Family Challenges

Regrets, I've had a few

Having children is a prime activity for breeding regrets because we care about our children so fiercely and want to do right by them so intensely. When I'm an old woman, I don't expect to spend much time regretting that I didn't wash the floor more often or that I never got my ears pierced. But I'm sure I will regret the places I fell short with my children: Was I too rushed? Should I have helped him to control his temper better? Did we send her to the right school? Did I hug them enough? Did I show them how to be generous? (And whatever possessed me to enroll him in swimming lessons, on his own, at age 3, with a teacher who soon told him if he didnÕt stop crying the blowup shark on the wall would swim over and bite his toes?)

Parental regrets are easy to come by, hard to banish. We may regret birth outcomes ("I wanted natural, but I ended up with C-section"), work choices, or discipline styles. No wonder, writes Peggy O'Mara in Mothering magazine, that we are sometimes tempted to have another child so "this time we'll get it right." The illusion here, of course, is that with enough opportunities, we could become the perfect parent and produce the perfect child.

Regrets do have something to tell us. They're worth listening to (at least for a while), because they show us our human frailty, our mistakes, our sins, and how these can affect those most precious to us. Sometimes we did the best we could, and sometimes we didn't. With serious regrets, forgiving ourselves comes slowly, and only after we've spent time recognizing what we've lost and allowing healing to happen at its own pace. Healing and forgiveness don't come cheaply.

But watch out for the temptation to wallow in regret. "The only way out of endless self-recrimination is faith. It's the antidote to fear," writes O'Mara. A priest I know says that in parish work, he is frequently troubled by how hard people are on themselves. He tries to convey a sense of liberation from sin, encouraging people to take to heart that God has forgiven them. Like the father of the prodigal son, God comes running to us with arms open wide before weÕve even squeaked out the repentant speech we rehearsed so carefully.

Father Andrew Greeley says that God's forgiving love comes vividly to life for Catholics in the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, which reveals "the Catholic conviction that our reconciling, forgiving God lurks everywhere in the objects, persons, and events of our life experience.

"Mary the Mother of Jesus represents the mother love of God, the truth that while God loves us in many different ways, she also loves us the way a mother who holds her newborn child in her arms loves that child," says Greeley. This "is very good news indeed, perhaps too good to be true, but true nonetheless."

Just as we keep on loving our children even when they pilfer from the candy aisle or hurl spiteful words at us, God holds out forgiveness even for times we haven't done right by our kids. Failings and sins aren't meant to weigh us down forever. So when our regrets have served their purpose, we can send them on their way instead of making them permanent residents. We can also embrace a more realistic image of ourselves: a person who makes mistakes but who also has a great potential for good, who knows what it means to start over and try again, and who can dish out to our kids the same kind of extravagant forgiveness that God lavishes on us. (by Catherine OÕConnell-Cahill)

 

Back to Parenting Ideas Index