Thou Shalt Have a Thing

“Sloane is our smart one.”
“Jack is our athlete.”
“Peter is our musical one. He plays violin … guitar… and piano.”

There is an unrelenting pressure felt by every parent: the pressure to find your child’s Thing.

That Thing could be baseball, ballet, horseback riding, hockey, table tennis, good grades, getting into a “good” college, trumpet, trombone, tuba, debate team, chess club. It doesn’t matter; there are as many Things as there are things. What matters is your child having some identity marker which separates them (and you) from the pack, which they (and you) can display to the world, and which grants them (and you) a Reason For Living.

Things. How did we get here?

According to Andy Root, professor at Luther Seminary, it’s a familiar narrative for all who have read A Secular Age and/or Seculosity. Once upon a time, there was a Universal Story that gave meaning to the world (and parents). That story was the Christian one: Chapter 1: God made the world good. Chapter 2: Man fell into Sin. Chapter 3: Christ has come, turning the tide and dealing a decisive blow to Sin. Chapter 4: One day he will come again, draining the Cosmos of all remaining Sin and Sadness.

In this story — coupled with the fact that the average life expectancy was 35 or 40 years old — there were no SAT tutors or private pitching coaches. If dad was a cobbler, his son was probs going to be a cobbler. The goal of parenting in this premodern world was relatively straightforward. Live into the Story, and raise your children to do the same.

But now, alas, there is no Story, and all are left to their own devices to write a Story for themselves.

I lived in Austin for six years (with all your other millennial friends, sipping jalapeno margs and pontificating about Elon Musk), and during that time I would go on runs around the lake which flows through downtown. Crossing over the lake on what is called the MoPac bridge, each runner or walker passes a mural painted by a local artist, which reads: “Live a Great Story.” I trust the artist had the best of intentions, and his words made a certain entrepreneurial, CrossFit-type inspired to run harder and live better. But I always felt a sense of despair. Because that is where we are now. We no longer live into a great story, but we must write a story of our own. We have eliminated that key word “into.”

Parents today carry a double burden: (1) not only must we Live a Great Story for ourselves, but (2) we must ensure our children do, too.

This second pressure has escalated in the last 40 years. For evidence, Root says to watch Stranger Things. Where are the parents? Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will sit in the basement playing Dungeons and Dragons (imagine that being your child’s Thing), or they ride their bikes through town slaying monsters, and the parents are nowhere to be found. Really, one sees this in any show or movie from the 80s. In E.T., there’s an alien in the house and Mom doesn’t even know. And in the Breakfast Club, there are essentially no parents at all. Are they bad parents? Maybe. Or maybe they simply didn’t feel the same pressures.

At some point in the last 40 or 50 years, the pressures of secularism (and perhaps the economy!) caught up to parents, and the thought of our children not having a Thing became intolerable. And so we stepped in.

From the second our children are born, our antennas are up, scanning for possible Things (does our baby Einstein seem smart? Maybe Athletic? Musically-inclined?). From the minute they turn three, we begin playing a little game I like to call “Thing Roulette.” It’s still early! So let’s spin the wheel and try all the different things to see what might hit. For boys, maybe we start with tee ball (how’s his hand-eye coordination?). For girls, perhaps it’s ballet. At age five, it’s often time to #pivot. It turns out Ollie’s hand-eye coordination is not great. And it turns out Ellie isn’t all that graceful on her toes. Sounds like it’s time for piano lessons. At around age five, with kindergarten imminent, it’s time to play a new game, this one called “School Seculosity.” What is the One Perfect School that is “right” for my child and will ensure they don’t end up at State College, or (gasp) no college at all? By age eight, it’s not fun and games anymore. Things start to get serious. It’s time to take our time eggs and money eggs and put them in one basket (“Johnny, can’t play soccer/football/basketball and baseball anymore. So what’s it going to be…”). By middle school, despair can set in (“we’ve tried everything; nothing is sticking.”), or jubilation (“we finally found it … viola”).

As our children enter high school, our garages (as Root says) become a Shrine to all the different Things we’ve tried over the years. Full of hockey sticks, instruments, and various cleats, our garages are where Things go to die, a chronicle of all our dead ends and wasted money. By the time our children are seniors, we might look back and ask: what happened? Or, as a friend told my wife the other day: “our son just got his first college football scholarship … but he just wants to go be a frat boy.”

In the end, the Pressure of Things is sort of like a flow chart: Our child better be athletic … And if they’re not, they better be smart … And if they’re not, they better be musical … And if they’re not, they better be pretty … Or else they are nothing.

To be clear, observing these pressures does not mean I am immune from them. To know them is to feel them, and to feel them is to be inevitably caught up in them. But two things — or two people — have helped.

The first is my son. When he was three, he was diagnosed with epilepsy and then autism. Overnight, it became evident that he would never play organized sports, never be admitted to the classical Christian school down the road, and his life would look vastly different than we had imagined or expected. Given the odds, he will likely never go to college (or at least not the “right” one), never live independently, and will struggle to find meaningful work. And yet, there are many graces to having an autistic child. One of the most profound is being released — overnight — from the pressure to find his or her Thing. From the time he was three, my wife and I were released from that most ubiquitous of parenting idols — control — and forced to proverbially give our child back to God.

But I am no saint. Immediately, I transferred pressure from my oldest son to my other two children. In fact, because he has special needs, the pressure on the other two feels even greater: because of what he is not, they better be “normal,” athletic, social, and so on. Christ have mercy.

The second person who has helped has been my dad. Recently, my family moved to Dallas, and I was tallying up all the different dorms, apartments, and houses I’d lived in since I left for college. The answer: 13. I asked my dad how many homes he’s lived in his whole life, and he said “four.” He has lived his whole life in Memphis, TN.

When I ask him about his life, it’s clear he never really had a “Thing.” He didn’t play any sports in high school, and he wasn’t in the band. He was really smart, though. He went to a Catholic high school and was admitted into Notre Dame — every Catholic boy’s dream, and his dream, too, until … wait for it … he didn’t go. He was dating my mom at the time, so he stayed in town and went to Memphis State (decidedly not Notre Dame). He graduated college in three years, and went on to be an accountant. Just like his Dad and just like his four other brothers.

My dad is a man without a Thing. And I am here to tell you that he is doing just fine. He just turned 70 years old, he is still married, he has four adult children who are all still in the Church, and all know that they are loved without condition.

Which, now that I think of it, is beginning to sound like another Man, “who had no beauty or majesty to attract him to us, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Jesus was a “talented and gifted” child, to be sure, known for hanging around the Temple and teaching the older scribes. As gifted and special as he was, he never had a Thing. He was no politician, philosopher, merchant, or celebrity. He resisted having a Thing, preferring to become nothing so that no one would ever need a Thing.