community learned a whole new vocabulary of words, most often used in prison environments such as “lock down” and “Code Blue”. One night the relentless media coverage culminated in a broadcast announcement from “the sniper” that, “Your children are not safe, anywhere, any time.” The next morning I watched Emily, who, up until that point, had expressed concern but not outright fear about what was happening around her, actually hesitate on the front porch to scan the street and the trees for any signs of danger before high-tailing it to the car. My heart sank.

As 2003 begins, we continue to be bombarded with dire warnings of vengeful terrorist networks, impending war, nuclear rearmament and most recently, smallpox, a disease we had wiped off the face of the earth until someone decided it would make a terrific weapon of mass destruction. If we are not on the alert, our children could watch unbelievable acts of premeditated violence and destruction on the evening news every night of the week. Yet, how do we prepare? How do we handle our awareness that, since September 11th, life seems to have permanently shifted into a precarious state?

It makes sense to stay as connected as possible to our children in times of crisis. We sharpen our communications skills (especially our ability to listen), and we try to gauge their emotional reactions to an event such as 9/11 or the Washington, D.C. Sniper or simply a news headline that: “The United States is going to war and many American soldiers could die.” “The leader of Iraq has deadly chemicals that can kill you just by breathing them.” “Child kidnapping is on the rise.” “Thousands of children are lost in our foster care systems.” “Unemployment is up and people are losing their homes.” Besides assuaging their fears and gently correcting their misconceptions, there is something else we can do. We can help them become more resilient. We can increase their ability to be strong and resourceful during times of hardship and crisis whether now or later, because resiliency is a crucial life skill at any age and at any time.

How do we teach resiliency to our children in ways that match their individual needs? There are no Mapquest directions for this journey, but there are a number of guideposts that point to places where our children can learn resilience. Child psychiatrist, Dr. Neal Mazor says we can provide our children with three basic elements to make them more resilient: 1.a safe and secure place to go; 2. people they love and trust and who value them, and 3. a sense of competence and self-confidence. For most of us numbers 1 and 2 are fairly easy. We believe that our home environment is considered by our children to be a safe and secure place to go. We believe that we, their parents, are the people our children love and trust and we value them more than life itself. However, it is Dr. Mazor’s third element that presents more of a challenge. What are some of the ways to enhance their inner sense of competence and mastery?

Nourishing our child’s sense of competence and self-confidence can begin by talking with them about their strengths. Fortunately for us, talking to our children about how they are strong enough to handle what is going on around them offers lots of opportunities to find common ground. We’re not dwelling on their problems or deficiencies, but instead their accomplishments. We’re not taking an authoritative approach because, goodness knows, we personally could use some more resiliency ourselves, so we take a “we’re all in this together” approach which instantly establishes common ground. We build on our positives, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant.

For example, during the “sniper” crisis, Emily and I talked about how her determination to find out the truth turned out to make her feel better about herself and her ability to cope. Makes sense, doesn’t it? But in a crisis, it is easy for anyone, not just teenagers, to become subjective about what is going on around them. At her high school the level of anxiety over the uncertainty of a sniper “on the loose” was being increased by the high drama of being in a “lock downed” environment. With police guarding exits and entrances, and some parents calling at each announcement from the media, many students were on the verge of hysteria.

During an assembly on the situation, a police officer from our second district was answering questions from the audience, focusing primarily on what was known and not known about the killings. His answers were fascinating yet at the same time were “fanning the flames” of the collective perception of crisis. Then Emily asked what exactly the odds were of a kid going to her school being killed. The police officer answered that the odds were extremely slim, but at the same time, there was no way to absolutely guarantee no one would be hurt. In other words, life is uncertain, and all we can do is the best we can which does not include overly dramatizing reality. The previous line of questioning continued but Emily felt “much better,” she told me, even though some of her friends thought her question “a big duh”. By talking to her about this one spontaneous act she was able to see how what she did was both competent and self-confident – that it wasn’t the answer that made her feel better, but her ability to ask the question.

The best support we can give our children is to help them believe that they have resilience and can act on it. Doing so does not require long explanations about the nature of resilience, but it does require attention on our part so that we acknowledge our children’s strengths when we see them.

When Duct Tape Won't Bond, Try Resilience

An article in the February 16th Washington Post, published midway through America’s rush to empty hardware stores of duct tape and plastic as protection against a biochemical attack, advises parents to be aware that their children’s “sleeplessness, nightmares and problems in school could be signs of severe anxiety.” In “What Steps To Take Before, After Attack” Marilyn Benoit, president of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry also stresses that, “the way parents handle their anxiety will determine how well their children do. Don’t let children see panic.” This is sound advice, more useful than the suggestion that we seal our families into customized baggies along with the mechanical can opener and tomato paste. It’s crucial to appear calm when our children look to us for assurance that “everything will be okay,” even if we aren’t confident of our ability to guarantee their safety and security. However, instead of glossing over everyone’s fears with forced bravado, why not use these uncertain times as an opportunity to bond with our children? Why not address their anxieties (and ours) with inner resources that we can both rely on?

The best way to cope with our anxieties is trusting that we have the inner strengths to face hardship. And, after the struggle, trusting that we will survive, even stronger and closer to those we love than before the crisis occurred. If we acknowledge and honor these strengths each time we recognize them, as well as foster them in our children, we create an environment where a sense of security and confidence can thrive. Creating a sense of security is important during a time when global events, which usually do not regularly appear on the radar screen of children and adolescents, seem to intrude on a daily basis. We might be surprised how many of our children know they live under a vague yet ominous Orange alert; have listened to the latest Bin Laden tape; and watch the televised images of our armed services being deployed to the borders of Iraq.

A study by Project Resilience in Washington, D.C. (www.projectresilience.com) asked 25 children who had done well in stressful situations like war, the death of a parent, or extreme poverty a single question: “how did you do it?” “Their answers revealed that all had been scarred by their experiences. Nevertheless, they were also strong and healthy in many ways.” Why? When faced with a crisis or traumatic event, they drew upon experiences of being strong, competent, creative and joyful rather than ones where they were victimized, felt fearful or weak.

Courage, laughter, creativity, acceptance, objectivity and connecting with others are some of the shared strengths we can identify and practice with our children. In The Mother Daughter Circle, I explain that the more we identify and connect with these strengths in ourselves as well as nourish them in our children, the more we experience a sense of comfort and balance. “These connections fill us with positive energy, provide relaxation, increase our enthusiasm and self confidence, and detach us from our personal agendas.” Plus, the more we take pride in our ability to be strong, the stronger we become. The more we reveal our own inner resources to our kids, the easier it will be for them to find those same resources in themselves.

Here is an email I received from a mother responding to my question asking parents to describe a time when, in the presence of their children, they demonstrated courage in the face of adversity.
“I am an artist. I am also a divorced mother of two girls. Since my husband left I’ve been supporting us going on three years now. I won’t go into all the jobs I’ve held down except to say that most of them involved manual labor and like, very low pay. But I’ve kept painting. Maybe it was late at night. Maybe I used those little sets of water colors kids get or leftover house paint. Maybe I painted on shelf paper, or our walls but I painted. Now things are better. And I guess I showed courage doing that, because one day last week my daughter came home from school and said she hadn’t made varsity basketball but it didn’t mean she was quitting like some of her friends. She was going to keep on playing. When I asked her where she had learned to be so strong, she said she learned it from me.”

Talking to our children about their strengths instead of their weaknesses makes us both feel good about we can accomplish and endure. Instead of feeling victimized by events, we can strategize about how to plan and respond. Of all the ways to foster strength in our kids, talking respectfully, as equals (instead of as grownup to child) about our positive qualities may be the most practical response we can make during these uncertain times. For example, we can talk with younger children about their wise decision-making powers when it comes to obeying safety rules, choosing a nutritious snack or taking care of a pet. We can share our stories of experiences when we have replaced our fears with faith in order to face an anticipated event such as a temporary (school, a business trip) separation from the family. With our older kids we might discuss the media and how we can participate actively in what we see on television or read in the newspaper by asking hard questions about what is fact and what is hearsay or conjecture. We might all feel more confident about our analytical powers and ability to discern the truth if, together with our adolescents, we practiced Mark Twain’s advice that, “I believe everything that I read in the newspaper except that which I know.”

With children of all ages we can also talk about the inner strength that comes from love. In The Mother Daughter Circle many parents described their unconditional love of their daughters as the foundation on which to build resiliency. “Is there a way to give her total self-confidence in life by just loving her no matter what? I hope so.” said one mother. “I affirm her exerting of independence, her abilities, her confidence, her “space.” I try not to personalize it when she shows she dislikes me. I never give up loving her even when she is difficult,” says another. To love unconditionally it helps to believe we are not personally in control of our lives or our daughters’ lives, but that a Universal Love (or whatever we may call this life force) is. In fact, perhaps the simplest way to follow the advice of Marilyn Benoit to “don’t let children see panic” is to act from love instead of fear as often as possible.

Bonding With Love

“Motherhood is not a personal performance and a baby is not a personal project. We and our babies already posses the qualities of perfect Life, and we are together to enhance the unfoldment of each one’s quality identity.” Ann Tremaine Linthorst, Mothering As A Spiritual Journey

There are plenty of times when we find bonding to our daughters difficult. For whatever reason, there are communication barriers between us that we cannot seem to overcome. When these impasses happen, we can surmount them by responding with unconditional love, a concept that our daughters may understand better than we do.

Almost every girl who visited the girlprayers web site and answered the question, “What is Unconditional Love?” gave a clear interpretation of what it means and said she believed unconditional love exists. Additionally, the girls understood that unconditional love is not the same as romantic love with its possessiveness, intensity, and often, transitory nature. Whatever their differences in religious practice, self-awareness, or perception of spirituality, from eight to eighteen, girls have faith in unconditional love and find their faith comforting. Adolescent girls want to be loved unconditionally and want to love back in the same way.

