Hurricane Mom

Understanding my upbringing has been a lifelong pursuit. One of the most difficult people to understand was my mom. I still have a mental snapshot of her bent over her flower beds. She instilled in me a love of the earth and taking care of what God has given us. I still can’t stand littering and in the spring I obsess over getting those first annuals in the rich black soil I had delivered before the moving boxes were even unpacked.

But my mother had a secret anger that simmered out of the sight of polite company. It would waylay my sister and me, and I’m sure, the brother I never knew. Hurricaning is an unhealthy practice birthed of rage, pumping adrenaline into the body even giving the person a temporary high. It can cause you to feel powerful. In cartoons, it is the character who suddenly reveals their evil side, rising into the air like a giant Medusa with thunderclouds and lightning billowing behind.

Raging at a spouse or children can become addictive. It is often a trait of the Alpha personality or the choleric, the ones who are prone to heart attack and stroke early in life, but anyone can fall into a rage. In short, hurricaning is bad for the body physically and destructive to a happy home life. I remember moving out at the age of eighteen, looking around my little rent house and thinking, “Peace and quiet—finally.” My mom and I were only able to know each other on a surface level because as a young person I could not feel safe to confide in her. When my father followed suit, hurricaning when I applied to an out of state college, my response was to move out of our home, fearful that I would never know safety if I didn't. Confidence in a relationship is based upon a healthy mutuality and a sense of safety. We want our children and spouse to respect us, but how we go about earning that respect will determine the health of our relationship.

Truthfully, it takes time to build a relationship. It takes two parties walking in agreement. Getting our kids to sign on is reliant on our pursuit of mutuality and that means changing the language we use to motivate others to invest in our missions. I have one last caboose in my life, my teenage son. I was justifying the friction between us by saying that his testosterone was getting the best of him—and that is true. But God tapped me one day when I was sort of grumbling about him in prayer. He asked me to consider why I was so troubled. I knew why—I’m afraid he’ll make a poor choice at the precipice of adulthood that will take years to undo. The keyword, God showed me, was “afraid.” He gave me a new benevolent tool--communicating out of my beliefs instead of my fears. The next morning on the way to school instead of nagging him and then both of us losing our temper, I reworded what I wanted to say to him out of my beliefs instead of my fears. To do that, I had to know in advance what I believed. It changed the entire mood and my tone. We were laughing and chatting like two adults when he got out of the car and went into his school. By refocusing my platform, I killed the hurricane.

The hard part is doing that every day with my child, my husband, the people who work alongside me in ministry. That will require prayer and my surrendering what I feel is right for my relationships back to God—and that means reconciling myself to mutuality with God

The Things We Carry

Do you get frustrated with yourself, especially when you blurt out the wrong thing, or, believing you’re being forthright, take your words over the line hurting a relationship? I think that as a recovering choleric, that was the hardest problem for me to control. It took time for me to first of all recognize it as a problem, and then to get a Holy Spirit bit in my mouth.

I remember the years of struggling to grow while trying to build a career. Work ethic was never a problem, but dealing with the people I saw as obstacles frustrated me. I kept encountering people whose habits were counterproductive to my goals. It seemed for many years that people had been placed directly in my path to drive me over the edge. I saw them as the enemy, rather than recognizing the real enemy—often, myself.

What I failed to recognize was that the people in my way were the true part of God’s plan for me, while my aims and objectives contributed far less. It was the difficult co-worker who did not want to be a cog in my schemes that taught me to slow down and see her for her humanity. It was my ADD son who taught me that there are greater things to learn in life than facts and lessons learned by rote. It was a mentally ill relative who taught me that change is not always the goal, but living in the moment. It was my once-failing marriage that taught me that happy endings aren’t sensible while small daily triumphs gained in tandem bring long-term happiness.

John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things. God has taught me that those other things I spend my time doing will be enriched by how people are treated along the way. Each person I meet in some form or fashion has taught me something. I can’t take the fruit of striving with me when I die. It is people who are the only cargo allowed into and out of Spaceship Earth.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not us.”
2 Cor. 4:7