The relationship I have with each of our four children began the moment I held that fragrant newborn in my arms. It was unasked for and immediate, complete with everything we would need for the journey ahead. Through the years, communication, playfulness, respect, and a sense of belonging, were at the core of our ties, they were the things we valued and developed. They were also the very things I often forgot when we landed in the changeable territory of adolescence.
There are a thousand ways to raise happy and healthy children. I have seen strict parents and lenient parents do it. I have watched intact families, single parents, rich and poor manage to instill a sense of purpose and meaning in their children. There is no grand formula, no one set of criteria for success save one: There is a sense of relationship between parent and child. However misguided, lopsided, or messy the connection may be, if there is a relationship, there is hope, there is forgiveness, there is a certain resiliency that absorbs the lurches of mistakes and failure. In many ways, it is unimportant how you cobble a relationship together, as long as there are corridors and alleys of connection.
I needed that sense of relationship about a hundred times a day raising our kids through their teen years. There were times when most forms of communication were issued in the command tense over unfinished business or mysterious outings---“Finish your homework, empty the garbage, Where are you going? Who are you with? When will you be home?”
In the end what helped save life from becoming an unrelenting yammer-fest were hot tamales candies and ping-pong. I am not kidding. I was a little desperate. It started one autumn afternoon when our son came home from middle school flat and monosyllabic for the fourth week straight, I pulled out a gigantic box of the red-hot candies and shook them enticingly. “Want one?” I asked. “Sure,” he said. “Well, you have to beat me at ping pong then. Winner gets 10.” He looked at me scornfully. “Just give me some,” he said. “Forget it, you have to earn them,” and I cha-cha-cha-ed downstairs shaking the box like a mariachi hoping he would follow.
He did. We played. We talked. We even laughed, because truth be told, he is a whole lot better at ping pong than I am, and he coached me with a muscular voice on how to play more competitively. I often leaned on ping-pong and hot tamales with the others as they moved through their detach-and-grow-distant moods. The game became a conduit for communication without eye contact, for sharing the silly and the profound on a level playing field. The command tense swung around to the kids telling me I wasn’t quite good enough and here’s how to do it better. “I learn better if you don’t yell!” I caught myself saying one eye-opening evening.
As the ball landed back and forth, idle exchanges sometimes led to topics more difficult to breach when we were eye to eye or confined to chairs. There were gaps and pauses before replying, sideways lunges and rich conversational detours. The game was a metaphor in many ways for the things that were going right in our relationship: having fun loomed larger than who won, the world wouldn’t end if we changed the rules, and a shared laugh bridged the worst day.
Margaret Mead once defined the ideal human culture as one where there is a place for every human gift. Whether the human culture is at work or home or the community, the meaningful use of our gifts can hold people together in fundamental ways. Don’t wait for the right time to connect with your child. That day has arrived. It is right now. As deadlines are being met, laundry folded, and as another workday draws to a close. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is drop everything for red-hot candies and a game of ping-pong.
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