To love unconditionally, it helps to believe we not personally in control of our lives or our daughters’ lives, a Higher Loving Divinity is. If we remember this, even occasionally, a huge burden is lifted from our shoulders. We do not have to worry about whether or not we are good mothers or whether our daughters are good girls. We need not be anxious about how lovable we are or how loveable they are. We don’t have to wonder how capable we are of loving them “enough” or if they love us “enough”. When we love this way, our love is spontaneous and nonjudgmental, and we bond to each other.

However, there are plenty of times when we feel no love, conditional or unconditional. For instance, I am running late, find a parking place, put my turn signal on to indicate that that parking place is mine, but then someone slips their car in before I get to it. It’s hard to feel love for that person. Or, when, after a long day, I come home to find that the dog got into the garbage which is now strewn all over the living room, it’s hard, at that moment, to love the dog. Yet, much of the time we find great satisfaction and joy in loving and being loved conditionally in numerous ways We love people, places, things and ideas.

I feel romantic love for my husband; caring and compassionate love for my daughters, and my several closest women friends; devotional love for my parents, sister and her sons; lovingkindness to my community; nostalgic love for places with special meaning for me like the beach and the mountains of Utah. When I am honest with myself, I know that I set conditions on these feelings and often use my controlling ways to try to experience them on demand. On the other hand, I feel grateful that I have so many parts to my life that I am able to love.

We also love activities, objects and ideas, and pass many of these loves on to our daughters, just as our mothers and grand-mothers passed their loves on to us. When handed down from generation to generation, these loves may be transformed into passions, enthusiasms, simple pleasures, or rejected altogether, but they still originated as love. From my grand-mother, Geneal I inherited a love of opera, drama, gardening, all things having to do with the countries of Greece and India, occasional outrageous breeches of decorum and a deep and abiding belief in the magic of everyday life. From my grand-mother, Lola, I inherited a love of baking, healing, children, practicality, and the western desert. And from my mother I inherited a love of hospitality, ritual, literature, travel, and I must confess, sweaters. Why not think about what you might share with your daughters in terms of activities, things or ideas that were passed down to you from the generations of women in your family and that you have incorporated into your own life as experiences you love.

However, our greatest challenge in parenting and also in life may be to go beyond loving conditionally to unconditional love. As little children, unconditional love is the only way we know how to relate to our world. We trust in the world and we live in the moment. We let love happen. We don’t try to understand or identify our experiences, but instead simply trust in them. We love unconditionally because we were born loving unconditionally, and there hasn’t been time yet to experience otherwise.

It is difficult to call up unconditional love on demand. As Celeste Snowber Schroeder writes in her book, In The Womb Of God, “Love requires not a one time of becoming, but an ongoing surrender into the womb of God.” The idea of an “ongoing surrender” implies we must make time in our lives, time we can’t preprogram, because when we surrender, we give up control. How frustrating. We are far too busy with all those roles we’ve assumed, some of which we treasure, like motherhood, to have much time for the sort of open-ended and spontaneous atmosphere required to experience an ongoing surrender into love. Who can sandwich in an hour for “the womb of God” if, directly after eight hours of work, not including travel time, we car pool from school to softball practice, pick up the cleaning, a prescription for head lice, and dinner, and then start the evening off trying to put together some sort of chicken, cheese and vegetable concoction and conduct a vocabulary drill in French at the same time. I’m guessing Deepak Chopra or Gary Zukav have never had a single day like that. But I know Celeste Snowber Schroeder has because she gave birth to twins; yet, she found time and so can we.
Yet the yearning of our inner self to love and be loved unconditionally is always present no matter what role we play, mother or daughter. When our daughters don’t get unconditional love they blame themselves. Fear of rejection from conditional love of others makes them defensive, living life in a crouch. Whatever confusions, crisis or self-doubts our daughters experience, they can be transformed by unconditional and compassionate love. It is when we are simply lovingly present to our daughters without any assumptions about what we expect from ourselves or them that this transformation takes place. During these times we are not relating to our daughters to fill some need of our own or to demonstrate our ability as a good mother. We are surrendering to our love for her and her love for us.

In Wartime: A Time For Compassion, Communication, and Courage

Now that the new television series “Iraqi Real World” has been transformed into “Iraqi Real War,” we are beginning to focus on how war is affecting our families and how we should respond. Michiko Kakutani writes in a New York Times article entitled “Shock, Awe and Razzmatazz in the Sequel” that “the Pentagon and television news coverage are blurring the lines between movies and real life as never before, turning us into 24 hour couch voyeurs.” While we remind ourselves and our children that the bombs over Baghdad are not special effects, and soldiers in battle photographed in the green glow of night vision are not the same as a neighborhood conflict on local cable, the media undermines our efforts. Kakutani says the lines between the real and the fictional are so blurred that newscasters repeatedly remind us how scenes of violence, carnage and death are brought to us live. “In this case, reminders are meant to give the audience a racy frisson of danger, rather than a sober appreciation of the solemn business of war.”

Whatever our politics concerning Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is our responsibility as parents to manage the impact (of what now appears to be months) of the war on our children. We know to monitor the television, radio and, yes, newspaper images our children are exposed to, particularly if they are young. We know to listen carefully to what our children have to say about the war, and to ask open-ended questions to learn about how they feel. We know to provide answers that are appropriate for our child’s age. We do not over-explain, but we clear up misconceptions like the fear many young children have that they, too, are not safe from American bombs. We know to look for signs of stress such as nightmares or aggressive behavior. We know the importance of constantly reassuring them that the family is and will be okay.

These wise strategies are crucial to the mental and emotional health of our families. They help our children cope and move on. Yet we can do more to foster the resiliency these troubled times demand of us and of our families. To begin with, we can show compassion. By compassion I mean a deep caring in which we demonstrate our ability to be virtually “inside our children’s skin.” By compassion I mean our immediate response to the needs and fears of our children so that we forget our own agendas and are touched by the pain they are feeling. Compassion demands that we wake up to what is going on around us, not in Iraq, but right here, right now. Generally we go through life in a daze, closed off from the miseries of our world. Then the war in Iraq is, indeed, like a movie. Through compassion we not only face the facts of war for ourselves, but we help our children to do so as well, in ways that demonstrate our understanding and love for our child at that moment. During the past week, one friend of mine simply held her six year old for longer periods of time while another returned home early from his law firm each night so he could pick up his ninth grader from baseball practice. Coming upon her ten year old daughter and a friend near tears over televised images of suffering, a colleague, who works out of the home, instantly cut her conference call short and took both girls out for pizza. Reaching out with compassion often occurs spontaneously.

We can also hone our communication skills, particularly the art of listening. Listening is absolutely all that it is cracked up to be. The number of teenagers who email me about how no one listens to them is in the hundreds. “When I try and talk to her, she can’t sit still and just listen.” “No one in my family listens to anyone.” “I am scared I am going to die but I can’t tell anyone.” I wish my mom would listen to what I have to say instead of always jumping in with her opinion."” We often hurry to provide our children with our own opinions and observations about the war or try to prove to our children that we know how they feel or think about it. “You must be as outraged as I am about….” “I know you must feel this war is the only thing people care about…” “Don’t be afraid of what is going on far away.”

However, during a crisis we have opportunities to experience the event and each other as equals. When events are frightening and unpredictable, clear two-way communication tells your children that you together with them. Listening attentively and responding with emotional honesty sets a pattern that will last long after this war is over. As difficult as this time is for all of us, we need to remember that we can live a far more encompassing life if we connect with those whom we treat separate from ourselves starting with our children. Connectedness fosters a sense of security, which is essential for children in times of crisis. In article posted on AOL’s parenting site entitled “Helping Kids Cope With Fear and Loss” Dr. Salomon Grimberg points out that, “Only security will, more likely than not, provide an internal sense of stability that children will carry within them the rest of their lives.”

Resiliency also requires courage – the ability to draw upon our inner strengths and trust that they will sustain us during a crisis. The most courageous act is living what is real. Because our children’s responses to the war are influenced by how we respond, the best way to teach them about their own courage is to role model ours. In The Mother Daughter Circle, a number of moms emailed me how they have courage in the face of adversity. Here is one entry: “I try to show my daughter that the way to live life is with courage. I try to face life head on. When I lost my job, I tried to be honest about my fears. I also talked about my faith that we would be okay. She remembers that even though it happened three years ago. ” It takes inner strength to embrace reality as it is. But only by experiencing reality as it really is and not as we think or feel it is, can we act with courage. Often reality is unknowable. I find myself saying, “I don’t know” when answering my daughters questions about this war. As Dr. Grimberg says, “Life holds many mysteries, and children need to learn early that we do not have answers for many questions.” During wartime we have an opportunity to learn to live with courage about the unknown, and teach our children to do the same. However, the unknown offers beauty as well as ugliness, extraordinary joy as well as fear, new life as well as death. Being thankful for the beauty and joy of life during wartime and teaching our children to be thankful as well may be our greatest act of courage yet.

Bonding With Story

Who doesn’t value the reading of bedtime stories to our children or being read to as a child as one of the treasures of the parent child relationship? The stories that makes these brief one-on-one encounters the most magical are the ones that speak to both our souls and the souls of our children at the same time. Whether we know it or not, we are experiencing a special kind of spiritual reading called, in the Catholic Church, Lectio Divina. In Lectio Divina you allow yourself to become so intimate and involved in the words, that the story becomes a sacred text. You allow the words to take on a power of their own in ways that nourish, enlighten and strengthen the bond between you and your child.

