I heard a knock on our front door one beautiful late spring evening: after a hot day, finally cool enough to sit outside and enjoy… well, in this case, enjoy my son, banging away on the drums as he was want to do as soon as he walked in the front door after school and/or work. When I answered the front door, my next door neighbor stood there. I smiled and said hello.
He smiled back and asked, “Hey do you think your son could close his windows? The drumming is pretty noisy. If not, no big deal.” I was somewhat taken aback. In the past, our neighbors on both sides of us had assured me that they didn’t mind the occasional cacophony of my son’s band practice. They assured me that they liked the music. But today, it was only my son on the drums by himself, wearing headphones, playing along to something on his playlist that none of us could hear. I felt a little bit defensive but also torn. I could understand where my neighbor was coming from, especially if he and his partner were sitting outside on their back patio trying to enjoy the evening. This certainly couldn’t be defined as music.
“His room is super hot, but he usually only does this for, like, fifteen minutes. I’ll make sure he’s done soon.”
“Oh nevermind, really, it isn’t that big of a deal,” he said. “I don’t know how you guys stand it.”
“Oh, you know, I want to be the cool parent.” This was partly true, but I was selling myself short. I was allowing this kid to fulfill his dreams, not necessarily of stardom, but at least of getting better at playing a host of different instruments including the drums.
The neighbor chuckled, an audible eye-roll, possibly, as he trudged down our steps and went back to his house. Maybe he’d expected that I would shut my son down immediately in deference to being neighborly, to being polite. At first I thought, Whatever, he doesn’t have kids. He doesn’t understand the need to let them do their thing sometimes. However, somewhat of a people pleaser, I wanted to find the middle ground once I shut the front door. How to be considerate to both? I walked around the house shutting the other windows, hoping to dampen the beating of the drum a little bit without actually interrupting my son. Less than ten minutes later, he was done anyway, so the neighbors could still enjoy the rest of their “quiet” urban evening.
“The creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend,” is how Henri Nouwen, the late Catholic priest and sage theologian, defined hospitality in one of his multitudinous books on the spiritual life, Reaching Out. “The creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship.”
Before reading this book, I considered hospitality the thing that you do when you invite people, sometimes not-well-known to you, over for a meal so that you can get to know each other better. That’s not completely off the mark. My dad was a pastor, so growing up, we always had strangers over to our house after morning church for Sunday dinner (a big lunch, people, lunch), and sometimes after evening church for after church snacks, a casual supper. Dinner on Sundays was often a formal affair, us girls expected to sit primly, quietly at the table while important adult conversation occurred. We were there to serve our guests, not to be noisy or curious or otherwise draw any attention to ourselves, and to clean up after the meal.
Hospitality seemed like a thing for adults to participate in. Kids were not included in the friendly, empty space of hospitality, seen but not heard, as the old adage goes. If the people visiting were from out of town, they may even stay at our house through the afternoon so that they could attend the evening service with us as well. This meant that the whole afternoon was about being seen and not heard, about letting the commanded communal Sunday nap heavily descend and wrap around us like a slow, patient, hungry boa constrictor. My sisters and I squirmed against this, and often managed to do something to call attention to ourselves instead, followed by some punishment or other for being so depraved and sinful. It made us long to be adults where we could then be included in the friendly space instead of sequestered to the outskirts.
Here is what Henri Nouwen writes of the parent-child relationship:
… Our children are our most important guests, who enter into our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while and then leave to follow their own way. Children are strangers whom we have to get to know. They have their own style, their own rhythm and their own capacities for good and evil.
What parents can offer is a home, a place that is receptive but also has the safe boundaries within which their children can develop and discover what is helpful and what is harmful. …the hospitable home indeed is the place where [parents] and children can reveal their talents to each other, become present to each other as members of the same human family and support each other in their common struggles to live and make live. …
The difficult task of parenthood is to help children grow to the freedom that permits them to stand on their own feet… and to allow them to move away in their own direction.
