On Bread and Children

 

I noted something the other day, as I was making bread.  I follow the same recipe I have now been using for years.  Each time I measure out the sugar, the yeast, the water, the flour, the oil, the salt.  In breadmaking I don't guesstimate. I might guess when making biscuits or cornbread or muffins or pancakes, but with bread, I take care.  I measure.  I mix it in the exact same way every single time.  I use the very same cycles on my bread machine.  I time the last rising of the bread and heat my oven to the very same temperature and when I place that bread pan in the oven, I time it the same number of minutes that I've learned it requires in my oven.

I do make mistakes at times, but I can pretty well tell you when a loaf fails why it has failed and what I missed.  But there are other times when the dough is just not right without any mistake at all being made.  Why?  Same amount of yeast, sugar, water, flour, salt and oil.  Same brands. Often the same containers of products that worked well last week and will work well next week.  No difference.  

Yet the dough might come out too stiff, or too wet.  The bread might rise too fast or slower than usual.  In the oven one time it might bake a tad too dark, and another time be not quite done.  These sorts of things don't happen consistently.  They are random.  It's not anything I did or didn't do.  It's the atmosphere, over which I have no control at all, that determines these failures.  Is it dry, or humid?  Is it cold, or hot?  Is that spot where the bread maker sits in a draft or in a warmer area than the rest of the kitchen? Was the oven off by one degree?  Impossible to know when you have a very simple dial operated oven knob.

With children, with any people with whom we are in relationship, they can all have the same love and care, the same rules to follow, the same allowances made for them and each one will be different as can be.  And it might be easy to look at the parents and blame them, but I'll wager that in really looking back, one would see that something in the atmosphere was different.  Perhaps there were financial strains, or sickness, or anxiety due to uncertainties.  Perhaps there was abundance or scarcity.  

For myself, there came a day as a parent when I realized that while I loved my children as well and as equally as any of us can, I also had things ongoing in my life that caused me to parent differently in each season.  I did the best I could with where I was at the time.  It was at that time that I realized fully that my parents, who might have been less than ideal, did their best where they were at the time.  They too faced hard things, like bankruptcy, job loss, job insecurity, sickness, martial difficulties, family issues and death of loved ones.  They weren't perfect.  But I conceded they had likely done the best they could.  

Did it stop me blaming them for their failures?  In some respects, it did.  There were a few places where it took me longer to forgive but for the most part, I could clearly see they had done all they could at the time, given who they were and their set of circumstances. 

Their parenting, faulty or true, taught me a lot about how I wanted to parent, both the things I wanted to impart, and the harm I didn't want to cause.  It didn't make me the perfect parent.  I failed at times, spectacularly.   Every parent does.  

I'll guarantee you something else.  No matter how hard you try as an adult parenting an adult child, you're still going to make mistakes of different sorts.  And sometimes, without making a mistake, something will cause that child to feel less than loved, less than heard, less seen.  There are going to be times as parents that we are so caught up in whatever other tragedies and dramas we've gotten caught up in, or even in riding the peak of the wave of good fortune, that we miss vital clues of how we might manage a relationship with a child better.  

I've felt over the years that I knew my children pretty well.  Not perfectly.  Too much isn't shared as they get older to truly know them but well enough to be able to see their strengths as well as their faults.  It's only fair that they should know mine as well.  And so, I try to look hard (as I do anyway, being the analytical sort) at criticisms they might make of me.   All the same, we never really know one another, no matter how close we might have been, do we?  Because adult children are not the same as those little ones, we raised years ago.  We've missed too much of their lives to know what their inner atmospheres are like, even if we strive to know them, nor do they know ours.  

So, we have a failure of sorts that we can't figure out...as with the less-than-ideal loaf of bread.  Sadly, we don't get do-overs at this stage.  We just have to move on and accept that this is the way things are.