When was the last time you cried reading The NY Times? Not just teared up, but really bawled? Well, if Emily Rapp’s “Notes from a Dragon Mom” doesn’t open the waterworks, I don’t know what will. It’s a staggering piece, the kind that puts all of our lives in due perspective, parenting- or otherwise. The theological implications are enormous and should hopefully be pretty clear (clue: they have less to do with parenting, more to do with being parented). Emily is describing the kind of love that is fundamentally unconcerned with results or behavior (because it can’t be) and is all the more powerful for it. Indeed, she gives us an all-too-rare glimpse of what uncoerced, unconditional love really looks like in human relationships, and the precious wisdom it inspires. Praise God! It’s too good to excerpt, ht BH & SZ:
My son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.
I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.
How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?
Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.
Parenting advice is, by its nature, future-directed. I know. I read all the parenting magazines. During my pregnancy, I devoured every parenting guide I could find. My husband and I thought about a lot of questions they raised: will breast-feeding enhance his brain function? Will music class improve his cognitive skills? Will the right preschool help him get into the right college? I made lists. I planned and plotted and hoped. Future, future, future…
Our parenting plans, our lists, the advice I read before Ronan’s birth make little sense now. No matter what we do for Ronan — choose organic or non-organic food; cloth diapers or disposable; attachment parenting or sleep training — he will die. All the decisions that once mattered so much, don’t.
All parents want their children to prosper, to matter. We enroll our children in music class or take them to Mommy and Me swim class because we hope they will manifest some fabulous talent that will set them — and therefore us, the proud parents — apart. Traditional parenting naturally presumes a future where the child outlives the parent and ideally becomes successful, perhaps even achieves something spectacular. Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is only the latest handbook for parents hoping to guide their children along this path. It’s animated by the idea that good, careful investments in your children will pay off in the form of happy endings, rich futures.
But I have abandoned the future, and with it any visions of Ronan’s scoring a perfect SAT or sprinting across a stage with a Harvard diploma in his hand. We’re not waiting for Ronan to make us proud. We don’t expect future returns on our investment. We’ve chucked the graphs of developmental milestones and we avoid parenting magazines at the pediatrician’s office. Ronan has given us a terrible freedom from expectations, a magical world where there are no goals, no prizes to win, no outcomes to monitor, discuss, compare.
But the day-to-day is often peaceful, even blissful. This was my day with my son: cuddling, feedings, naps. He can watch television if he wants to; he can have pudding and cheesecake for every meal. We are a very permissive household. We do our best for our kid, feed him fresh food, brush his teeth, make sure he’s clean and warm and well rested and … healthy? Well, no. The only task here is to love, and we tell him we love him, not caring that he doesn’t understand the words. We encourage him to do what he can, though unlike us he is without ego or ambition.
Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.
credit J Weber via Santa Fe Reporter
Nobody asks dragon parents for advice; we’re too scary. Our grief is primal and unwieldy and embarrassing. The certainties that most parents face are irrelevant to us, and frankly, kind of silly. Our narratives are grisly, the stakes impossibly high. Conversations about which seizure medication is most effective or how to feed children who have trouble swallowing are tantamount to breathing fire at a dinner party or on the playground. Like Dr. Spock suddenly possessed by Al Gore, we offer inconvenient truths and foretell disaster.
And there’s this: parents who, particularly in this country, are expected to be superhuman, to raise children who outpace all their peers, don’t want to see what we see. The long truth about their children, about themselves: that none of it is forever.
I would walk through a tunnel of fire if it would save my son. I would take my chances on a stripped battlefield with a sling and a rock à la David and Goliath if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go.
But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. I can see my reflection in his greenish-gold eyes. I am a reflection of him and not the other way around, and this is, I believe, as it should be. This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVBUdnTMcmE&w=600]
COMMENTS
12 responses to “Dragon Mothers and the Greatest Love Story Ever Told”
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I am so moved by what she has written. She shoots right to the heart of the matter.
This is profound and full of hard-won wisdom. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I waited nearly all day for someone to comment on this post. I thought maybe Dave had cut off comments because it is so towering, so powerful and so rich with love and Grace in practice. As JZ said, I can’t stop thinking about it.
I can’t either; the piece says everything there is to say, really. Ferocious, is right….
3 months ago, I lost my grandson to Leukemia, he was only 10.
Yesterday, during a memorial service at the “Montreal Children hospital”, Dr. Stephen Liben read part of the Dragon Mother profound and beautiful story, I feelt her agony and pain as well as the other 27 parents, present for this beautiful and soothing commemorative service.
Thank you Emily Rapp for this lesson of courage and determination!
What a great story! So glad I read it!
Incredible story. Beautiful. But….since DZ led into this by saying the “theological implications are enormous … Emily is describing the kind of love that is fundamentally unconcerned with results or behavior…,” I want to ask some questions. Is God concerned about our future? Is God concerned about who I become? When a parent believes that her child has adulthood ahead of them, doesn’t her love take on a less permissive form? Given that God has an incredible future planned for us, does his love in the here and now sometimes nudge us toward – dare I say it – discipline and work as part of the growth process?
God bless you and hold you in His arms.
A lot of what she describes we experienced when our son’s wife was deployed to Afghanistan…not knowing what the future held..would she make it back…would he raise the baby alone…..Praise God she was returned to us….but the trauma of it is real.