The Hard One Is The One Like Me

It is the way they go quiet before they get angry. Or the thing they do with their hands. Or the answer they give when they know they are in the wrong, which is the exact answer you used to give.

And you are watching yourself at nine years old, across a kitchen, being difficult.

That is what makes this one different from an ordinary hard child. There is a layer under it that you cannot get out from under, because every time they do the thing, you know precisely what is happening inside them, and you also remember what happened next in your own house.

And you cannot tell whether the impatience you feel is impatience with them or with somebody else entirely.

I am not going to give you a way to break the pattern. That phrase is a technique and this site does not hand those out. And I am not going to explain your child to you, because I have not met them and I have not met the nine year old either.

Like as a father pitieth his children

There is a comparison in Psalm 103 that works in a direction most people never run it.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. (Psalm 103:13, King James Version)

The verse uses a parent to explain God. That is the usual reading and it is the right one.

But look at what it assumes. It assumes that a parent's pity for a difficult child is the clearest available picture of how God feels about a person, which means the thing you feel when you watch them struggle is not the problem in this situation. It is the illustration.

You are carrying something the Scriptures use to explain God Himself, and it has never once been the wrong response. Psalm 103:13 says like as a father pitieth his children, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a yard where somebody is watching a familiar gesture.

And now run it the other way, which is where it lands tonight.

If God pities like a father, then the nine year old in your memory is somebody He looks at with exactly that. Not the adult version who has learned to manage it. The nine year old, mid difficulty, in a kitchen, being hard work.

You are pitied at nine years old and at forty, and neither of those has ever once required you to have been easier. It is written in Psalm 103:13 that the LORD pitieth them that fear him with a father's kind of pity, and the Spirit of God is the one who extends that backwards into a house you left long ago.

Two children in the room

Now let me name what is making this so tiring, because there are two jobs happening at once and only one of them is visible.

There is a child in front of you and a child in your memory, and both of them are being parented simultaneously, and one of them cannot be reached.

That is why the impatience has a strange edge on it. Some of it belongs to this evening and some of it is thirty years old and arriving in the same voice, and there is no way to sort them in the moment.

You are carrying two evenings at once, and nobody has ever once been asked to separate them before God will help. It is written in Psalm 103:13 that the pity comes like a father's rather than like a verdict, and the Spirit of God is the one who covers both rooms at the same time.

Nothing about that is a moral failure. It is what recognition does, and it happens to anybody who sees themselves accurately in a child.

Psalm 103:13 puts pity in front of both of them without asking a person to separate them first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who covers the child in the room and the one in the memory at once.

You are able to hold both of them without sorting them out, and it has never once required you to know which is which. Psalm 103:13 supplies pity like a father's rather than a tidy verdict, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reaches a nine year old nobody can get back to.

And here is the plain thing, because this has become an accusation.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about how that child is being handled.

It is a person recognizing themselves, which is uncomfortable and is not a fault, and which most parents never get close enough to feel.

You have not been failing that child, and recognizing yourself in them has never once been the same as resenting them. The written word makes a father's pity the picture of God's own in Psalm 103:13, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to read recognition as impatience.

What they are not

One straight thing, because there is a temptation here and it is worth naming plainly.

Your child is not you. The resemblance is real and it is also partial, and the story that happened to you is not the story that is happening to them.

They have a different house, different people, a different decade and a different set of everything. The gesture is the same and almost nothing else is.

You are raising somebody with their own story, and a shared gesture has never once carried a shared ending with it. It is written in Psalm 103:13 that the pity is aimed at real people, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps two separate lives from being folded into one.

That matters because a parent who is certain they know how this ends will start parenting the ending rather than the child, and the child will feel it and will not be able to say what it is.

Psalm 103:13 pities the actual person in front of the parent rather than a projection, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps two different lives from being collapsed into one.

You are looking at a different person with a familiar gesture, and the resemblance has never once meant the story is the same. Psalm 103:13 has the pity aimed at real people rather than at patterns, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a child from being parented as a repeat.