The lineage goes like this: there is my darling and cosuffering life mate, The Queen Mother. The Queen Mother begat our daughter, Her Princessness, who through her marriage to One L Wil morphed into New Momma Deb though ‘New’ is no longer appropriate, given that at 18 months she’s driven that car off the lot, so to speak. Her daughter The Queen spends a lot of time at our house–over the summer, essentially a couple hours every day. Which is very cool except when I have to write a sermon, because I’d rather be hangin’ with her.
An unintended consequence of this, by the way, is that I can imagine ever more existentially the darling’s hideous isolation those four years in Winters at home with the three infants and no family in a thousand miles, nor even, actually, a car, since we had only one. ‘No wonder,’ I said in admiration while chatting with Northlands John yesterday, ’she was such a bitch when I got home.’ I once was blind, but now I see; how overwhelming it must have been.
‘Course, I was overwhelmed by my own shit as a freshly-minted seminarian moving into a public position in a tiny town, the size (3000) of which I had no experience. She, of course, didn’t have a clue about my end of the world, either. We danced to ‘you got your troubles, I got mine.’ I’ve always taken great encouragement from the fact that our Lutheran wedding vows being, as it were, minimally hypocritical, never include the promise of love, only the promise to stay together, which is hard enough in itself. Lowered expectations bring their own freedom. I beg your pardon, huh? I never promised you a rose garden.
The Queen and I have our own special routines. She likes looking at pictures, both on the walls and in the computer, ’specially calling for ‘Dadee’ and getting all excited when his picture comes up. I love seeing how much she loves her Dadee. ‘Course, Momee gets not quite so much hoopla, given that Momee’s with her most of all of the time, and is thus assumed. It’s special when Dadee comes home. Makes it a little tough for Momee, eh? She’s there with all the drudgery day after day, and Dadee walks in and is worshipped like the messiah. And based in my own experience, Dadee usually doesn’t have a clue as to what Momee’s feelin’ nor how much he is loved by his children. Because he’s busy thinking he is, in fact, the messiah. Had the darling simply acknowledged the obvious, we would have saved a ton of money on marriage counseling.
After we feed the birds The Queen and I will often go for a walk with her wagon, a huge plastic thing with seat belts (for real). Sometimes she rides–sans seat belt–but more often she wants to pull it. It’s a sweet picture, this 18-month-old child pulling a red wagon the size of a Mini Cooper down the street on our cul-de-sac. I walk beside her, a little behind, strolling at ease with my hands held behind my back. Yesterday she got tired of pulling it so I did, and she strolled along with her hands held behind her back. It’s awesome to behold.
She’s beginning to garner the meaning of language–the organization of sounds into reality, or maybe the organization of reality into sounds. Whatever. It’s that point at which she’s beginning to connect with the power inherent in words, though, natch, with limited vocabulary and ability to form the sounds. But she knows, for example, that ‘mo’ might get her more of whatever she just had, be it the yogurt she loves or the amount of bird seed we’re putting out. She can ask for what she wants, and when asked if she wants ‘mo’ she can say no. It’s pretty miraculous, I think: with the language comes the birth of the autonomous self in its power to influence her own life. I suspect that’s why she likes to pull the wagon, to be able to learn her power to control (some) things.
Hence, the word ‘no’. As in: ‘It’s time to go in the house, now.’ ‘No.’
Of all the words a kid hears in her first 18 months of life the word ‘no’ must easily stand out like the U.S. defense budget compared to the rest of the world, that being six times the amount of all of them combined. And perhaps for the same reasons of security, who knows? At least that’s the case in this household, fed by the darling’s generational inheritance of no-sayers as well as her occupational necessity in all these years of herding pre-k kittens. The only time ‘no’ has never been the first word out of the her mouth was when I asked her to marry me. It’s been ‘no’ ever since; immediate, instinctual, and unconscious. And maybe it’s a spiritual gift given that actually makes her so good at teaching. I don’t know about our kids, but it’s tough on me, being as I am more naturally inclined to yes or why not and dreaming of great adventures.
In any case, it’s no wonder that The Queen has grasped the power of ‘no’ so early in her life (though the darling said she’s right on schedule), given her experience and genes. She can express her mind about things and maybe affect the outcome. She can exercise her will and define herself, though it seems oppositional. It’s a magnificent sight to see, this newborn image of God now given the power to create a world through a word, ‘And The Queen said no, and it was so.’ The power to say no is an essential and fundamental element of what it means to be human, at least as God has created us. This power is a Very Good Thing.
Once you learn how to use it. Which, of course, ain’t accomplished right out of the shoot at 18 months. Rather, with the discovery of the power of no comes also the hideous frustration of having that power vetoed by The Big People. Hence, tantrums; ’cause where else does that uncontrolled power have to go? Tantrums are The Queen’s way of saying fuck you to the forces that overpower her and oppress her absolute will, having bought her own pr that instead of being wonderful because she is loved, she is loved because she is wonderful. So the parental question is how best to respond to what has escalated to an uncontrollable (though not necessarily irrational) fit.
