This long hot summer has been a special time for our four youngest daughters to connect and spend lazy hours together. As they are almost all teens, I have been struck by their closeness in age. This is the one and only summer that they will all be the same height. They are at a crucial stage of their lives as they begin to accept and acknowledge their own identities. In reality, though their days are spent in similar ways, their similarities stop there with their ages, heights and doings.
Each daughter is emerging in their own special ways. I delight in the deep down radiating essence of each. I wonder at what defines their very unique entities in a way that can be called their identity? As a parent, I want to allow their heart true essence to emerge and be welcomed. I am also aware of my place in helping them to unfold in healthy ways.
For each of the children, I take seriously our role as parents to offer choices of activities and interests and basic core values that will lead to their own development of their identities. I do want all the children to learn to swim safely, so they do consistently take swimming lessons through the year, even if they are not passionate about swimming. Each child has had some exposure to music lessons of one kind or another. Most have chosen not to continue, but some have truly found that playing an instrument is a joy and part of their chosen identity. All the girls have chosen to take dance lessons. Again, some have continued and others have moved on to other areas of interest. One daughter is passionate about cooking. Another is an artist. One son is most happy in the wilderness, hiking and climbing. Another loves everything to do with psychology. Some like to read and others do not. Some are more social than others. Those things are part of their delightfully emerging identities. We have tried to offer the children and ourselves varied options of things that contribute to their identities and have also been available to encourage even attributes that are different from those offered but which come from within.
We are a multicultural family at our very core, as my husband is of Chinese descent and I am from British descent. Our children also bring other cultures. Each child differs in the impact that their cultural identity has for them. One child has struggled with her perception, for example, of her Chinese heritage. She has not embraced that. Even within our genetic cultural beings, we have choice about the importance of that in our understanding of our own identity. I feel a responsibility to offer our children coming from different cultures opportunities to learn and practice traditions inherent to their cultures, but in the end it will be their choice about how much that becomes a part of their identity.
My husband and I do love God and our identity as Christians is central to our being. Though we have struggles with some of the cultural and specific outworkings of that identity even for ourselves, the children do come with us to church and participate in our family times of prayer and activity, as imperfect as those sometimes are. Some children may eventually chose to follow Christ themselves, while for others Christianity may not be a part of their faith identity. I do know people who chose not to take their children to church or a faith community as they want them to freely determine their own identity. In so many areas, we have chosen to go ahead in our own areas of interest and identity and offer our children wide ranging experiences so that they will eventually be choosing from places of understanding and experience. In those areas that we do not have experience, we have seen that the desires and inclinations of identity often emerge from each of us regardless!
For much of my life I have struggled with my own identity and have been often caught in comparing myself to others. Some external things that I have so desired to be a part of my identity have never happened. I have been jealous of those for whom those desired things are a part of their identity. I have struggled to have my true heart identity fit with what I might like it to be. Sometimes it has felt that the reality of my identity is never quite what I would like. I recognize that sometimes I have identified myself as a "human doing" rather than the "human being" that I am! As the years have gone by, I have noticed that when it comes to respecting the identities of others there are a few things that stand out for me. Frequently I hardly notice the things that I have felt to be so centrally important in my own life. When I chose my friends, for example, I often do not notice if they are married, if they have kids, if they are social with lots of friends, or what they are even doing for an occupation. What I do notice are the qualities and essence of their being. I notice those fruits of the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control and gentleness. Most important of those is love. Those are not qualities that I would immediately think were qualities of identity, but certainly these days I am struck increasingly by their important and most central impact. They are qualities that are expressed in uniquely different ways by each of us. I value and delight in those different ways, but when all is said and done, I do hope that those core qualities available to us all will be what shines forth most in me as my identity. May I mostly be a person of love, undergirding and covering all things. Certainly that is what I notice first in others.
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