It is important that we find the books that invite us and our children to open our hearts. Whether it’s a bedtime story for your two year old, or an online book you downloaded for your eighteen year old, carefully chosen stories have the potential to become a child’s “sacred texts.” By helping your children understand how to connect emotionally with a book, you teach them to read, not only for knowledge and entertainment, but also as a spiritual practice. If our children take ownership of the words in just one story containing spiritual values such as courage, integrity, unconditional love and acceptance, that story can sustain them for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, reading aloud, the easiest way to establish a bond through story telling, usually becomes obsolete once our children declare that they are too old to be read to. They can now read for themselves. For me, the end of reading stories aloud that spoke to both my soul and the soul of my youngest daughter, Emily, came when we were enjoying a nightly chapter of Gary Paulsen’s novel, Hatchet, a wonderful tale of survival in the wilderness and a boy’s coming-of-age. Emily was graciously indulging me, since she was perfectly capable of reading Hatchet herself and, in fact, was reading it after I’d left the room. However, I was lingering over every word, acting out every sentence, knowing that this particular way to bond was drawing to a close.

Our common ground had started with Good Night Moon, Pat the Bunny and The Puppy Who Had No Home , a particularly poignant story, as you may have guessed from the title, which we would read night after night, chanting together “Go away little stray, go away I say.” I knew this treasured ritual was over when, as I sat down on her bed, “over the top” with enthusiasm “to find out what happens next in Hatchet”, Emily simply said, “Mom, I finished it. He gets rescued.” And that was that.

However, once we stop reading aloud to our children, we can still point them toward stories that “open their hearts” with spiritual messages. These are stories about essential values that our children must learn; must feel to their very core to sustain their sense of self and their relationship to God. These are stories which, if given a “spiritual reading”, will help them successfully navigate life’s journey. Madeleine L’Engle, author of the children’s classic, A Wrinkle In Time, chose books for her anthology of spiritual children’s books based on how they meet our compelling need for understanding of the Divine. She selects classic children’s books like Winnie the Pooh, Wind In The Willows, Charlotte’s Web, The Little Prince, Little Women, Emily of New Moon, To Kill a Mocking Bird and Julie Of The Wolves.

However many of these classic children’s books are considered old fashioned and unappealing to the youthful reader of 2002. A publisher of young adult books recently lamented that preteens and teens don’t know what stories to read. As a result, they skip all the stories that might help them in their attempts to make meaning out of life and move on to adult titles. As parents, one of our challenges is to help our older children find young adult books with the same spiritual values as Charlotte’s Web or Emily of New Moon. Better yet, we might consider reading the book ourselves so that we can later talk about it together. From this idea came Shireen Dodson’s, The Mother Daughter Book Club, a guidebook on how mothers and daughters can bond through stories. Dodson explains how we can share the experience of discovering core spiritual values in a book with our children through informal discussion, craft activities, and even cooking. She then offers a list of books and explains how to build monthly meetings around them.

Modern young adult fiction offering universal and spiritual themes within contemporary story-telling include: Whirligig by Paul Fleischman, Slave Day by Rob Thomas, Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden, Driver’s Ed by Caroline B. Cooney, and Smack by Melvin Burgess. Here’s an example: In this passage from Whirligig, a teenage girl, Alexandra, has discovered the whirligig built and then left on the rocky coast of Maine by Brent, the book’s teenage protagonist, as restitution for his crime. She describes its magic to her skeptical friend, Steph. “You can’t see the wind, but look what it can do. It’s invisible but powerful. Like thoughts. One brings a bunch of junk to life. The other brings desires to life. And it’s better if you broadcast your thoughts outside…it symbolizes all unseen forces. It’s like electricity – an invisible power that people didn’t know existed for centuries. If you learn to use thoughts, you can do all kinds of things. “

Having two teenage daughters, I assure you that preteens and teens like books that are authentic and that grapple with real issues. Some of my daughters’ favorites were also mine when I was a young adult such as: A Separate Peace, Catcher In the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Anne Frank, and Summer Of My German Soldier. They also appreciated the environmental values found in more contemporary books such as The Legacy of Luna, the true story of Julia Butterfly Hill’s two year vigil living in a Redwood tree to protect it from loggers who wanted to cut it down.

Our children may often seem cynical and uncaring but in reality they are searching to know their divinity as they did when they were little. Taking ownership of books with spiritual values opens up new ways of thinking about themselves and their relationships with others. It may even break down their self-imposed isolation and relax the often rigid standards by which they judge themselves and their peers. Reading stories that communicate messages of love, gratitude, compassion and courage moves God from some abstract concept on the outskirts of a young person’s life into their very core.

The Practice Of Bonding
Before Birth – Trust Yourself

Bonding with our babies begins long before they are born. The formation of our unborn child goes hand in hand with the formation of the most intimate human relationship possible. Begun at conception, this bonding process continues throughout our lifetime, yet for these first few months it is unfamiliar territory. Although brief, this phase of the mother/child relationship brings with it a complex range of emotions - from overwhelming love and joyful anticipation to fear, frustration, and resentment. For each time we encounter the experience of two individual selves living as one, it is unique – and profoundly spiritual.

Five months into a risky pregnancy with my second child, I was advised to go to bed and stay there. By putting my life on “pause”, I discovered that the emotional bonds between our inner selves and this new fledgling self are as real as the physical ones required for its development and growth. Without ever voicing a word, I carried on continuous one way conversations with my daughter, encouraging her to grow and thrive. We were partners, I’d say, teammates working on a birthing project together. My inner voice whispered to hers throughout our days and nights. Although I can never be sure intellectually that Emily heard these inner monologues, in my heart I believe that she did. We were soul mates in the most literal sense.

Yet by making the bonding process my personal project, I put myself through needless worry. When I didn’t feel her move, I became afraid. When I resented having to stay in bed, I was overcome with guilt. When I thought about how much I wanted her, I was awed by the overwhelming intensity of my feelings. It took months of enforced solitude to learn how to surrender into myself, allowing the Divine to grow and shape my daughter. Eventually I relaxed and stopped trying to force the emotions I was conditioned to believe would improve the bonding process and in subtle ways promote her healthy birth. And only then, when I avoided thinking about feeling happiness, contentment, anticipation or maternal, did I feel a true connection between the two of us. Only when I released all attempts to control, judge or program my emotions, did I begin to trust the strength of a bond which was as ephemeral as a gentle breeze.

If we can stop second guessing ourselves or forcing our feelings to take the shape of whatever we have been conditioned to believe is “right,” the bonding process will simply happen. Like all the expectant mothers, we wait with trepidation and fear because of the newness of it all. We wait, filled with awe over our capacity to create and love our creation without ever having seen it yet. We wait, certain that the closer we come to birthing, the greater our performance anxiety will become, and the worse we will perform. Who hasn’t been caught off guard by the mood swings and contradictory emotional responses to pregnancy? In a single day we can be overwhelmed by feelings of completeness as if we were one with ourselves, our unborn child and the universe. An hour later we are experiencing feelings of resentment that our lives will never be the same or feelings of frustration that our distorted bodies are no longer our own. After that we feel guilty because we felt anything negative or worse, are currently feeling nothing at all.

We can, however, experience our pregnancy in another way, by adding a spiritual dimension. We can wait believing that motherhood offers us one of the most profound opportunities we shall ever have to expand our human identity and experience the sacred in life. We may even discover that the bonding process involves unconditional love that transcends whatever phase of life mother and child may be experiencing, from pregnancy on. We may learn that we need not hold ourselves personally responsible for being a good expectant mother or for successfully mothering our newborn. With open hearts, we can trust that the essential goodness and reliability of the Divine in life will care for our child better than we ever could.

If we approach our impending motherhood with spirituality, we are giving both ourselves and our unborn child a great gift. We are building a strong yet flexible structure for a successful mother/child relationship which, sure as sunrise, will continue to change and evolve just as it is doing now. We are creating bonds that will withstand the inevitable contradictions of motherhood: the positive and negative feelings about our child, the closeness of connection and pain of separation, the self confidence we achieve as we improve our ability to mother and the sense of despair when we fail. As our child grows older, we can better meet the challenges of separation as well. Separation is seldom easy, beginning, as those of us know who have given birth, at birth. From that miraculous moment on, we will connect and separate, connect and separate for the rest of our lives. Our faith in bonds crafted of the spiritual and Divine in life gives us balance and perspective so that separation becomes as acceptable as any other component of our relationship.
Once, when I was working on a project about Shamans, I was, at the same time, recovering from the emotional trauma of a miscarriage. In the midst of an interview with a very wise, very old Native American woman, I found myself pouring out my story between sobs. She patted my arm and told me not to worry since that little soul desired only a brief existence here on earth. Another child soul would soon choose me, and this time she would insist that we, together, experience her birth. And, soon after, we did. So let us be quietly aware of the creation process within us, and accept all we feel about our baby’s living presence without judgement. Let us take these precious few months to better learn how to love our self and our baby’s self unconditionally and with spirit.

Sorry

When Emily was in second grade and learning about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the students were asked to create a shield composed of a family crest and motto. Her motto was, “Sorry Don’t Feed The Bulldog”, a line from the 1970s television series, “Mash”, and an excellent choice for the Straus family (although possibly a little obscure for her seven year old peers). My husband, Richard, started using the line when someone in our family would cross over another person’s boundaries or do something selfish or thoughtless and mindlessly say, “I’m sorry”. The assumption was that these two words would get them off the hook quickly and easily even though both parties knew it wasn’t the truth. Or motto is still heard around the house today as much as it was eight years ago. For example:
Emily: “You wore my brown turtleneck again after I asked you not to, and now it’s pitted out.
Julia: “I’m sorry.”
Emily: “Sorry don’t feed the bull dog.”

Richard: “You’re using my college T shirt as a dust cloth? You know how much that T shirt means to me. Even the holes have meaning.”
Celia: “I’m sorry.”
Richard: “Sorry don’t feed the bull dog.”

Celia: “Why did you download all that music onto my laptop when the last time you did that, the computer crashed and I was an insane person for days. It could have happened again.”
Emily: “I’m sorry.”
Celia: “Sorry don’t feed the bulldog.”

