The lessons of imperfection

Jun 09, 2023

                           

I have just had to text my teen’s catechist to explain the reason my 15-year-old would not be attending the class camp.

As I hit send, a wave of despair washed over me. My message explained that my child was clinically diagnosed with anxiety, thus making social interactions difficult, and that forcing attendance to the sleep away event would impede their daily coping ability. I was not making any of it up, but as I waited for the two-tick read message from my former fellow catechist, I wondered how things had come to this.

Having received entry into the Catholic Church as an adult, I was adamant that any child I had would be born Catholic and raised Catholic, by a parent who was not only a Sunday Catholic, but one who spoke of the faith, tried to live it in all ways possible, and who testified to it when appropriate. Even without the help of a Catholic co-parent, my progeny was baptised as an infant, enrolled into catechism, and received perfect attendance awards for every year of their primary school catechism classes. I planned vacations and school holidays around the catechism calendar, and moved family gatherings and social outings to give the classes precedence because I wanted to make it a point that my child would grow up understanding the faith, and adhering to all its practices is not about how convenient it is, but how committed a person or a family was to keeping to the teaching and responsibilities of Catholic familyhood.

While fortunately the teen actually finds pleasure in going early to help set up the classroom with the catechist, she falls into anxious, subdued silence in the presence of chattering classmates, most of whom remain strangers, despite nine years of being in a class together.

In despair, I wrote to my teen’s catechist, “I sometimes ask what kind of demon exists in the kids of today that they are plagued with such crippling low esteem, such self-hate.” The adolescent psychiatrist attending to my offspring’s case tried to put things into perspective when I burst out one day, “Why is this happening?

There is no abuse, neglect, abandonment in the family. The parents are civil to each other, there is every effort taken to ensure extended family ties are strong, that there is a routine, and the opportunity of age-appropriate responsibility and decision-making given. So why this illness, why my child?” I felt as bereft as the widow in the Bible whose only son had died.

In her clinical, neutral way, the psychiatrist — one of the pre-eminent names in her field, and one of the best in the country — told me that I should be grateful that the teen trusted me enough to confide in me, and felt safe enough to say there was a need for help from a trained mental health professional. Many times, she said, she saw teens only after they had failed to hide evidence of self-harm.

Yet, for me, that was little comfort. I was the one who was primed to raise a young Catholic who would lead by service, be rooted in the Word of God, and walk in the footsteps of the Good Shepherd. I was a firebrand myself — as zealous a proponent of my faith as Paul was after his conversion. So why this? Why was my child ‘faulty’?

After months of searching, and speaking to trusted friends in ministry, teacher friends, and Catholic parent friends whose values mirrored mine, I have come to a conclusion, and not a particularly nice one.

Because children are an extension of ourselves, many parents, whether they know it or not, desire their child to appear societally ‘correct’. Passable, if not excellent, academic results, acceptable cocurricular performance, and please God, as a Catholic parent, a love for Jesus and His Church. We forget that conversion is a personal thing. Faith lessons can be drummed into a person relentlessly, but until a heart softens enough to accept God in an intrinsically organic way, Scripture and prayer are just words on a page. We can lead our children to the faith, but we cannot make them believe.

We would like to believe a good tree produces good fruit. As such, we sometimes force-shape our children to be what we want them to be, unheeding of their limitations, momentarily deaf to that line from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 that “for everything there is a season, and a time for every [a]purpose under heaven.”

As a parent, I should not be treating my child as a means to collect honour. My prime responsibility is to care for the gift that God entrusted me with, in spite of what I wish they would be. While I may fancy myself some kind of female version of John Chrysostom, perhaps it is the will of God that my attention be turned to the study of gentleness and patience needed to raise a child with societal difficulties.

This is something I struggle with every day. When things get hard, I grit my teeth and read 2 Corinthians 12:7–10, and pray for the grace of God to continue to parent in the way God would have me.

(Karen-Michaela Tan is a poet, writer and editor who seeks out God’s presence in the human condition and looks for ways to put the Word of God into real action.)