I Want Her Childhood To Be Different

You have a list of things you will not say and you have kept it.

Four years now. Not one remark, not one aside, not one comment about anybody in front of her, and it has taken more effort than anybody knows because the sentences are all still in you and they arrive fully formed.

You have been proud of that, quietly, and you are entitled to be.

And about two months ago something occurred to you and it has not gone away.

She is going to grow up in a house where nobody said any of it. Which is enormously better than what you had, and it is not the same as growing up in a house where something else was said instead.

You have removed something. You have not yet put anything in.

And you know from your own life that children do not inherit absences. Nothing gets handed on by not being mentioned. What she will carry out of this house in twelve years is what actually happened in it, and at the moment what actually happens is silence on the subject, which is a great deal better than commentary and is not a thing she can carry.

So the question is not what you are protecting her from. You have done that and you have done it well.

The question is what she is being handed.

The faith that dwelt first in thy grandmother

There is a line in Timothy where Paul traces something backward through three women, and the mechanism in it is worth looking at.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

The unfeigned faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded that in you also.

He traces it back two generations and names both women, and the thing being traced is described as dwelling.

You have a passage where something real travels down a family line, and 2 Timothy 1:5 has never once described that as happening by instruction. The word is dwelt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves something living from a grandmother to a mother to a child.

You are able to see how much the word dwelt is doing there. It does not say taught. It does not say explained. It says the thing lived in Lois, and lived in Eunice, and now lives in Timothy.

Something that dwells in a house is present in it, doing ordinary things, over years. It is not delivered in a conversation.

And notice that it is called unfeigned, which means unhypocritical, which means the thing that got passed on was the actual article rather than a performance of it.

You are able to hand your daughter something that lives in this house rather than something explained to her in it, and 2 Timothy 1:5 has never once made the passing on a matter of what gets said. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a real thing down a family line, and the verse describes it dwelling rather than being taught.

What she is currently going to inherit

Here is the honest inventory, and it is not a rebuke, because the hard half is already done.

Right now, what is in this house about bodies is a silence.

You have removed something real and are standing in front of an empty space, and 2 Timothy 1:5 has never once described an absence as an inheritance. It is written that the faith dwelt first in a grandmother, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts something in a house that a child can actually take out of it.

Silence is not neutral to a child. She will not experience it as the absence of commentary, because she does not know there is anything absent. She will experience it as a subject that is not discussed, and children draw conclusions about undiscussed subjects, and the conclusions are not usually the ones anybody intended.

So the thing to put in is not a conversation. That is the trap, and it is where a lot of thoughtful mothers go, and it produces a nine year old who has been talked to about her body, which is its own kind of inheritance.

What goes in is a practice. Something that happens, repeatedly, in her presence, that she is part of.

You have ten minutes on a Saturday, with her, every week for the next six years, and that has never once needed to be more than ten minutes to be an inheritance. Second Timothy 1:5 traces a thing that dwelt in a household rather than one that was taught in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary Saturday into what a child carries out.

That is what she will be carrying at nineteen. Not a sentence you said, and not the absence of a sentence you did not say. A thing that dwelt in this house and that she was in.

You are able to build something she can carry out of here, and a practice has never once been a smaller inheritance than a set of words would be. The Spirit of God is the one who makes something dwell in a household, and 2 Timothy 1:5 traces the real article rather than the teaching of it.

The same ten minutes every week

So here is the assignment, and the repetition is the entire content of it.

Do the same ten minutes with her every week and let it be the thing she remembers about her mother and moving.

You are able to give one thing enough turns to become a memory, and sameness has never once been the enemy of a thing worth keeping. It is written that the faith dwelt first in Lois and then in Eunice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the four hundredth repetition of an ordinary Saturday.

The same. That is the piece that matters and it is the piece that will bore you.

The same day, roughly. The same route, or the same park, or the same thing done in the same place. Not varied to keep it interesting, because a thing that varies is an activity and a thing that repeats is a practice, and only one of them gets remembered as belonging to a family.

You have about three hundred Saturdays between now and her nineteenth birthday, and none of them has ever once needed to be different from the one before it. Second Timothy 1:5 traces something that dwelt in a house across three generations, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a repeated ordinary thing into an inheritance.

Ten minutes. Six years is about three hundred of them.

And say nothing about what it is for. Do not tell her this is something you are giving her. Do not explain, in eleven years, that you were determined she would have something different. Let her find that out at forty, or not at all.

You have a daughter who will remember what happened rather than what was intended, and none of that has never once needed to be explained to her for it to reach her. Second Timothy 1:5 has the thing dwelling in three generations without a word about how it got there, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the moving of it.