Richard’s aim was to encourage a more mindful response -- one that might take some thought (and maybe even a few minutes), but culminate in an honest interaction. Like every family, our lives are full of small daily conflicts that can be resolved with a truthful response, but are often deflected with a lie. “I forgot.” “I didn’t mean to.” “I didn’t think you’d mind”, “I got it confused” “I misspoke” “I’m sorry.” Our motto is a gentle way of reminding someone that they’re not being honest without blowing the interchange entirely out of proportion with accusations: “You’re not sorry at all.” “Are you calling me a liar?” “Yes.” “Well now you owe me an apology.” And so on. During adolescence it becomes even more important to strike a balance between parental control so rigid that any confrontation results in a self-defensive lie, and not holding your daughter accountable for much of anything. In other words, honesty with a light touch.

It’s not always easy to strike the right tone between teaching the importance of integrity and trusting that our daughters already possess a spiritual understanding of integrity and need us only as role models. When controlling our child is our strategy, we can develop a pattern of personalizing authority over our daughters. We take it personally when she does not behave according to our expectations. We neglect her right to experience life for herself and make her own mistakes. Put simply, we take so much personal responsibility for our daughter’s life that we do not trust her to be responsible for it. In self defense, she begins to distrust us, and our connection with truth can begin to fragment.

We can counter this disconnection by paying a little more attention to the truths we have in common such as the shared goodness of our spiritual selves. Keeping focused on the values and vulnerabilities that we share makes it easier to be flexible about topics we don’t agree on. Every time we speak the truth, not in terms of scientific fact, but in terms of what we know in our hearts to be essentially right and good, we take one step closer to living truthfully. I’ve talked to my daughters about how you live the truth in different ways, such as speaking it, standing up for what you believe in (as long as what you believe in does not infringe upon the rights of other people), and being true to your real self, not the one you create to please others.

Making this commitment to truth isn’t easy. I spent most of my adolescence telling lies whenever it seemed expedient to do so, so I know. However, lying isn’t so easy either since it makes your life complicated, and you’re always afraid you’ll be found out. Truth takes time, reflection and often, tremendous courage, but it has distinct benefits: 1. Truth teaches you to pay attention 2. Truth makes your life simpler. 3. Truth fosters trust and visa versa. 4. Truth feels good. 5. Truth pleases your soul.

As Robert Lawrence Smith says in A Quaker Book of Wisdom, “If there is that of God in every person, truth is the best that there is in each of us – the part of us that is naturally drawn toward the good, toward God.” Each time we make a conscious decision to be guided by our inner voice and speak the truth, we become better at life, both as individuals, and as parents. For, as Smith goes on to say, “The prick of conscience that comes with the violation of truth is a reminder that integrity is the first principle of life, a principle all of us want to instill in our children – not only out of some vague sense of morality, but for the most practical reasons as well. Our ability to trust one another, in love, in business, in every arena of life, can only be based on a mutual commitment to honesty.” Truth and trust go hand in hand, and both generate from, as Smith explains, “the best there is in each of us”, the part of us where God resides. Connections between mothers and daughters based on truth are infinitely strong, strong enough to withstand the emotional tumult of adolescence. For it is our “mutual commitment to honesty” built on trust that can keep communication lines open during the most challenging of crisis.

A “mutual commitment to honesty” means accepting responsibility for the truth of who we are and relating to others truthfully. This is frightening. If we take responsibility for being honest with those around us, we often feel exposed. By speaking the truth, we fear that we’re opening ourselves up to anger, laughter, sarcasm or being ostracized. In their book The Day America Told The Truth, James Patterson and Peter Kim estimate that 91 percent of us lie on a regular basis. For years I was oblivious to the “little white lies’ my daughters overheard me tell: To my mother - “I love the tropical bird place mats and napkins. I’m going to use them the next time I have people over for dinner”. To my husband - “I always take your gastrointestinal complaints seriously.“ To a client - “Darn, no, I can’t work over the weekend. We’re going out of town for a family thing.” To them - “I swear to you, the only person who’s going to notice your pimples is you.” “Only two more minutes on this phone call and we can go.” “Having a tooth pulled is no big deal”, “I’m not upset, I’m just tired.” “Nothing’s wrong”. – oblivious, that is, until I began to see the impact of these seemingly innocent “untruths” on them.

For even the littlest of lies weaken our connections to one another. If I would not share my true feelings with Emily when she asked me if I was upset, why should she share her feelings with me? She began withdrawing. By not letting Emily into my inner world, she began refusing me entry into hers. By not paying attention to my words, I was demonstrating to her that she didn’t need to pay attention to hers.

Accordingly, with Julia, if I would not tell her the truth about how she looked, why should she believe me when I told her she looked terrific and she really did? She began doubting. We all know the power of praise and encouragement on our children. Our ability to use positive messages to strengthen and affirm our daughter’s self image is a precious gift to be handled with care. I was squandering this gift by being falsely reassuring all of the time. We want to respond positively far more than negatively, but at the same time, we need to strike a balance so we’re not “loose with the truth.”

It’s a lot easier to be truthful with each other, if we are truthful about ourselves. As Robert Smith points out, “Living in each of us is a seed of the divine, an inner light of truth. Although it’s there, we must turn toward this light and acknowledge its power to illuminate our path.” In other words, this truth is not a judgmental truth defined by “shoulds” and “musts”, but a truth that comes from the inner light of our spiritual self or soul. Following this light of truth keeps us on a path of integrity, enabling us to form honest and authentic relationships that last. However, determining who our true self is, and then allowing that self to speak and live with integrity demands awareness, focus and more often than not, courage, particularly if we are trying to role model truth for our daughters. We all want our daughters to be happy and secure and successful in their relationships, but we cannot live our daughter’s life for her. We can only live our own lives truthfully and be truthful with her. Although we may fear we will lose the intimacy we had when she was a child, in actuality, our truthfulness will bring us closer. The more we help our daughters achieve the truth of their own identity, separate from us, the closer we will become to them.

Plato tells us, “Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in Heaven and on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be from the first a partaker of truth for then he can be trusted.” Yet, partaking of truth can be difficult in today’s society when most people assume that others are lying. We are skeptical about the truthfulness of our politicians, business leaders, advertisers, press, sports and entertainment celebrities and often the people we work for or with. Many of us have adopted, at one time or another in our lives, the utilitarian ethic that a good end justifies the means, even if the means is a lie. This is partly because in a world where everything’s relative, many people considered truth to be irrelevant or even non-existent.
Teaching our daughters to rely on their “inner light of truth” can be an uphill battle, when we are surrounded by cynics who question whether speaking the truth is possible, or worse, tell us truth doesn’t matter, but we can do it, one truth at a time.

To everyone else I’m creative and bold
To everyone else I’m quite fine
To the outside world success is my game
To the outside world luck is mine.

But they don’t understand what is happening inside
They don’t detect the confusion
They don’t know what I go through alone
The struggle I have with illusion.

I wish I could say what I feel
I wish I could show my true soul
I want to be real, not pretending
Pretending takes too great a toll.

More Prayers On My Pillow

Can you help me to be truthful?
Reality builds strength in me.
I don’t want to make up stories
Or wear a mask so you won’t see.

Can you give me inner courage
To do what I know to be right?
With open heart I’ll love you always
With honesty I’ll win our fight.
More Prayers On My Pillow

“Truth is what is real; it describes how things really are. Truth is the skeleton life hangs upon; it adds shape to everything in the universe. God’s truth leads us to what is real, to what is accurate. Just as our DNA contains the form that our physical life will take, God’s truth contains the form that our soul and spirit take.” Changes That Heal by Dr. Henry Cloud

When Emily was in second grade and learning about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the students were asked to create a shield composed of a family crest and motto. Her motto was, “Sorry Don’t Feed The Bulldog”, a line from the 1970s television series, “Mash”, and an excellent choice for the Straus family (although possibly a little obscure for her seven year old peers). My husband, Richard, started using the line when someone in our family would cross over another person’s boundaries or do something selfish or thoughtless and mindlessly say, “I’m sorry”. The assumption was that these two words would get them off the hook quickly and easily even though both parties knew it wasn’t the truth. Or motto is still heard around the house today as much as it was eight years ago. For example:
Emily: “You wore my brown turtleneck again after I asked you not to, and now it’s pitted out.
Julia: “I’m sorry.”
Emily: “Sorry don’t feed the bull dog.”

Richard: “You’re using my college T shirt as a dust cloth? You know how much that T shirt means to me. Even the holes have meaning.”
Celia: “I’m sorry.”
Richard: “Sorry don’t feed the bull dog.”

Celia: “Why did you download all that music onto my laptop when the last time you did that, the computer crashed and I was an insane person for days. It could have happened again.”
Emily: “I’m sorry.”
Celia: “Sorry don’t feed the bulldog.”

Richard’s aim was to encourage a more mindful response -- one that might take some thought (and maybe even a few minutes), but culminate in an honest interaction. Like every family, our lives are full of small daily conflicts that can be resolved with a truthful response, but are often deflected with a lie. “I forgot.” “I didn’t mean to.” “I didn’t think you’d mind”, “I got it confused” “I misspoke” “I’m sorry.” Our motto is a gentle way of reminding someone that they’re not being honest without blowing the interchange entirely out of proportion with accusations: “You’re not sorry at all.” “Are you calling me a liar?” “Yes.” “Well now you owe me an apology.” And so on. During young adolescence it becomes even more important to strike a balance between parental control so rigid that any confrontation results in a self-defensive lie, and not holding your daughter accountable for much of anything. In other words, honesty with a light touch.

