To invoke Love / is to take the risk of inviting chaos to visit the spaces / you spent so much time making tidy . . .1 —from “To Invoke Love,” by the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison.
This is the first of several posts about the mundane, everyday work of love within family, in all its messy missteps and growing pains and its luminous breakthroughs and sheltering of growing spirits.
Every family goes through periods when mutual understanding is harder to achieve. People change as they grow, old habits of interaction no longer meet the needs of the moment, and family members must consciously relearn how to approach and help each other thrive.
Such has been the case in my house lately. During the past few months, when my kids share space at home, bickering and discord often follow. It doesn’t happen all the time: the pattern is thick on some days and nonexistent on others, and on some days, the few moments of tension are washed away in an abundance of silly laughter. But the bickering happens often enough that I now recognize it as a “phase” of family life that’s calling us to deepen our practices for recognizing and communicating with each other.
The bickering tends to happen as follows:
There’s a spur: One kid interferes with the other’s plans or infringes on the other’s bodily autonomy, perhaps, or one kid feels slighted by the other.
There’s escalation: Voices get louder, sometimes quickly.
There’s judgment: The offended sibling assumes that the other is acting from bad intentions, or makes generalizing protests like “you always” this or “you never” that.
There’s defensiveness: The sibling on the receiving end of the complaint pretends not to hear it, or responds with more recriminations: “well, you always” this, or “you never” that.
As the emotional stakes of the conflict become amplified, it becomes increasingly difficult for the kids to resolve.
But what about me, the at-home parent on the scene?
At some point, I hear the loud voices at odds, and discomfort wells up in my body. Hearing my kids argue and assume the worst about each other is very unpleasant for me. Depending on the situation, additional discomfort may spring from my own role conflict between whatever responsibility I'm trying to fulfill in that moment (e.g., cooking dinner) and the need to stop what I’m doing and intervene in the kids’ escalating argument. And any such discomfort tends to be worse if I’ve not slept well recently.
If I’m not careful, this is when I can get tripped up by my own judgments. A story about the origins of my discomfort might come to mind, whereby the kids are interfering with my plans, or I might start having thoughts like “not again,” or “they always” this, or “they never” that. These stories raise the emotional stakes of my own discomfort.
Wanting the discomfort to stop, I might start bickering back, protesting ironically about how exhausting the bickering has become. I might tell them to move to different spaces until they can co-exist again, leaning on my authority to exercise control over the space.
In such moments, we are aligned in our reactivity, in treating each other as obstacles instead of loved ones.
Things may get quieter in the house for a time, and I may be able to turn back toward my other household duties, but in the emotional let-down that follows such disputes, I feel dispirited. I wish I’d paused to take some deep breaths and encouraged the kids to do the same. I wish I’d provided a more graceful model for working through disagreements and imagining the needs of others, even when things are uncomfortable—perhaps by moving toward the conflict, sitting down calmly between them, and helping them translate their respective needs into words that each can hear.
And in the gap between the actual event and these wishes, I begin judging myself: “I always” this, or “I never” that. These are familiar self-recriminations, and I’ve written about similar ones before. They’re variations on the old theme of anxiety about my own competence as a dad, played in a new key by the ever-changing conditions of family life.
I will admit: it feels almost silly to lay out these mundane patterns in such granular detail. But it’s important to understand such details, because these are the subtle movements of interpretation and interaction that trip us up in everyday life, and learning to acknowledge them productively is an act of courage. Only when we accept and understand these subtle movements can we begin to work with them and nudge them toward more-connected ends.
As the adult in the room, my job is to step back from these patterns, analyze them, take responsibility for my role in producing them, and try new things—that is, summon the courage and commitment to start with myself, ask what I need to learn, and turn my discomfort into fuel for renewal.
So, I’ve been spending these past few months taking stock and working toward a fresh outlook, to better understand my own capacity to nudge moments of disagreement away from recrimination and toward understanding and renewal.
I’ll be “showing my work” in several posts here in the newsletter. The goal is to sharpen my insight and courage as a parent, so I might better recognize the emotional stakes beneath discord when it occurs, see the opportunities embedded therein for reconnection, and step into that uncertain emotional flux with care and concern. The goal is to deepen my and my kids’ collective resourcefulness for responding to each other in love.
There’s that word again: love.
So far, this post has talked a lot about bodily discomfort and reactivity, drawing on the mindfulness insights that have become increasingly important for me in navigating the changing conditions of family life. But there are other ways of making actionable meaning from all of this, depending on your spiritual or philosophical vantage point. At various points in these several posts, I’ll talk about this work in other ways, too: in terms of needs and vulnerability; giving and receiving gifts; grace and mercy.
But no matter which concepts I draw on in the moment, each is turned toward the same moral horizon: the everyday work of loving. As I’ve written elsewhere, love is not primarily a feeling, though the feelings associated with loving, whether joyful or painful, can be profound. Rather, love is the constellation of practices—per the late bell hooks, the “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication”2—through which we “nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth.”3
Change is continuous, and sometimes our practices for loving can get ragged and fall out of step with evolving circumstances and the ever-developing people involved. During such periods, we may struggle to find our way back to each other and to ourselves, and the distance hurts, mundane though it is, because we are most vulnerable at the hands of our loved ones. Love is the work of learning to return to each other.
If you, friend, recognize something of yourself in what I’ve described so far, I hope these several posts will nourish your own courage in striving for renewal. I hope they will remind you that these everyday tensions, though they hurt in the moment, hold great constructive power as openings to greater understanding, mercy, intimacy, trust, and shared meaning, so long as we’re willing to release our grip on who we have been and learn to become the people that each needs to thrive together. In this way, we become more fully and deeply ourselves.
Onward.
Sean Parker Dennison, “To Invoke Love,” in Breaking and Blessing: Meditations, Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2020, pg. 12.
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, New York, NY: William Morrow, 2018 (originally published in 2000), pg. 5.
Ibid., pg. 6.