Will He Hold This Against Me

It is always about two in the morning and it is always the same scene.

He is thirty eight. He is sitting somewhere, with somebody, and the subject of families comes up, and he says a sentence about you. You can hear the sentence. It has a shape and a tone and it is not cruel, which somehow makes it worse: it is the tolerant, slightly flattened way people describe a disappointment they have made peace with.

And then you turn the pillow over and it is ten past two.

Nobody knows you do this. Your husband does not know. Your son certainly does not know, and he is currently asleep four hundred miles away and has not thought about any of this in about eleven days.

And here is the thing about that two o'clock scene that I want to say first, before we go anywhere near whether it is true: you are not imagining a memory. You are imagining a verdict.

There is a difference and it matters enormously. A memory is a thing that happened. A verdict is a judgment passed on a whole person on the basis of one item. And what your mind produces at two in the morning is not your son remembering a year. It is a court, and you are in the dock, and the whole of your motherhood is being decided on one line item from one autumn.

Beareth all things

There is a description of love in First Corinthians that gets read at weddings, and there are four verbs in it that nobody reads slowly enough.

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. (1 Corinthians 13:7, King James Version)

Four verbs, and every one of them is about capacity rather than about feeling.

Bear. Believe. Hope. Endure. Those are load words. They describe something that carries weight over time, which means the passage assumes there will be weight, and assumes there will be time, and does not treat either as a sign that something has gone wrong.

You are inside something built to bear weight, and one hard year in a family has never once been more than what love was described as carrying. First Corinthians 13:7 gives love four load bearing verbs in a single line, and the Holy Spirit is the one awake with somebody at ten past two.

Now look at the second verb, because it is the one your two o'clock scene has no room for.

Believeth all things. That is a posture toward a person: reading them generously, assuming the better version, refusing the worst available interpretation.

And here is the thing you have been doing every night since September. You have been extending that to everybody in your life except your own son. You have been assuming the worst available interpretation of a man you raised, and doing it in his absence, and convicting him of a verdict he has not passed.

You are able to believe the best about your own son, and a boy who has said nothing has never once been the same as a boy who has decided something. The written word puts the generous reading inside the description of love itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops a court that has been sitting every night since the autumn.

He is not building the case you are

Now let me tell you what is actually happening at his end, because it is almost the exact opposite.

He is not keeping a ledger of what you could not do. He is nineteen. At nineteen a person is not tracking their parents' provision, they are tracking whether their parents are on their side, which is a completely different account, and it is one this family has been in credit on for two decades.

And when he does think about this year, and he does, what he is mostly thinking about is his mother. He is wondering whether she is all right. He is aware, in the vague and imprecise way a nineteen year old is aware of these things, that something is hard for his mother, and he has no idea what to do about it, so he says nothing.

Both of you are lying awake worrying about the other one, and neither of you has said a word.

You are being worried about by the same person you are worrying about, and two people awake in two houses have never once been able to reach each other by lying still. The Holy Spirit is the one in two rooms at once at ten past two, and First Corinthians 13:7 sets four verbs of carrying against each other in one line.

And here is the part that would end the two o'clock scene if you let it in.

What a person remembers about a hard year is almost never the shortage. It is how the people around them behaved inside it. Whether they were honest. Whether they were still themselves. Whether the room was safe to be disappointed in.

A number that would not stretch is not a verdict on a mother.

You are able to determine how this year is remembered without changing one figure in it, and the shortage has never once been the part a grown man keeps. 1 Corinthians 13:7 names bearing and enduring rather than providing, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman which part of a year is actually hers.

Give him permission to mind

So here is the thing to do, and it will feel counterintuitive, and it is the single most effective sentence available to you.

Say to him once, out loud, that he is allowed to be disappointed about this. And then do not defend yourself afterward.

Not "I hope you are not too disappointed". Not "I know it is disappointing, but". Just the permission, plainly given: you are allowed to be disappointed about this. It is a disappointing thing.

You are able to give him permission rather than a defense, and a mother who allows her son to mind has never once made him mind more. It is written in First Corinthians 13:7 that love beareth and endureth, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a phone call where a woman hands her son something instead of protecting herself.

Here is why this works on your two o'clock scene, which is what we are actually treating.

The imagined sentence at thirty eight only exists because something is unspoken. Unspoken things calcify. They become the thing that was never mentioned, and the never mentioning is what turns an item into a verdict over twenty years.

Say it out loud once, and it stops being unspoken, and there is nothing left to calcify around. The year becomes a year that his mother named. And a named year does not turn into a sentence at thirty eight.

You are able to say the thing that stops it setting, and one sentence spoken in October has never once been too small to change what a man remembers in twenty years. Scripture describes a love that bears and believes and hopes and endures, and the same Spirit who put those four together is with you when you make the call.