It’s not always easy to strike the right tone between teaching the importance of integrity and trusting that our daughter already possess a spiritual understanding of integrity and need us only as role models. When controlling a child is our parenting strategy, we can develop a pattern of personalizing authority over our children. We take it personally when they do not behave according to our expectations. We neglect their right to experience life for themselves and make their own mistakes. Put simply, we take so much personal responsibility for our daughter’s life that we do not trust her to be responsible for it. In self defense, she begins to distrust us, and our connection with truth can begin to fragment.

We can counter this disconnection by paying a little more attention to the truths we have in common such as the shared goodness of our spiritual selves. Keeping focused on the values and vulnerabilities that we share makes it easier to be flexible about topics we don’t agree on. Every time we speak the truth, not in terms of scientific fact, but in terms of what we know in our hearts to be essentially right and good, we take one step closer to living truthfully. I’ve talked to my daughters about how you live the truth in different ways, such as speaking it, standing up for what you believe in (as long as what you believe in does not infringe upon the rights of other people), and being true to your real self, not the one you create to please others.

Making this commitment to truth isn’t easy. I spent most of my adolescence telling lies whenever it seemed expedient to do so, so I know. However, lying isn’t so easy either since it makes your life complicated, and you’re always afraid you’ll be found out. Truth takes time, reflection and often, tremendous courage, but it has distinct benefits: 1. Truth teaches you to pay attention 2. Truth makes your life simpler. 3. Truth fosters trust and visa versa. 4. Truth feels good. 5. Truth pleases your soul.

As Robert Lawrence Smith says in A Quaker Book of Wisdom, “If there is that of God in every person, truth is the best that there is in each of us – the part of us that is naturally drawn toward the good, toward God.” Each time we make a conscious decision to be guided by our inner voice and speak the truth, we become better at life, both as individuals, and as parents. For, as Smith goes on to say, “The prick of conscience that comes with the violation of truth is a reminder that integrity is the first principle of life, a principle all of us want to instill in our children – not only out of some vague sense of morality, but for the most practical reasons as well. Our ability to trust one another, in love, in business, in every arena of life, can only be based on a mutual commitment to honesty.” Truth and trust go hand in hand, and both generate from, as Smith explains, “the best there is in each of us”, the part of us where God resides. Connections between mothers and daughters based on truth are infinitely strong, strong enough to withstand the emotional tumult of growing up. For it is our “mutual commitment to honesty” built on trust that can keep communication lines open during the most challenging of crisis.

A “mutual commitment to honesty” means accepting responsibility for the truth of who we are and relating to others truthfully. This is frightening. If we take responsibility for being honest with those around us, we often feel exposed. By speaking the truth, we fear that we’re opening ourselves up to anger, laughter, sarcasm or being ostracized. In their book The Day America Told The Truth, James Patterson and Peter Kim estimate that 91 percent of us lie on a regular basis. For years I was oblivious to the “little white lies’ my daughters overheard me tell: To my mother - “I love the tropical bird place mats and napkins. I’m going to use them the next time I have people over for dinner”. To my husband - “I always take your gastrointestinal complaints seriously.“ To a client - “Darn, no, I can’t work over the weekend. We’re going out of town for a family thing.” To them - “I swear to you, the only person who’s going to notice your pimples is you.” “Only two more minutes on this phone call and we can go.” “Having a tooth pulled is no big deal”, “I’m not upset, I’m just tired.” “Nothing’s wrong”. – oblivious, that is, until I began to see the impact of these seemingly innocent “untruths” on them.

For even the littlest of lies weaken our connections to one another. If I would not share my true feelings with Emily when she asked me if I was upset, why should she share her feelings with me? She began withdrawing. By not letting Emily into my inner world, she began refusing me entry into hers. By not paying attention to my words, I was demonstrating to her that she didn’t need to pay attention to hers.

Accordingly, with Julia, if I would not tell her the truth about how she looked, why should she believe me when I told her she looked terrific and she really did? She began doubting. We all know the power of praise and encouragement on our children. Our ability to use positive messages to strengthen and affirm our daughter’s self image is a precious gift to be handled with care. I was squandering this gift by being falsely reassuring all of the time. We want to respond positively far more than negatively, but at the same time, we need to strike a balance so we’re not “loose with the truth.”

It’s a lot easier to be truthful with each other, if we are truthful about ourselves. As Robert Smith points out, “Living in each of us is a seed of the divine, an inner light of truth. Although it’s there, we must turn toward this light and acknowledge its power to illuminate our path.” In other words, this truth is not a judgmental truth defined by “shoulds” and “musts”, but a truth that comes from the inner light of our spiritual self or soul. Following this light of truth keeps us on a path of integrity, enabling us to form honest and authentic relationships that last. However, determining who our true self is, and then allowing that self to speak and live with integrity demands awareness, focus and more often than not, courage, particularly if we are trying to role model truth for our children. We all want our daughters to be happy and secure and successful in their relationships. However, rather than judging our daughter’s ability to achieve this goal according to our terms, we might want to respect, to trust her achievements according to her terms. In other words, we can only live our own lives truthfully and be truthful with them. And, as they grow older, although we may fear we will lose the intimacy we had when they were little, in actuality, our truthfulness will bring us closer. The more we help our daughters achieve the truth of their own identity, separate from us, the closer we will become to them.

Plato tells us, “Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in Heaven and on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be from the first a partaker of truth for then he can be trusted.” Yet, partaking of truth can be difficult in today’s society when most people assume that others are lying. We are skeptical about the truthfulness of our politicians, business leaders, advertisers, press, sports and entertainment celebrities and often the people we work for or with. Many of us have adopted, at one time or another in our lives, the utilitarian ethic that a good end justifies the means, even if the means is a lie. This is partly because in a world where everything’s relative, many people considered truth to be irrelevant or even non-existent.
Teaching our daughters to rely on their “inner light of truth” can be an uphill battle, when we are surrounded by cynics who question whether speaking the truth is possible, or worse, tell us truth doesn’t matter, but we can do it, one truth at a time.

To everyone else I’m creative and bold
To everyone else I’m quite fine
To the outside world success is my game
To the outside world luck is mine.

But they don’t understand what is happening inside
They don’t detect the confusion
They don’t know what I go through alone
The struggle I have with illusion.

I wish I could say what I feel
I wish I could show my true soul
I want to be real, not pretending
Pretending takes too great a toll.

More Prayers On My Pillow

Laughter – Your Key To Balance

“A sense of humor will help both you and your daughter distance yourselves from your emotions. It also gives you the time and space to be more objective about the situation at hand. Don’t be afraid to use humor in the midst of pain. As long as you are laughing with your daughter, not at her, and your humor is respectfully given and received, you will enjoy a bounty of benefits.” Loving Your Teenage Daughter Whether She Likes It Or Not, Debra Whiting Alexander.

I believe most of us, no matter who we are, often take life too seriously. Our souls yearn to feel, once again, that simple innocent pleasures in life that we experienced as young children. Each time, as adults, we can relax enough and trust enough to spontaneously laugh together with another person, our spiritual selves are released from the confines of our rigid public persona and, in that moment of laughter, connect. We laugh for any number of reasons, but the reason offering the most opportunities for connections with spirit comes from our heightened awareness that life is basically uncontrollable and yet filled with happy surprises. This realization of our human condition does not engender hopeless, bitterness or cynicism. It creates just the opposite. As adults, seeing the humor in our daily lives strengthens and sustains us by giving us new perspective and balance.

Personally, I find that it takes some letting go of old habits and patterns of behavior to celebrate the simple and spontaneous in life with laughter. Instead of working so hard to get life right, I am forced to admit that, basically, life is already right, and I just have to trust its rightness. Giving up control is not easy for most of us, yet, when we do so, we become a little less self-absorbed. It is then that laughter from our inner self may bubble forth, and we are able to respond to our state of being as we often did as little children. We are graced. The next step comes when we are able to share this grace, or “lightness of being”, with our children.

The laughter I’m describing is not what accompanies hurtful teasing, taunting or sarcasm at the expense of another person or oneself. My father used to tease me continually all through my childhood. It was his way of relating that did not require him to show his true emotions, and he had learned it from his parents who teased him in the same way. I don’t think he meant to hurt me at all, but whenever he teased me about, say, my boyfriends, taste in clothes or lack of athletic ability, I felt that I had two choices. I could pretend to laugh or become defensive and then be accused of having no sense of humor. In either case my self -esteem would go down a notch.

As a sixth and seventh grader I was teased unmercifully by other girls in my grade, partially because I was a newcomer, and also, because I tried so hard to be liked, I was an easy target. At one point I was invited to try out for middle school cheerleading, a guarantee of peer acceptance, even homage, if you made the team. I was thrilled, instantly accepting without a clue about what I would be doing. Being a complete klutz, on the day of tryouts I couldn’t perform any of the required acrobatics like a cartwheel, split, or even one of those leaps where you kick your legs up and arch your back, ideally with pom poms in each hand. I was the first to be disqualified, and the girls who had invited me were hysterical with laughter. I’m not sure how this unhappy incident influenced me in later life other than keeping me from entering ballroom dancing competitions, but I’m guessing we all had experiences like this as teenagers. Just as our children are sometimes reluctant to share the inside jokes and funny experiences that occur at school, they are often hesitant to admit to being teased. Perhaps if we let them know that we know what it’s like to be teased, and that the laughter teasing elicits is not funny, but cruel and therefore has no value, they will feel better about themselves, and about talking to us. Perhaps, if they are afforded the opportunity to tease other children, they’ll think twice.

Laughing at ourselves with compassion and understanding is a deeply spiritual response to life that we all might practice more often. If we cannot find ways to accept our foibles and flaws with the acceptance that comes with discovering the humorous in what we do, we end up fearful and defensive. We worry that other people might laugh judgmentally, with derision or scorn, if we drop our guard and reveal the true us. Being ourselves is often silly or outrageous, but it is also trusting, joyful and infinitely more appealing to others, if only in terms of sheer energy, than the guarded self who is always predictable, defensive and serious. Nourishing our own childlike sense of humor and fostering it in our daughters enables us to, not only better cope with the process of living, but to also better enjoy the process as process. When my girls were younger, laughter was a natural occurrence, woven into much of what we did on a daily basis. My task is retrieve those humorous moments we shared and use them as connections when times are tough.

