Finding Ourselves in the Lost Years

It is ironic that in the current “Mommy war” debates, resurrected by Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, the terms “lost time” or “the lost years” are occasionally being used to describe the time parents take off from their careers to raise their children.

Many parents like myself, whose children are now young adults, would say the early years we spent with our children were actually, in many ways, the “found years” of our lives, whether we stayed at home or not.

Those were the years when many of us came into a (bewildered but) new, spiritual understanding of ourselves and the world around us, even in the midst of being pulled in all directions by the nonstop physical and emotional demands of young parenthood.

In the preface of her book Gently Lead: How To Teach Your Children About God While Finding Out For Yourself, Polly Berrien Berends encourages parents to yield to the spiritual opportunities of parenthood.

“It is a little known fact that the real business of parenthood is the upbringing of the parent,” she says.

“Okay, you want to teach your children about God. But let’s face facts. The idea of God comes easily to a child. So who is rearing whom? Isn’t it our children who are teaching us about God?”

It is a good question to keep in mind.

When a child hears someone describe Heaven as a place where God is, and then the child declares, “Oh, that’s where I was before I came here to this Earth,” who is teaching whom?

When a child hears someone say, “When the Student is ready, the Teacher will come,” and the child responds, “Well, actually, the Teacher is always here,” who is teaching whom?

When a child says, “It shouldn’t be ‘May the Force be with you.’ It should be ‘May you be with the Force,’” who is teaching whom?

The joys, the sorrows, and the challenges of our ordinary, everyday lives can be a spiritual journey we embark upon together with our children, when we are open and aware – and sometimes even when we’re not.

Polly Berends recommends learning how to pray a different version of “Now I lay me down to sleep”:

“Now I lay me down ... not to sleep,” she says. “But to wake.”

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(as previously published in The Bucks County Herald)