WHENEVER I'M IN THE THICK OF PARENTING, STUCK IN AN ENDLESS circle of obsessing about circumstances I can't seem to control, a Winnie-the-Pooh story comes to mind. One snowy winter's day, Pooh is walking around a small stand of trees in circles, tracking the mysterious and never seen Woozle. When his pal Piglet joins the search, they continue making circles around the trees. Going round and round, they become increasingly bewildered, as they look down and see more and more footprints appearing in the snow. Finally their friend Christopher Robin comes along, and informs the twosome that it's their own footprints they've been seeing. A relieved Pooh announces, "I have been Foolish and Deluded." A. A. Milne, The World of Pooh (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985), p. 43 .
I was feeling pretty foolish and deluded myself not too long ago. Alone in my car, in front of my daughter's school, I vowed not to start the engine and drive away until I found some peace. It had started a few days before, at the breakfast table. My 15-year-old daughter, Rosie, was scribbling something intently on a piece of paper beside her cereal bowl, and mentioned—in that casual way adolescents do—that it was "just a speech." She shoved it into her backpack, and that was it. But I, the worried mother, knew what a speech meant: She was running for some kind of office.
I realized that there is no human standpoint from which we can honestly know our children. Who they are, is who God made them to be.