The darling and I’ve found mockery and ridicule to be the most helpful. Not, of course, for the kid–the tantrum has to run its course–so much as for us: better to laugh at ‘em when they’ve thrown themselves on the floor and are squalling and pounding their fists than kicking them in the head–somebody’s got to be the adult, eh? So we practice tough love by hooting ‘what a big boy/girl’, both indoctrinating them into that special family sarcasm which will (as we’ve seen) come to full fruition in their adulthood and clueing them in to the response they deserve when making asses of themselves. It’s my theory of child-raising: you can’t reason with a pre-rational kid so you gotta provide an emotional experience for them of the consequences of the behavior. The kid breaks away and runs into the street. You don’t fetch and then rationally explain the danger. You make him experience the danger through terror; creatively convince him he’s gonna die. You can explain why later, but in the meantime you protect him by creating a sense of fear near traffic.
Same thing with tantrums and ridicule: you wanna behave like that publicly, here’s what you can expect.
‘Course the only way you can pull this off doing only minimal long-term psychic damage (to both parties) is to demonstrate your love ever more deeply (love covers a multitude of screw-ups, eh?). When the tantrums have ended and the emotions have cooled comes the time to set things back in order, ‘Come, let me hug you. I love you.’ The Queen has actually been pissed enough to say no and turn away. And you gotta let her have that no because the hugs and kisses of love cannot be demanded, only invited. (‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’ being the roll I played so often with my own kids after chastising them.) Love empowers her.
And besides, after a little while we’ll be hugging and cooing and rubbing our heads together at her desire. On the list of The Greatest Things My Now Adult Kids Ever Told Me was Soccer Saul’s confession, ‘I’d sit in my room after a big confrontation and think about how much I hated you and wanted to get out of here. Then you’d knock at the door and come in and we’d talk about it and half the time got to laughing about it, even when I still had to face the consequences.’ And, yeah, buddy, I waited in my own misery of yearning for you to open the door in the meantime. But, as they say, true love waits. And hopes. And mine has never been disappointed.
I watch The Queen’s birth of self-awareness in her power to say no and think about the Garden of Eden (Hebrew, y’know, for ‘delight’) and the myth of The Fall. It matters to us preachers, because how you understand the human condition is foundational to everything you preach, including God. The quick take on it is that Adam and Eve were having them a delightful time there in the garden until they rebelled against God and fucked everything up, thereby pissing off The Father world without end amen. But in His equally infinite mercy Our Father kills his only-begotten Son instead so Tammy Faye can have orgasms of rapture thinking about the agonies of the cosmic whipping boy, singin’ ‘He suffered so I don’t have to’ and bleeding glycerin tears through non-smudge mascara.
In professional parlance we call it The Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement. I now call it Jesus the Whipping Boy myth and/or depending on my mood, God the Abusive Father, though during my seminary Christology class (formal studies on what in the hell did the existence of Jesus mean, anyway?) I did buy in on P.T. Forsyth’s insights on it as ‘Jesus the perfume that sweetens the odor in the nostrils of God from within the whole shitpile of human existence’, though that’s my paraphrase. But the whole thing begins with an emphasis on the shitpile of sin, started by The Fall there in the Garden that somehow God’s sense of righteousness has been offended and needs to be appeased (as if righteousness were a category devoid of relationship). ‘He suffered for me.’ He was The Sacrificial Lamb God demanded. In His Divine Justice God Our Father demands an innocent victim: ‘Gimme a virgin!’
I ain’t buying it anymore. That theology is a vestige of Christendom and its empires–a god of violent reprisal except for his chosen ones us, however it is we get to be chosen. It oppresses, hence controls, the spirit through the demand for perfection, the threat of punishment, and the sense of shame, singing week after week ‘what a fuck up am I but how good god was in killing Jesus instead.’ I cannot believe that God shows his love for us through violence toward another regardless of who it is. (Oh, and besides, it ain’t in the Bible, according to NT Ray). Violence is a human thing, not a divine thing. That’s what Jesus showed us. The violence done to him was done by the powers and principalities in this world that oppose God, not by God’s offended ‘righteousness’.
The Queen appears to be losing enthusiasm for her tantrum, so I’m returned for a moment to Eden, where I see not so much I rebellion against God as the birth of human consciousness, the dawning awareness of a me; the ability (if not necessarily the wisdom) to say no. The created image of God; NO vs no. Without the little no, there is no image of God. There’s a tantrum in the Garden.
And now she’s standing up and toddling shamelessly over to stand in front of me, snot drooling over her lips and tears running down her raging red cheeks. I pick her up and she buries her head in my should and wipes her sniffles on my neck, and we sit and rock and comfort one another.
Don’t tell me God needed Jesus to die for my tantrums.
Larry