A Parenting Non-Tutorial

This all began as a tutorial of sorts and I guess in its own providential way, it is all that, maybe more, but I only discovered that after the fact, after the horrifying ooze of it all.

The halo light of late afternoon, of late January, the gold warmer than the snow, circles, sun ponds on honeyed floor. I line up the little people, the wooden ones with their smooth, bald heads. And the lively ones, pinked and sparkling, heads tousled with darkening blonde, they revolve too, in giggly, climbing glee of the grand something coming.




I take the paint brush jar down from its shelf, select a least-frazzled one. Then to find a screwdriver in Farmer Husband’s cubby, to wedge and pry and reef open the paint can lid. When finally -- pop! -- Malakai cheers. Those eyes – they too pop, lids opening to this bottomless, brilliant blue. (To paint all the world just that!)

Each towhead, one by one, simply must have their own turn peering into paint can’s depths , to milky disk floating. I can smell the fresh possibilities.

I stir the paint with a red dogwood branch from the nature table; it does fine in a pinch, though an older son, more knowing, teenaged and all, walks by, eyebrows arched in inkling of a happy smirk. We anticipating ones laugh. We know (or think we know) what we’re about.

I lay a doll, smooth and perfect, in palm and begin. Each stroke wraps wooden person white, an angelic swaddling. And, of course, can’t all our hands have dolls and dip brushes into priming milk too? So I say yes and eager pudginess begins, smattering drops of white, baptizing lathed dolls in primer and dreams of yellow dresses with daisies and firemen with red suspenders. I’m imagining hours of play, little heirloom dolls quaintly daubed by a mama trying to paint her love on wood. I smile at the thoughts of painting little red hearts on each peg breast.

And soon --- our own (sort of) angelic host, primed and ready for revival to the full colored life.





Animated little ones count (several times, for certainty’s sake) the cocooned wooden ones. Then wait. Drying decelerates to imperceptible rates while waiting. While touching round white heads every few seconds. As evidenced by a bevy of white fingertips.

We wash hands. I pound down the seal of the lid. We think it best to outwit waiting with the diversion of drawing, thick crayola lines on white expanses.

Shalom grabs the roan red and Kai howls and she runs, for isn’t that half the fun, and he takes chase, for isn’t that the other half, and he keeps running, right to me, to show me, face skewed in horror, his heel and toes all dripping pigment, white and creamy.

“I didn’t mean to!” He’s pitched high, brow crinkled in angst, eyes alarmed , face a wild exclamation mark.

He’s dripping paint on the floor from his big toe and it takes a minute for me to envision what sequence of events had to have happened to lead to this finale.

And yes, when I look past Malakai’s foot dangling in the air, leaking white, there’s a quart of chalky, oil-based paint flooding across century old planks, seeping down between aged cracks. Apparently the feisty running of six-year-olds can kick a paint can such that the lid remarkably pops off. Ah, yes.

This is where the tutorial falls apart… or begins, depending on your perspective.

“KAI! ARRGH! THIS is why we don’t run in the house!” It’s not helpful and he doesn’t need that right now, but as I previously mentioned, this is where it all gets rather messy. He crumples in tears.

“Stay calm.” I caution myself, but I’m not, feeling this strangling panic surging. Kai’s squalling and I can’t think, move. Paint’s saturating knots in the floor, bleeding between boards. “Kai, wash your foot in the mudroom sink.” He wails louder. “Hope, Kai needs help NOW!” Teenaged boy watches wordlessly from his chair in the study.

“Rags.” I’ll need a pile of rags to soak up this oozing lake.

“You think that will really work?” someone drawls slowly.

I glare, grope for words, slow and deliberate, that still spill in hysteria, “If you can’t help, leave!” (Yes, this is how not to parent in (imagined) crisis.)

Levi dives in, rags in both hands; I grab a garbage bag, a butter knife to drag rag through the cracks. Kai’s screaming from the mudroom, Hope rubbing his foot with a cloth.




“Kai, please! If you can’t stop crying, go to your room. I can’t think!” I know I should be comforting Kai but all I can think about is what will it look like, a permanent patch of bleached pine, there by the door to the porch? I could almost cry too.

“Good, Levi. Put the rags in here.” I hold open the bag. I lay out another two layers of rags, watch the paint saturate through. Levi and I whisk up them too in the bag, and while I lay out another layer, he rests his hands, his paint-drenched hands, on his pants.

“ Levi! No!”

He looks down at his pants.

“Aren’t you glad he’s helping you?” a voice from behind a book questions.

“Go. To. Your. Room.” The words are low, an almost growl.

And he does and Levi and I mop it up and I can hear Kai sobbing and we keep soaking up the Atlantic of paint and I miserably think about this botched legacy I’m leaving, these hearts on warm breasts that I’ve smeared.

When the primed peg people sit on the table, rescued, and the floor’s only paled slightly (Magic Eraser works wee wonders), Kai comes find me scrubbing at a knot.

He strokes my cheek, and I stroke his, and our sadness looks into each other.

“I did the wrong thing.” He chokes out the words. I nod. “Me too.”

“Did you hear me in my room? I just kept crying, “I sinned, God, I sinned.”

“Oh, Kai, Mama did more.” I pull his little heart close to mine, embrace little person I love.
He pulls back to find my eyes again. His lip’s quivering, eyes swimming.

“I said, 'Make my heart clean, God.' ” I nod slowly, hurting somewhere in my chest. Yes, Kai, me too, me too.

An older boy wanders out, sits with us on old floors.

“Sorry, Mom. I got scared and said awful things. Will you forgive me?” My own eyes have gotten all Atlantic.

“Boys, I’m the one who said things I should never have said, who handled this poorly. It’s me who is asking for your forgiveness.”

Little Boy and Near Man and I sit on these history planks and hug long. I can smell new possibilities.

That night, when all the little people, wooden and real, sleep, I pray from Diary of Private Prayer:

“My failure to be true even to my own accepted standards:

My self-deception in face of temptation:

My choosing of the worse when I know the better: O Lord, forgive.

My failure to apply to myself the standard of conduct I demand of others:

My complacence towards wrongs that do not touch my own case and my over-sensitiveness to those that do:

My slowness to see the good in my fellows and the see the evil in myself:

My hardness of heart towards my neighbours faults and my readiness to make allowance for my own… O Lord, forgive.”

I repent of a day that had heart tutorial all its own, baptized and revived to the full-colored life.


Lord, let me learn from the tutorial of today, from Your Word, from You, how to love all people well, from wooden hearts to warm.