When Your Child is Different from What You Expected

Ever marveled over how your child is different from the one you’d pictured?

When I found out I was pregnant 16 years ago, I was over the moon. In fact, there were a few days during a women’s retreat when I suspected I was miscarrying. Fear clutched my heart with thick talons.

The pregnancy would be successful: to be exact, 9 lbs. 2 oz. (um, Wow! And ow) of success.

But even before the birth that totally flushed my “birth plan” (serious misnomer), my vision for parenting was tilting askew.

I was laid off from my job when I was seven months along. The nursery bedding in my mind was replaced with one a friend had found on clearance.

And at 38 weeks, my husband and I were in an auto accident. That night in the hospital, I feel asleep to the comforting sound of my son’s heart, beating like the hooves of an undaunted horse.

We still joke about what a horrid baby he was. The lactation consultant marveled at his terrible nursing.

I would babysit for another child, whose mother said her child would nap for, oh, about 2.5 hours. My eyebrows arced. My son would nap for 30 minutes at a time. He wouldn’t sleep through the night till a year old, despite the tricks and “shoulds” other detestably well-rested moms spilled forth.

But even the lack of sleep (his, mine) couldn’t rival his discontentment with life. With a hopeful smile, we handed babysitters a single-spaced full page of methods to calm, soothe, and otherwise mitigate the incessant crying.

That is, until he hit 9 months, and began to crawl–finally able to dictate his own life. It would be the first sign of how independent this kid was wired to be.

This Isn’t How I Saw It Going in My Head

To be fair, he was an adorable, compliant toddler; a brilliant, creative elementary schooler, always leading the other boys in games of battle, always packing around Nerf weapons he had to remove from the table before dinner.

He was (is) also distinctively not the firstborn I anticipated. All that birth order stuff about people-pleasing, compliance, rule-following, achieving? (Um, all the stuff I was as a firstborn?)

My son was far more internally than externally. And that meant grades and parents and the rest of society had minimal effect.

Though my family had never had a military background, my son has sights set on ROTC and the Marines. In contrast, I am peacekeeping and diplomatic, sometimes to the point of passivity. I can count on one hand the times I’ve shot a gun, and most were at a summer camp.

What does God think of my child?

But about six months ago, God seemed to tap me on the shoulder. He helped it along by the church elder/mentor of my son who was also a marine; the youth group leader who’s just returned from Italy with Samaritan’s Purse, who has loved his ministry opportunities in the army. My son now hopes to go into military law.

I felt as if God asked me, What if I created your son as a warrior? (And not just metaphorically?) What if for my Kingdom, I need exactly this strength, this independence, this love for justice and intellectual argument?

I thought of a warrior God loved and rewarded: King David. I thought of God’s description of himself as a warrior.

I’ve thought frequently, too, of God’s long game for my son.  Personally, I tend to prefer God’s miracles immediate as a cosmic finger snap, answers thundering from heaven as I prayed them.

But so much more often, God seems to be doing a work through my constant waiting, trusting, asking, worshiping.

And whereas instant-as-a-microwave results might have soothed me, I wonder if they would have been as long-standing for my son, whose character has undergone monumental shifts in the last year. Slow changes, if watched at 365th intervals.

When the Child You Expected Becomes Too Important

When any of us attend baby showers, there’s so much joy for new life. We delight in the supposed blank slate, a life ready to guide into greatness. But like gardening in the high desert here in Colorado, the doctored image on the seed packet rarely matches any real-life plant. (For that matter, like, 10% of all parenting is what I thought it would look like. But then again, so much of it was better.)

Instead, as Brene Brown reminds me, Hope is Plan B.  It is a function of struggle, not my will being accomplished in the form of a child. That will, that expectation of a perfectly-imperfect child, could easily become any parent’s…idol: what we look to for legitimacy. Satisfaction. Fulfillment.

In fact, God may not share my vision or timing or pictured journey for my child.

Pastor and author Tim Keller writes,

Everybody has got to live for something, but…if that thing is not [Jesus], it will fail you. First, it will enslave you… If anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected.*

What are God’s possible plans for my child?

And control as a parent has always come more easily as a parent than surrendering my son to the only One who truly changes our kids. But when I don’t have control? Fear for my kids can overwhelm me.

(See this post on how fear turns a great parent into a slave.)

I’ve come to realize that at times, I have loved my own image for my son more than God’s image for him.

As I watched Just Mercy the other night (…then made my kids watch), there was a point in which I watched the character of real-life attorney Bryan Stevenson as he opposed the forces holding injustice in place.

I thought of the resolute strength Stevenson–and perhaps my son someday–would need to dethrone the powers that be, and help God’s Kingdom to come on this earth. I would likely have been done after the first whiff of failure; Stevenson and his staff have found exoneration for 135 unlawfully convicted people on death row. That’s 135 lives saved.

I read Amos 5 the next morning as I curled on my porch, about God’s justice rolling down. He likely will not accomplish this goal in total by more passive personalities like yours truly.

I wrote earlier this month that though my oldest has occupied a significant part of the pie graph of my prayers the last three years–he’s making decisions that leave me humbled and grateful.

He just returned from volunteering four weeks at the Christian camp down the road which we love. Members of camp staff sought me out, telling me my son was just the kind of leader that difficult camper needed; that he was a natural counselor.

And after each week, I’ve relished us sitting on the Starbucks patio, laughing out loud at his anecdotes, my heart swelling with a cocktail of gratitude, pride, and good old-fashioned relief.

Dream Bigger

He’s still diametrically different than me in personality. At times, his values sit so different than mine I have to reconsider all over again who’s wrong, or if he actually expresses a different side of God’s own values, his own image. (As Tony Evans has said, “If both of you are the same, one of you would be unnecessary.”)

But also, parenting each of my kids is an act of patience–not just when they spit cherry pits on the floor, but as we acknowledge God as master of Time. That we as parents with children are not the leaders, but the lovingly led. And within that leading, he’s parenting us toward holiness.

What if our kids get the idea they’re a colossal disappointment to us? Could we be shoehorning them into plans God never intended? What if our expectations cause us to miss the sheer joy and wonder of who they are?

Having a child so different than myself–what some might call our incompatibility–has sculpted me every day of the last 16 years. It means a constant effort to reach toward one another. To understand, appreciate, listen rather than argue and contend (or fear). To advocate the man God’s created my son to be, rather than the one I’m sure  he should become.

Work along with me, friends. Let’s not miss loving our kids as God created them. Let’s help them dream bigger than the vision in our heads.

Like this post? You might like

When Your Child’s Weaknesses Feel Overwhelming

Why and how to tell kids, “It’s okay not to be perfect”

On Parenting, and Other Miracles We Wait On

Bouncing Back: Helping Your Child Open the Gift of Failure

*Keller, Timothy. The Insider and the Outcast (Encounters with Jesus Series Book 2). New York: Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, chapter 1.