In Praise of Third-Party Parents

“We choose our parents.”
“How do you mean?”
“We choose the parents in this life that can teach us something, so that when we go into the next life, we get it right. Of course, sometimes it don’t work, does it?” —Secrets & Lies

“We all need parents who are not our parents. And God is in the business of providing those people. And parents need to pray that God will provide the parent that the child needs, even if it’s not themselves.” –John Zahl, The Brothers Zahl, “Episode 19: Parenting“

As parents we want to believe that we’ll be able to provide for our children — and we will, up to a point. God has put us in their lives for a reason. There are certain things that we can provide for them that no one else could. However, if we’re being realistic about human nature, we know that our limitations will leave multiple openings in our children’s lives that we are entirely unqualified to fill. And pretending this isn’t the case will only lead to frustration and strife for both parties. This is where “third-party parents” come in. These are the people who are not us, who will, in some way, help our children feel loved. Who may only be in their lives for a short while, but who will leave an indelible impression on them nonetheless. These people take many forms: teachers, coaches, aunts/uncles, neighbors, friends, friends’ parents, bosses, people at church, and people who show up in ways that feel completely serendipitous.

I don’t know if it’s easier or harder to accept this for those of us who have made it our mission not to do the things our parents did that we wish they hadn’t, or to do the the things our parents didn’t do that we wish they had. I think when we’re young, there can be a certain amount of resentment that comes from our parents’ inability to help us in all the ways we need help, especially when it seems like they won’t even try. Maybe most of all when they won’t even let us try to then find someone else who could. But I think it ultimately teaches us something important: that our parents are not ultimate. Which can then help us remember when we become parents that, we too, are not ultimate. That if these holes are to be filled, God will be the one to fill them, whether through some sort of direct means or through commissioning other people to be his hands and feet. This also means that sometimes we’ll find ourselves being third-party parents to those we least expect.

Right after college, I was working as an AmeriCorps member in a couple of low-income elementary schools, doing volunteer coordinating/recruiting/training, tutoring, teacher-assisting, and any other odd jobs the schools needed someone to do. The school that was least equipped to have me, where things just felt a little more precarious (my “office” was a desk shoved in the corner of the teachers’ lounge), ended up being the one that I really loved. I still think about it 15+ years later, largely because of one kid. He was in the third grade, and I would read with him for thirty minutes every Tuesday. He didn’t seem to need as much help with the actual reading as did some of the other kids I worked with, but his teacher insisted on the pairing. I didn’t mind, because he was a sweet and funny kid, and I didn’t have to work as hard to keep him on track as I did with some of the more reluctant students. At some point, I found out his dad wasn’t in the picture. It was just him and his mom, and his teacher thought I would be a good adult male role model. This kind of freaked me out, as I was still getting used to my own relatively recent designation as an adult, but I just kept showing up, listening to him read, and making occasional jokes.

One day, he came to the tutoring session beaming and said, “Joey, look at my shoes!” (this was in the middle of a 10- to 15-year stint during which I almost always wore Chuck Taylor Low-Top sneakers), and when I looked down at his feet, I saw he had gotten a pair very much like my own. I was young and dumb and didn’t know what I was doing, but despite my myriad deficiencies, it seemed like whatever I was doing was enough at that time for that kid.

I’m sure part of the reason this experience has stuck with me is that although my father was around when I was growing up, our relationship has never been an easy one. Very different temperaments, very different values, very different interests. Which, when I was young, frequently felt like some sort of cosmic mix-up. It sort of helped that a number of my friends felt the same way about their own fathers, but it also made the whole thing seem even stranger. It probably wasn’t really until sometime in my thirties that I realized the providence of this kind of set up. I’m not saying this holds true in all accounts, but I think there has to be something sort of like this to make it clear to many of us that we have to place our ultimate trust in God rather than our parents.

If my dad had the same love of shaggy-dog stories, would I not have been as close as I was to my maternal grandfather or as I am to my father-in-law? Or if he loved dry or Seinfeldian jokes the way I do, would I have missed out on a largely comedy-based relationship with my uncle? If he was as equally interested in silly pop culture and certain serious strands of theology, would I ever have needed to find Mockingbird? Maybe not. And I’m so grateful for all of those things, and for all the other people who chose to act as “third-party parents” to me, or who let me choose them. God used these insufficiencies for good.

So when I’m tempted to try to be everything (in the material realm) to my own daughter, I have to remember all the unexpected — and completely wonderful — blessings and relationships that came from my having to look elsewhere to fill these perceived lacks in my own parents. And think about how the people who end up being the people she needs in these situations could later inspire her (with a nudge from the Holy Spirit) to be the person someone else will eventually need. When we remember that God is “the Alpha and Omega” (Rev 1:8), the beginning and the end, the final arbiter of everything, we can let go of some of our more egregious attempts at control to see that some of our past resentments aren’t worth holding onto either. In the end, they led to something much better than we could have ever imagined. We can pray for the right people to show up at the right times for our kids in ways we never could — and fall to our knees in gratitude when they do.