Hopeful Hearts Ministry

“You expect me to be perfect,” Seth proclaimed along with a sneer that stabbed my heart.

“Perfect?” I retorted.  “You think I expect you to be perfect?  I’ll show you what that really looks like.  If you think me being a parent is expecting you to be ‘perfect’ then you are up for a rude awakening.”  He smiled as if I was ridiculous so I responded by making him sit up straighter in his seat.  “No more slouching and tuck in your shirt,” I said.

Let me go back a day… yesterday after having what I consider a pretty good day and had just posted about how we don’t have to be perfect,  I picked up my boys from school and on the way home we ended up in a conversation about school and handling stress, etc. Ryan has been putting a lot of expectations on himself that cause undo stress.  It is great to see him strive to achieve but at the same time I see how it is causing his esteem to crumble.    What began as a normal conversation discussing the project he had due and the prep he felt he needed for finals quickly turned into an all out melt-down, complete with him resorting to his two-year-old behavior of screaming, flailing about the car and crying  “You just don’t understand!”  🙁 (I was trying to tell him to take it one thing at a time and to simply do the best he could.  I was only trying to be helpful not hindering.)

Upon having this tantrum in the car (the major meltdown happened when we pulled into the garage) Seth slipped discretely out and into the house.  Once cried out and calmed down Ryan went inside and brought the main source of his ‘angst’ – the project – to the living room.  He is normally a kid that does all of his projects and studying in his bedroom so it was heartwarming to recognize that he needed to be near while he was working on something that really had him in a bind.  I helped with the little I could that wouldn’t overstep the boundary of it being ‘his work’ and soon I could see his shoulders ease away from his ears.

I sat on the couch and watched him work, thinking about some of the self-degrading things he’d proclaimed in the car and my heart physically hurt.  “Lord,” I prayed, “please help him to accept his best and not be so hard on himself.”  All Neal and I have ever expected from our kids is for them to do their best. 

Enter Seth who laid a paper on my lap.  “I need you to sign for some grades in class,” he said. 

I took the piece of paper and as my eyes focused on the grades listed (two D’s and an F) he began to state his case, “That 60 is because the quiz only had 6 questions and I missed one.  Everybody failed,” he said.

We are in the stage of ‘excuses’… but here it is, right?  That fine line of parenting with “Do the best you can.” and “No excuses.”  The truth is Seth is an ‘A’ student (maybe high ‘B’ in some subjects but when he is doing his best he really is an ‘A’ student.)  I didn’t shout, yell or begin badgering him about the grade.  When he stopped with the ‘excuses’ I asked, “Was it your best?”

He looked at me sheepishly and shook his head no.  I pointed to the other low grades, “And what about these?”  Again the excuses were unloaded.  Granted they weren’t test scores but I know what even small homework and participation scores can do to a grade.  His last progress report was all A’s except one B that was one point from an A!  But the issue here was the failed quiz.  So I took his phone away.

Lord have mercy on my soul!  You would have thought I’d declared world war 3 in the Deitz home.   Except I’m a nice enemy, I gave him the chance to text his friends that he wasn’t going to have his phone. 

This afternoon when I picked Seth up the first thing he said was, “When do I get my phone back?”  Once again we were tangled in a discussion of what was ‘expected’ and therefore was the ‘You expect me to be perfect.’ remark.  Funny, I have one child that expects too much of himself and then I have another that has an excuse for every thing.  Is there a child that meets in the middle?

Finally, I settled on this, “You can have your phone back but the deal is if your grades have gone down from the last progress report then I take your phone away for a period of time that your dad and I will decide later.  Could be weeks or even a month, depends on the final report card.”  He got real quiet.

Funny, I went to hand Seth his phone he gave it back to me. “Keep it till I’m done studying.” 🙂

This morning when I went for a run and within the first two minutes ran under a tree and had a bird take a ‘dump’ on my head I should have known this day would be challenging. 😉