Surprise, surprise!

Life calling

I should start by saying that this post isn’t announcing anything, either good or bad. It’s just a reflection - sorry to disappoint!

We recently spent a week in Normandy with my dad and some of my extended family. The house we stayed in was gorgeous, as was the garden and land surrounding it. But is was not child friendly. A banisterless staircase with a sheer drop to a stone floor; all cupboards and fridges at waist level, with wine glasses and mugs and bottles of beer just waiting to be smashed by a curious toddler; barbed wire around the perimeter of the garden; lightweight bookshelves adorned with heavy lamps not anchored to the wall; etc. etc. We spent the entire week trying to prevent the toddler, or even the older kids, from gravely injuring themselves, to the point that it was difficult to relax and enjoy the holiday.

Praise the Lord, no one got hurt. However, within an hour or two of getting home, as I tried to wrangle the toddler into his romper, he reached forward into a cupboard, grabbed a glass bottle of deodorant, and sent it crashing onto the tiled floor. Small shards bounced into my legs as I crouched, some of them lodging into my skin and others cutting it, leaving tiny bubbles of blood. It wasn’t a big deal; thankfully the toddler was unscathed, and I managed to clean myself up pretty easily. But I couldn’t help but notice the irony of having spent an entire week shadowing the toddler, screeching “careful on the stairs!!!” at the big kids every few minutes, only to come back to the safe space of home and within a very short space of time, have the toddler cause a (minor) accident whilst literally clasped in my hands.

Our beautiful but very anxiety inducing vacation house

This could turn into some version of “we always worry about the wrong things”, but for the anxiety prone among us *ahem* this notion is far from reassuring. (When I was rereading I Capture the Castle recently, I was amused and validated by Cassandra’s conviction that if she imagines something happening, it won’t happen. She is primarily talking about good things, and tries to avoid letting herself imagine scenarios she wishes would unfold, but my anxious brain sometimes tells me if that I imagine all kinds of horrible things happening then they won’t happen… it’s science.)

The more positive spin I wanted to put on this is that life very often takes us by surprise in a good way, but when we’re constantly trying to control for possible disasters, it can be hard to notice this. In fact, it wasn’t until we had been home from Normandy for a couple of days that I realised that a tricky relationship dynamic I had been stressed out about before the trip actually turned out to be much less troublesome than I had anticipated.

A more impressive surprise came when I bumped into my internet-turned-IRL friend, Sarah, in the small Norman town of Alençon. Sarah lives in the US, and although I had met up with her a few weeks before in Paris, I had no idea that she was planning to visit Alençon, much less on the same day as me. This is partly a “small Catholic world” thing - Alençon is the birthplace and family home of St. Thérèse, which was why we were there - but many tiny things had to happen in order for us to bump into each other. For example, I initially spotted Sarah’s husband and kids, and a minute later she came walking down the road, having accidentally taken her hymnal with her after Mass and needing to return it. If she had simply left her hymnal in the pew at the end of Mass, she probably would have been down the street and round a corner by the time I crossed the road to load the kids into the car, which was parked right next to where her family had been standing. Even my aggressively atheist dad had to admit that there seemed to be some divine orchestration.

Where am I going with this? I guess that so much of life, but especially parenting, is about worrying, or trying to mitigate perceived dangers. Some of that is totally necessary - it obviously would have been wildly irresponsible and probably catastrophic to let my 16 month old treat the banisterless stair case like a climbing frame, as he was eager to do. But many of life’s beautiful surprises come when we release our anxieties, and stop trying to construct life in a way that we believe - wrongly, usually - will reduce the likelihood of XYZ terrible things happening. Example: I really nearly decided not to go on this Normandy vacation at all because of the aforementioned tricky relationship dynamic, but it ended up being a really rich, nourishing time of connection with our extended family. Some problems did arise, but I dealt with them, and it would have been an awful shame to forego all the beautiful things about the week because of the challenging parts.

Second example: when we moved to our current home, it meant pulling our daughter out of a really wonderful Montessori preschool programme that we loved, and which she loved, and instead put her into the local public preschool. We agonised over this, and considered really awkward and nonsensical logistics to keep her in the Montessori, but in the end we concluded that it made most sense to at least try the public school (not that we had anything against public school, but it meant giving up something we knew and loved for an unknown). And guess what, it was a huge success! Of course, it doesn’t provide the same beautiful environment as the Montessori or the small class sizes, etc etc, but it has offered other huge benefits in the realm of community and social integration that I am so glad we didn’t skip out on. It’s by no means perfect, and we would change if there was a reason to, but we’ve had kids in the school for three years now and have never wished we’d stuck with the Montessori.

I’m sure every age has experienced fear mongering of one sort or another, but it does seem that at this moment in history in particular, thanks to the usual culprits of social media, crappy journalism, and way too much access to way too much (mis)information, most people feel like they’re constantly fending off threats to themselves, their families, and their communities. It’s an exhausting way to live, with little room for the ways that life can turn out to be spectacularly surprising, sometimes in bad ways but very often in good. Discernment and prudence are important, but so is releasing control of outcomes and accepting that even our very best efforts will never be enough to sidestep the brokenness of the world, for ourselves or those we love. Instead, by gripping tightly to the belief that we can build the best childhoods, or the healthiest diets, or the most robust faith lives, we stem the flow of grace into our lives and make it harder to be surprised by God.

This is, I finally realise, a note to self: If we can accept that life will sometimes surprise us badly, we can be more open to all the beautiful, wild ways that God shows up in our lives and surprises us.

Isn’t the natural world our first teacher that life can be both brutal and painfully gorgeous, all without our intervention?