When Julia was three, I made up an incredibly stupid song to sing every day when I drove her the mile or so to a local school where she had three weeks of nursery summer camp. Each morning she was tearful, certain she was going to have a miserable time, which she seldom did; certain she would hate whatever I had packed in her brown bag lunch, which she never did, and certain I would not come to fetch her home, which I always did. The song, which was essentially tuneless, had to do with bunnies and went something like, “Julia loves baby bunnies. They play play play all day. They dance and sing and poop on the ground and then they run away.” The verses were endless and got progressively more ridiculous as we closed in on the camp so that by the time we pulled into the parking lot, Julia and the bunnies had done everything a three year old could possible think was funny, and Julia was usually beside herself with laughter. However, this mindlessly inane song was more useful when, ten years later, she came home in tears because all the so called “popular” girls refused to sit with her at lunch, and after holding her tight for a while, and then suddenly bursting forth with the bunny song, we both began to giggle and as a result, feel better. And it was most useful when she called, forlorn and homesick four years later, after her first week living with a family in rural France, and I sang it to her over the phone.

Most of us have become masters at laughing at life’s little ironies, and at the stage in our lives, when our children are no longer little, irony is often how we demonstrate our sense of humor. A tad more jaded and world-weary than when our children were toddlers, we laugh knowingly at the sorry state of: the universe, the world, our neighborhood park, our teenager’s bedroom. We shake our heads in mock despair over: junk email, endless “to do” lists, ever again purchasing a bathing suit, the boss’s irrational need to micromanage, our outdated wardrobe consisting primarily of different shades and lengths of monochromatic jackets and skirts, the last time we had a romantic weekend with the man in our life, the last time we had a man in our life.

We joke to our children, saying, “It figures I would have a fender bender one week before the lease is up. How else would I be able to pay the extra $1,000 to give my car back to the dealer?” “Of course the basement flooded while we were away on vacation. If it had flooded when we were home, then we’d have had to stress over trying to save all the carpeting and books that we can now simply throw away.” “Now that you’ve lost your favorite fleece, I guess you’ll finally be able to wear the jacket we bought you last month.” With irony we teach our children how to put setbacks into perspective, and how to cope with the fact life is often unfair.

“If you don’t try to make light of things, but simply find the humor which is there, self-importance is eased without pain. It is helpful to seek out the humor in everything you do – perhaps even to write down the most heroic, tragic, painful, nostalgic, meaningful, important things in your life and look for their funniness.” Simply Sane – The Spirituality of Mental Health Gerald May. Since life is often unfair, we will always have opportunities to make “light of things” with our children; however, we need to take care. Irony can easily turn into or be interpreted as cynicism, a popular attitude with teenagers because they think it makes them appear “chilled out” and impervious to life’s setbacks. Eventually they become numbed to the joy and pleasures of life as well, unwilling and unable to celebrate their victories. They assume masks that become difficult to take off, and their laughter comes at the expense of others more and more often.

One way to counter the lure of cynicism, is to rediscover how we laughed as children and to expand our laughter, so that we role model the freedom and joy that an awareness of the absurdity of our human condition gives us. Is it possible to find humor in our ”heroic, tragic, painful, nostalgic, meaningful, important things”? I remember a time it was possible for me. It was when Julia, age eleven, and I had a terrible car accident in which, in order to avoid an oncoming car, I swerved and ended up rolling over twice in our Pathfinder, basically flattening it. We were both pulled out of the car from the passenger side window by two landscapers who happened to be behind us on the highway. Although we were trembling with fear and shock, we emerged, one after the other, without a single scratch; not a nail broken. In a very small shaky voice Julia asked, “Mommy, don’t ever, ever, ever buy another red car.”

When spirit is involved, we can overcome cynicism by discovering what is absurd and funny in life. Tilden Edwards points out in Sabbath Time that, “Laughter is a special kind of play. Laughter can be escapist, contrived, or cynical, but not when it is God laughing through us. Then it is a simply restful celebration of the life that is. Such laughter is schoolmaster, too. It teaches us humility and deflates pretension.” When our spirits connect through laughter, we feel the simple playfulness of our divine nature. We find common ground in the spontaneity and pleasure of the moment as if we were both trusting children again. When “God laughs through us”, we cannot help but bond.

Let me take from this moment
Just one memory I can treasure
When everything came together
In the brilliance of the day

Let me capture joyous laughter
How I felt and how I acted
So when all else is subtracted
I’ll recall I felt this way.

Let me throw off all my burdens
Inhale deeply all the magic
Use it when there’s something tragic
When I’m lost or gone astray.

More Prayers On My Pillow

Bonding - Moment By Moment

“When I am with my daughter, I have practiced being in the moment and sensing all that is around me. I have delighted in making mud soup, searching for worms, watching and laughing as a pet bunny rabbit hops around the yard, dancing in the warm rain. She has shown me how to receive what is, rather than focusing on a need to accomplish or produce something.” Patience Robbins, “The Call To Spiritual Growth In Parenthood”, Shalem News, 1997

Being in the moment with our children can be as natural as breathing. Take a deep breath and, as you fill your lungs, say to yourself, “Be”. Hold it a second, then, as you exhale slowly, say to yourself, “Still.” Repeat this simple exercise five times and see if you don’t feel more centered and aware of what’s going on around you instead of focusing solely on your own thoughts.

When we are young children, we live “in the moment”. We have access to a kind of visionary simplicity. With the open heart of a child, we are able to experience moment after moment of transcendence every day. Tibetan Buddhist masters teach that little children are “with the moment” or “with Tao.” Each child is a little Buddha master. We have not yet developed what Yogis call, the mind of a “drunken monkey”, a mind that lurches from past to future, but is never able to stay focused on the present. Often our ability to stay focused starts to disappear when we leave childhood and enter puberty.

Later on, as adults, most of us are unable to stay grounded in the here and now . Being in the moment no longer comes naturally to us, but instead requires concentration and practice. We must relearn what it is like to be a child – open, trusting, spontaneous and capable of finding the magic of everyday life. And when we do, we will find ourselves bonding with our children with far less effort.

What do we personally gain from this effort? Balance. Integration. Love. Wonder. As Charlotte Joko Beck says in Nothing Special: “Living is about wonder. As you go through your day, through your little upsets and difficulties, ask yourself, ‘Where is the wonder?’ It’s always there. Wonder is the nature of life itself. We can’t force ourselves to feel it. We can only work with the barrier we are facing. The barrier is created by ourselves; it’s not caused by what has happened to us.”. No matter who we are, what we are doing or how we feel, the more we break down our self-created barriers, the more we experience the wonder of life in that moment.

A mother of a twelve year old said to me that she have just about stopped taking photographs of events in her daughter’s life because she finally realized that, in capturing these “kodak moments,” she wasn’t experiencing them with her. Rather than trying to capture “kodak moments,” we are strengthening our natural ability to experience extraordinary moments in the most ordinary, humdrum details of our day in the company of our children. There is nothing we can do to make these “moments of being” happen except shift our awareness to the giftedness of life. There’s no formula except to gently bring our mind back to here and now. There is no outcome except that we can then appreciate the wonder of God’s love in everything around us. Bonding in the moment changes from moment to moment. How simple is that? What doesn’t change is how we perceive the world around us. If we are bonding with our children in this manner, we are seeing them clearly, exactly as they are in that moment and respecting them for their unique presence.

When we give our full attention to the wonder of what is going on around us, and then share that wonder with our children, our relationship with them deepens. Moreover, if our relationship is on shaky ground or fragmented, as all relationships are at times, building on the most ordinary of moments gives us credibility in our children’s eyes. Step by step, little by little, we are saying to them: “I love you for what you are as well as what you are not.”

I love my fourteen year old, Emily, for being able to stand up for her convictions. I also remind myself to love her for other qualities associated with her certitude such as stubbornness, an obliviousness to the need for communication with others (that would be me) and a certain defensiveness (as in “what do you mean I’m not using my time wisely? I always use my time wisely”). If I am with her in the present, I can love her both ways.

Your children will remember the moments when you loved them “both ways” more than you think. An email from a forty year old mother of two demonstrates this fact: “I remember going to the library for the first time with my Mom when I was little. It was late afternoon and I remember how it smelled like books. We spent a long time choosing books for her to read to me.” As does one from a twenty-one year old: “My mama used to braid my hair. There was this one time before my birthday when she wouldn’t let me look in the mirror until she was done. When I saw myself, I loved her so much for making me pretty.”

If we can stop ourselves from making judgements about our children and simply experience them, we are bonding moment by moment. However, when we are not mindful, and are, instead, mindless, we cannot take advantage of the invitations our children give us to be in the moment with them. These invitations are not always offered with words. They can also be communicated with silence, body language, movement, tone of voice, or facial expression. Often our responses are formulaic, even though we recognize the invitation. We want to bond; we even think we are, but, in reality, we are physically with them, but mentally someplace else, either distracted by the past or anticipating the future. These responses should give me clues that I’m clueless about being consciously present to the child trying to communicate with me: “That’s nice.” “Tell me later.” “It’s not that big a deal.” “Well, just as long as you had a good time.” “Don’t think about it.” “Not now.”

Most of us have spent many years trying to be someone other than ourselves to please others. After we become mothers, we try to be whatever we believe a mother should be, so it is difficult for us to stop and simply be. It’s sometimes hard not to approach mothering as if we were baking a soufflé, worrying the whole time about whether it will rise or fall. Who doesn’t dream of being rewarded for being a good mother ? Yet, in order to ever receive that reward, we must accept it by celebrating who our children are and who we are now moment by moment.

