Parenting from “Strength in What Remains”
- By Shea Adelson
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It was an accident that I started reading the book Strength in What Remains (Random House, 2009) as I also started preparation for the Parenting from Sufficiency tele-course. I had ordered the book from the library back in October, but it was so popular, the book arrived three months later, last Friday. I’ve been transfixed by Tracy Kidder’s narrative since then, following the story of a young man who escaped Burundi (Africa) during the 1993/4 genocide, somehow making it to NYC where he spent most nights in Central Park, worked for $15/day as a delivery “boy”, and endured all the humiliation of being poor in a rich country. There is an upside, hope – after all, the book’s tagline is “A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness”: he eventually makes it to medical school, becomes a US citizen and builds a medical clinic in the town where his family relocates after they lost everything in the civil war. He begins to heal.
It didn’t have to be a Tracy Kidder book, or a story about genocide, or about Africa. It’s the earthquake in Haiti. It is the tall public housing buildings I drive by to go to the grocery store. As a parent thinking about parenting from sufficiency – when I look around, read the news, or put down a book that touches on what it is to raise a family with so little material resources, I am compelled to revisit what I think is so hard about parenting as a middle class American. I run a scarcity story about parenting that goes something like this: “Woe is me. Parenting is so hard.” “I know I only have one, but it’s still so hard.” “It’s virtually impossible to work and to parent. I do it, but it’s hard.”
It’s hard, sure. Hard, humbling, tiring, boring, confronting. (It’s other things as well – joyous, healing, fun, creative – but right now I am talking scarcity). I don’t get all the sleep I’d like to. (The mom of Deo – the young man Kidder follows and writes about – has eight kids, three of whom are adopted. They live in a single room thatched roof hut and sleep on banana leaves next to each other.) I don’t have the money for all the activities I’d like to take Maxine to, or for the schools I’d love to send her to. (School in Burundi’s remote areas costs around $1 a year and most families struggle to pay. Children are beaten for being late (after walking extreme distances) or asking questions the teachers’ don’t know. Most kids have to leave sometime before their sixth year to tend to the families’ herd of animals.) I worry that the world Maxine is inheriting will lack all of the stability and certainty that I grew up with, that life will be hard for her – and her peers. (Deo and his brother walk 14 hours back and forth over seven mountain peaks carrying huge bundles of food from a fertile family property to their main family compound. They do this barefoot and they do it once or twice a week.)
Listening to the news this morning, the stories of parents not able to find their children after the earthquake hit Port Au Prince, the families that will struggle for survival in a humanitarian crisis in a country that was just starting to get attention and some solid help – my heart tore a little. It’s impossible not to put myself in the shoes of these mothers. I am humbled. I am humbled in my story of how hard it is parent a healthy, well-nourished, clothed child in a house with water, electricity, food. This is not to minimize or discount the challenges of living in modern life. Deo himself admits he chose sleeping in Central Park over squatting in the Harlem tenements because he felt more at home, closer to nature. The modern pleasure of a roof was not, in this case, better than being under the stars – or worth putting up with the violence under that roof. We are not fools for going about our day in modern American life (and someday there will be a post about those actual hardships); but there is something absolutely terrifying about abject poverty and the “structural violence” that can arise from it (Peter Uvin), the destruction of families.
The point for me, as a parent thinking about parenting from sufficiency, is to contexualize my parenting challenges more broadly. These challenges are universal; raising a child(ren) is a long developmental journey and requires a lot of resources – material, emotional, spiritual, communal – all parents could agree on this, no matter their situation. For me, today, this week, the story of Deo and the pictures coming from Haiti, invite me pause and to remember what I do have, what is going well, and that might just be long enough for the complaint I was having to vaporize into gratitude.