When I read this, I thought it profound and instructive, even coming from a priest with no kids of his own— what does he know?— and instantly hoped that this is the kind of parent I have been, one offering hospitality to my sons. I flatter myself that, in some ways, Brian and I have always practiced this, partly intentionally but mostly accidentally, without the language to be able to name it. For instance, deciding to homeschool them came from a desire to give them space to know and be known by us. I particularly wanted to have a front row seat of their entire development and education. I wanted to watch it all happen, be a part of it.
Again, I’m flattering myself that this came out as hospitality. I wish. I had control issues as a homeschooling mom and probably forced my own desires on my kids’ lives in a less than hospitable way a good bit of the time. Was setting up boundaries or making rules, and disciplining the boys when they overstepped or acted in opposition of them a gesture of friendliness? I can look back now and say, “Sure,” but that is not what was in my mind at the time. Setting limits and enforcing them are hospitable, but we did not do them to make friends with our kids, we did them because that’s what parents do. I think back then we might have used the word “authority” or something. “Control,” certainly.
Also, we seem to have done a better job being hospitable to Oren than Seb. But in our defense, parenting Seb is what may have taught us most about hospitality. We had to struggle to figure out how to make space for this kid who pushed all the boundaries we set up. Plus we had never been parents before and did not know what we were doing. We were total Newbs. Then along came Oren, and we seemed to do a better job of making space more naturally. But then again, he wasn’t a boundary-pusher. Seb still occasionally complains about our different approach to parenting Oren as compared to parenting him.
“He got to do things when he was younger that you never would have let me do.”
And my only defense is, “You were so different!”
Parents tend to relax their manifestos, I mean, “friendly boundaries,” with each subsequent kid, little by little. This was true for my sisters and me. My older sisters were hardly allowed to do anything compared to what my younger sister and I were allowed to do. They complained too. “You let them get away with murder!” they might have said to our parents.
Parents are on a steep learning curve all the time. We think we have it figured out with one kid, we try to do a better job with the next, but we also have to get to know this completely new person. Our responses tend to be completely different with the new, completely different human being. It’s why parents always seem to be stuck in the tall weeds somewhere, navel gazing, saying over and over again to themselves, “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.”
As rock climbers, Brian and I tried to make space for our kids to become climbers themselves— or not. Sometimes we were really good at this, but sometimes really, really not so good. We didn’t force our kids to climb, but they did come with us when we went climbing, outside and in. It was a family thing. We did not sign them up for the kids climbing team at our gym, and when each of them had their moments of not wanting to rock climb at all, we tried to let it be (though I really, really struggled with it), and instead let them explore other sports and activities here and there when they wanted to. Soccer, BMX racing, crew, mountain biking, longboarding. Then there’s the music.
I wonder if I had read Henri Nouwen’s words when the boys were really small or even before we became parents, if it would have changed my approach, helped me tone down my propensity for control. I can never know this. But I can say with a bit of confidence that as parents we’ve practiced hospitality with our kids enough of the time that they still want to come over and hang out with us now that they live on their own. Okay, okay, they probably come for the food. And now that I have discovered these ideas, I strive to practice hospitality for and with my sons, or at least keep it in mind when I’m interacting with them. Listening is the most important thing I now do as a parent. It opens up a friendly space.
And by listening, I sometimes mean, biting my tongue in order to not “instruct.” And by instruct, I might actually mean “nag.”
In Nouwen’s words, I believe “our home indeed is the place where [parents] and children can reveal their talents to each other, become present to each other as members of the same human family and support each other in their common struggles to live and make live.”
And when I say “I believe”, I mean, “I hope.”
Again, maybe I’m flattering myself.
So when I tell people that even though Oren moved out a few months ago, he still comes over with the band for practice, and they say, “What?! Why is this? Why don’t they practice somewhere else?” This is why— well, and the drum kit’s at our house, so…
Now, if they ever find somewhere else to have band practice, I will absolutely be friendly toward that decision too.