Each moment of the day
Can be a miracle
For beauty shines
If I look with truthful eyes
And love grows
If I give with a generous soul
Each moment of the day
Can be a miracle
For wisdom builds
If I learn with an open mind
And joy comes
If I live with love in my heart.

More Prayers On My Pillow

Creating Sacred Space for You and Your Children

“Sacred space is a space that is transparent to transcendence, and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation, even for the youngest child. When you enter through the door, everything within such a space is symbolic, the whole world is mythologized, and spiritual life is possible. This is a place where you can go and feel safe and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, you will eventually find yourself again and again.” Joseph Campbell
I first learned about sacred space from my grandmother, Geneal. When I was four years old my family moved to Lafayette, Indiana so that my father could teach ROTC at Perdue University. The Victorian house we rented had a huge wrap around porch and backyard that seemed to go on forever with a flower garden and an apple orchard. There were few young children my age for me to play with, but I had my stuffed animals and dolls and life was pretty good that summer of 1956 until August 4st brought a new baby sister. Christine came into the world, frail and sickly and, to make matters worse, my mother returned home ill herself from a difficult pregnancy and Caesarean birth. It became imperative that her mother, Geneal, would instantly fly from New Delhi where my grandfather was posted by the State Department, to help out.

From the onset of Geneal’s arrival it seemed to me that the entire household’s attention was focused on what was going on in the freshly blue-wallpapered (Christine was supposed to have been a boy) nursery. The house was invaded by strangers, young officers’ wives, who came to help launder loads of diapers and sterilize bottles under the imposing command of my grandmother. I resented them. I resented my bed-ridden mother and I especially resented my baby sister. I began to try to draw attention back to where it rightfully belonged by being, for the first time in my life, bad. I drew on the walls with my crayons. I took scissors to my pastel ruffled organdy party dress, the one my mother was most proud of making on her sewing machine. I “talked back”, and I stopped eating. Meals were taken seriously by our family with everyone expected to be on time, in place and demonstrably appreciative of the fare by cleaning your plate. Once my self-imposed fast was determined to be caused by sheer stubbornness and not a stomach flu, mealtime became tortuous battle of wills often ending with me at the table staring at cold congealed mash potatoes until bedtime.

One morning I wandered into the little den which had been converted into Geneal’s bedroom and found her seated, motionless, eyes closed, in front of a table on which were placed the most beautiful and exotic collection of objects I had ever seen: a carved box inlaid with coral and turquoise, a polished stone, an ivory statue of a Hindu goddess, a lighted candle – imagine at ten o’clock in the morning – and burning incense. My presence must have noticed because Geneal opened her eyes and, beckoning me closer, introduced me to the concept of sacred space. She explained that she took these objects with her wherever she went to create a “special place” where she could be alone and quiet and just “herself”. And then, in one of her customary strokes of genius, seeing how fascinated I was, she suggested we find a similar “special place” just for me.

It took only a day or so, looking inside and out, for me to locate my first of many sacred spaces – an old apple tree with twisted branches so low to the ground that even a little girl could climb up and hide among its leaves. I called it my “jiggley wiggley” tree and when I showed it to Geneal for approval, she immediately noticed the deep hole in the trunk where she was quite certain fairies lived. The next day an old bedspread mysteriously materialized that, if hung over the two lowest branches, provided a safe hidey place where I could hold long conversations with my stuffed animals and dolls in complete privacy. At Geneal’s suggestion I made cunning little “rooms” for the fairies to use at night when I was asleep out of buttons and sea shells, rocks and sticks decorated with moss and picked flowers. But by far, the most sacred time I spent in that particular sacred space was mealtime. Geneal decreed that, for the next month, I was allowed to eat one meal a day, my choice, breakfast, lunch or dinner, in the jiggley wiggley tree by myself, unattended. And, if I wished, I could eat it on doll dishes. Sibling rivalry gave way to utter bliss.

Thirty years later I confronted a similar situation with my four year old daughter Julia when I brought home her new baby sister, almost two full months premature. I was a little slower on the uptake than Geneal, I like to think due to sleep deprivation, but after a few weeks of temper tantrums, a new fear of the dark and a sudden refusal to eat anything but Campbells Chicken Noodle soup and brie cheese, I remembered the jiggley wiggley tree. We found the perfect sacred space, a closet big enough to put a cushion in and a light with walls plastered in white just begging to be painted with tempera.

As Julia grew older, her sacred space changed, as did mine when I was growing up. Occasionally, in warm weather, it was outside in the backyard Sometimes it was an actual three dimensional space like the closet, or her dressing table with its collection of photographs, glass bottles, makeup and basket of hair clips. For a while it was the lower bunk of her bunk bed where she read the prayer poem I wrote every night to help her go to sleep, or simply her memory of a particularly pleasant day on our deck when she was three years old. But always it was and is a shelter for her mind, her body, her emotions, her spirit and her soul.

My sacred space is in my office where I have surrounded myself with photographs of my family, fifteen years of artwork and hand-made gifts from both daughters, my collections of stuffed lions, music, books, childhood toys, stones and much more. Besides having personal sacred space in which to meditate, read, think, pray, weep, laugh, write, day-dream or simply be, our family has communal sacred space, where one or more of us can go to be in harmony with each other and the environment surrounding us, in our case, a special garden room.

Sacred space is all around us, but in order to benefit from it, both personally and communally, we need to recognize it as such. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree, but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.” I believe we can honor the more formal sacred space of a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, while at the same time crafting sacred places of our own. Creating sacred space and teaching our childlren to do the same is just one more way of maintaining spiritual balance, within ourselves and within our relationships.

I wrote prayer-poems for Julia and Emily describing and celebrating Sacred Space including this one:

Help me remember that moment of happiness
When I was a child
And my world was a garden,
When I picked wild strawberries alone in the sunlight,
Knowing somehow that my time there was precious.

Help me remember that moment of happiness
When the air stood still
And I walked in grace,
When my heart was dancing and my soul was one
With the beauty around me and the love inside.

Prayers On My Pillow , Ballantine, 1998.

Stress in School

A few weeks ago I spoke at length to a friend of my daughter’s, a beautiful, talented and intelligent girl filled with spirit in the best sense of the word who sobbed in anguish because she was not accepted to the college of her dreams. She felt that she had failed her family, her school, and most of all herself. The fact that she had been accepted to three excellent colleges, any one of which will give her a wonderful life experience, entirely escaped her. The process had had a negative impact on her soul and the soul of her family. And I couldn’t help but wonder how many other high school seniors and their families were coping with the same feelings of bewilderment and rejection.

The college admissions process has finally ended for the graduating class of 2001, and I, for one, have learned much about perspective and balance during these past few months. From personal experience as the mother of an eighteen year old senior, and from the dozens of emails I have received from distraught teenagers, I am convinced that many of us parents contribute to the emotional barriers our children must overcome to survive in this increasingly competitive educational environment. Moreover, the competition may culminate in admission to college, but the process of judging and competing starts as early as pre-school. Of course we all express dismay at how other parents use their precious children as projections of their own personal needs to win – to be the best, but often we, myself included, also justify our own projections as “only wanting what is best for my child.”

I remember wincing at the sound of my voice when “pitching” Julia and Emily’s attributes to admissions directors of pre-schools here in Washington, D.C. I knew there was something “wrong with this picture” as I watched first one and then, four years later, the other daughter toddle off at age three for a half hour of “play group” guided (and judged) by several well meaning teachers whose job it was to select out the problem child, the slow learner, the immature one. How could one make any determination whatsoever about a child based on their behavior over a thirty minute time period in a completely foreign environment with a group of total strangers? Meanwhile we parents sat in the school cafeteria with smiles pasted on our faces nodding intently as the headmistress or principal gave us an introduction to the school’s philosophy (a good one and always the same) of nurturing the “individual child”. Pretending to take notes, I would secretly steal glances at the couple next to me to see if they seemed more confident, more complacent about what they were putting their child through. A sure tip off was if they demonstrated an easy familiarity with the speaker, indicating their candidate had older siblings at the school. Half an hour later, our children would be brought back to us, intact, usually smiling. I have no idea what Julia or Emily really thought about these periodic competitive block building and picture drawing sessions. They always tried to please whomever was asking to be pleased; they always did their best to be polite, engaging, attentive, creative, focused.

I am humbled by what our children willingly, happily, spiritually do to please us, whether its applying to kindergarten, auditioning for the school play, attempting a goal for their junior soccer team, getting an “A” on a book report or seeking admission to one of the “Ivies”. I am grateful for their trust in our demands that they take risks; dare to dream; try just a little bit harder; shake off defeat; give it their all. I wish we were as capable of growing them in the presence of the Divine as we are of keeping them aware of the demands of our own egos. In eighteen years of parenting, it has been difficult for me to walk that tightrope between wanting the very best for my children -- basically setting the bar higher for them than my parents did for me – and foisting on them hopes and goals that cause needless anxiety and fear that they will disappoint me.

I am only too painfully aware that I often “talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.” For example, although I say to Emily that as long as she does the best she can in school, a grade of B or C is acceptable, when she shows me her report card, do I betray my disappointment in subtle ways? With a forced smile or a too effusive “good job”? I encourage and support Julia’s sense of right and wrong, her independence, her taste, her creativity, her essential ability to be herself, but do I then sabotage my support with judgements about her tendency to be sloppy, absent-mindedness, self-absorbed view of the world and lack of appreciation of what things cost, and, occasional lapses when it comes to competition. “I SO do not want to take another AP”, she tells me. “I just don’t care anymore.” Burnt out at eighteen? I hope, and pray not.

And so I urge you : Think clearly, carefully and most of all, spiritually about the messages you send your children regarding their self worth in all you set out for them to do, whether it is getting into the “right” kindergarten , winning a place on the select soccer team or getting good grades. Never in all our years of parenting are we so challenged to maintain a nonjudgmental, reassuring and loving presence for our children as we are in today’s competitive society. For, although we may pay lip service to the axiom that: “every school has its positives, and it’s likely you’ll enjoy your experience whether you attend your first, second or third choice”, our children will seek in our eyes, our tone of voice, our body language, and our hearts, the truth. And sadly, many of them will find the truth is that their parents’ hopes, dreams and need to compete and win have been projected onto their children. At a time when our children are often their own severest critic; at a time when the bar has never been raised so high for them to compete and excel across the board, in all ways; at a time when our children’s time is organized into schedules that no adult could maintain, our children desperately need perspective, balance and the guiding light of the Divine.
Our children might express it like this:

When I’m hurried through life
From the moment I wake
Rushed from home right to school,
Told there’s no time to take,

When I’m bundled like groceries
And carted around
Fulfilling a schedule
That’s getting me down,

When fun becomes offered
As an in-between treat
And everyone’s screaming
About deadlines to meet

Then let me find peace
In a place without stress,
A place deep inside me,
A place I can rest.

Reading To Our Children’s Souls

At this time of year we often look for just the right book to give someone we love. If we are aware of how books connect us to our own spirituality as well as that of other members of our friends and family, especially our children, we can strengthen these connections. In other words, we can purposefully choose books that speak to our souls. In the Catholic faith there is a special kind of spiritual reading called Lectio Divina. In Lectio Divina you read with an open heart. You allow yourself to become so intimate and involved in the words, that the story becomes a sacred text. Spiritual reading is more than simply finding spiritual meaning in what we read. We allow ourselves to read beyond our intellectual faculties so that the words take on a power of their own; they connect with our soul in ways that nourish, enlighten and strengthen us. We can also be guided by spiritual reading when choosing books for our children. No matter the age of your children, there are books that can become sacred texts for them in the same way. By helping your children understand how to connect emotionally with a book, you will teach them to read, not only for knowledge and entertainment, but also as a spiritual practice. Your children will take ownership of the words and personalize them. And, if a book speaks to the soul of your child, it can sustain them for the rest of their lives.

In a chapter entitled “The Power Of Story-Telling” in their book, Sacred Circles, Robin Carnes and Sally Craig quote Ursula Le Guin about the spiritual appeal of stories, “The story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace, is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.“ Reading stories and telling stories are, of course, very different, yet, unfortunately in both cases we often forget about the spiritual power of story over time. Once our children declare that they are too old for bedtime stories because they can now read by themselves, or once they cut us off at the very top of one of our own stories, mid- first sentence, with an abrupt: “You’ve told me that story before, mother” we stop. We stop with that particular story, and we often stop telling stories altogether, or reading them out loud.

At the end of my bedtime story phase with daughter number two, I was reading a chapter each night of Gary Paulsen’s novel, Hatchet, a wonderful tale of survival in the wilderness and a boy’s coming-of-age. Emily, who was graciously indulging me, was perfectly capable of reading Hatchet to herself and in fact, was reading it to herself after I’d left the room. However, I was lingering over every word, acting out every sentence, knowing that this connection we had of reading stories aloud, a connection that started with Good Night Moon, Pat the Bunny and The Puppy Who Had No Home , a particularly poignant story, as you may have guessed from the title, which we would read night after night, chanting together “Go away little stray, go away I say” was about to come to an end. Indeed, the last night, as I sat down on her bed, “over the top” with enthusiasm “to find out what happens next”, Emily simply said, “Mom, I finished it. He gets rescued.” And that was that.

However, once we lessen or stop reading aloud to our children, we can still point them towards stories that are spiritual. These are not stories about specific faiths, nor new age adult fiction or non-fiction self-help books. These are stories about essential values like honest, self-respect, responsibility, courage and faith; values that our children must learn, must feel to their very core to retain their sense of self and their relationship to God. These are stories which, if given a “spiritual reading”, will help them successfully navigate life’s journey. In Madeleine L’Engle’s anthology, Trailing Clouds of Glory, Finding Spiritual Values In Children’s Books, the stories all share this theme: “Only as we keep in touch with the child within our very grown-up body can we keep open enough to recognize God who is Love itself, as that Love is revealed in story.” Her choice of books like Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, The Little Prince, Little Women, Emily of New Moon, To Kill a Mocking Bird and Julie Of The Wolves is based on how they meet our urgent and compelling need for understanding of the Divine. In other words, stories about spiritual values connect us spiritually, no matter what our age, to ourselves, our children and to God.

A publisher of children’s and young adult books says the problem is that preteens and teens don’t know what stories to read, so they skip all the stories that might help them in their attempts to make meaning out of life and move on to adult titles. One way to maintain spiritual connections through reading with our children as they grow older is to find young adult books that are about the same spiritual values we held dear as children. We can read them, not literally out loud together, but at the same time, so that we can talk about them later. From this concept came Shireen Dodson’s brilliant guidebook on how mothers and daughters could connect through story, The Mother Daughter Book Club. Without making a big deal about it, we can together experience these young adult stories, not only for learning and entertainment, but also as a spiritual practice.

By choosing young adult books having to do with values we believe in, we communicate to our children that they can read for learning and entertainment, but they also can read as a form of spiritual practice. Books that can be a sure fire way to connect with these values include Whirligig by Paul Fleischman, Slave Day by Rob Thomas, Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden, Driver’s Ed by Caroline B. Cooney, Smack by Melvin Burgess. I’ll offer a passage from Whirligig as an example: A teenage girl, Alexandra, has discovered the whirligig left in Main as part of Brent’s restitution and describes its magic to her skeptical friend, Steph. “You can’t see the wind, but look what it can do. It’s invisible but powerful. Like thoughts. One brings a bunch of junk to life. The other brings desires to life. And it’s better if you broadcast your thoughts outside…it symbolizes all unseen forces. It’s like electricity – an invisible power that people didn’t know existed for centuries. If you learn to use thoughts, you can do all kinds of things. “ When reading this passage I’m reminded of John 3:5 when Jesus, in explaining to Nicodemus, the concept of being born again, uses wind as an analogy, saying “Only God’s Spirit gives new life. The Spirit is like the wind that blows where ever it wants to. You can hear the wind, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going.”

Young people may seem cynical and uncaring but in reality they are searching to know God as they did when they were little children. Reading stories about adolescent spirituality provides support and solace…for any preteen or teen having trouble, these stories can be a salvation. They communicate messages of compassion and courage that invite personalization and ownership, and taking ownership of these stories moves God from some abstract concept on the outskirts of a young person’s life into their very core. The process of reading spiritual literature also opens up for children new ways of thinking about themselves and their relationships with others. The process often breaks down their self-imposed isolation and relaxes the often rigid standards by which teenagers judge themselves and their peers.

In a March 12th 2001 article in Publishers Weekly entitled “Nurturing Today’s Teen Spirit”, publishers and authors talk about how preteens and teens want to apply their faith in daily life. They want to take action and see consequences in their own spiritual live and in the world around them . One book the article mentions is Inner Traditions, The Thunder and Sacred Wisdom for the Journey into Adulthood by Julie Tallard, a guidebook that offers step by step coming of age rituals that young people can do themselves. Teens are also especially interested in connecting religion to racial reconciliation and the environment. For example, Faith On Edge: Daring to Follow Jesus emphasizes discipleship, stewardship and how to connect with issues. Another extremely spiritual book is The Legacy of Luna, the story of Julia Butterfly Hill’s two year vigil living in a Redwood tree fighting against loggers who would cut it down. Having two teen daughters, I can tell you that preteens and teens like books that are authentic and grapple with real issues, avoiding pretense. Some of their favorites were also ours when we were teens such as A Separate Peace, Catcher In the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Anne Frank, and Summer Of My German Soldier. Teens also like spiritual books by other teens such as Be: Devotions by Teens For Teens, and Teen Ink: Our Voices, Our Visions

Ideally, the pages of reading matter that speak to the soul are experienced, not just read. In other words, grant your child permission to use those margins and spaces for writing, If your child can write his or her own thoughts, reflections and questions, then he or she can have a dialogue with the author. With the pen as a prayer tool, a child can write creatively his or her own commentary to the text. Now the book becomes an extension of the child because he or she has personalized it. A well annotated book is a book that has been taken to heart…and, therefore has become sacred to the reader.
Here are some ways of talking to our children about the books they read that will make them more aware of spiritual content.

POWER STORIES:
Talk to your child about the in terms of power. Ask, what story have you read where you identified with a character who was powerless? Why? What story have you read where you identify with a character who was powerful? Why? How might you make up a story that makes you feel powerful? What clothes do you wear when you want to feel the most powerful?

CREATE A SPIRITUAL ROLE MODEL: T
Talk to your child about spiritual role models. Read together a story about a spiritual master or saint. Then ask, what makes the person spiritual? What qualities of that person would you like to have?

FAVORITE BEDTIME STORY
Ask your child which story from when they were very little that you read to them do they cherished the most. Talk about how that story still lives in them.

PICK A BOOK INTUITIVELY:
Take them to a book store or library and have them pick a book that falls off the shelf as they approach or one that grabs their attention, and then read it. Talk about on what connected with them emotionally. How did this book speak to their inner spirit? Simply ask what in the book they could identify with personally and what conclusions could they make about their faith in God.
Stories can be stated, shouted, or sung,
Drummed and doodled or danced until done,
Whispered, whimpered, waved like a flag,
Pleaded, promised, put in a bag,
Chanted, chosen, chewed on like gum,
Looked at, laughed at, told on the run.
Stories can be written, wrapped up and sent,
Crayoned, chalked, or collected like rent,
Folded, faxed, found hidden in halls,
Painted, plastered, pinned up on walls,
Sculpted, scripted, scrambled when told
There’s never a way a true story can get old.
Prayers On My Pillow