by Sarah Palin
For others who may be going through challenging times, you may feel like I did when a friend thought it helpful to share the Palin dirt she’d read from anonymous bloggers on the Internet one day. She cheerily encouraged me to “hang in there though . . . surely your reward is in heaven!” I looked at her like she was an idiot, grinning through clenched teeth as I assured her we’d definitely “hang in there.” But at that particular moment, I thought, I’d rather God keep the reward that may await in the hereafter. I’d rather have peace on earth for my daughter than an extra ruby in my crown.
As a matter of fact, if you discount the screaming headlines and lurid magazine covers, ours has been a typical American family story. It may not be because of an unplanned pregnancy that grows on a national stage under a scorching spotlight, but everyone ends up in a foxhole once in a while. It may be a battle for your health, your marriage, your business, your community, or your country, but we all have our battles to fight. And if you’re lucky enough to have found a temporary hilltop upon which to avoid the bloody engagement for a bit, then your duty is to assist and defend someone who’s still caught up in the war. I’m blessed to have a wonderful family with me on my hilltop. They’re my best line of defense as well as my motivation to keep fighting. Otherwise, what’s the point?
It’s a funny thing about being a parent: having a baby is a life-changing event for the couple going through it, but a pretty ho-hum thing for the rest of the world. Your little miracle is just another screaming infant to just about everyone else. The comic geniuses at The Onion captured this paradox hilariously with the faux news article: “Miracle of Birth Occurs for 83 Billionth Time.”
HOPE SPRINGS, AR—The holy and sacrosanct miracle of birth, long revered by human civilization as the most mysterious and magical of all phenomena, took place for what experts are estimating “must be at least the 83 billionth time” Tuesday with the successful delivery of eight-pound, four-ounce baby boy Darryl Brandon Severson at Holy Mary Mother Of God Hospital.
The milestone was achieved by Carla Severson, 32, an unemployed cosmetology-school graduate and homemaker, and her husband of 14 years, Dwayne Severson, also 32, a former screen-door factory worker and freelance lawncare contractor . . .
The miraculous birth is the couple’s fifth.
I love that—“the miraculous birth is the couple’s fifth.” But the truth is, every baby is a miracle, whether he or she is “planned,” and whether he or she is “wanted.” Every baby isn’t easy; quite the opposite is true. And everyone who has a baby isn’t necessarily ready to be a parent. But every child is a gift of life that is capable, if we let her, of working miracles on us.
I don’t make a practice of quoting myself, but I’m making an exception here because I think this is true of most Americans. In my memoir, Going Rogue, I wrote, “On April 20, 1989, my life truly began. I became a mom.”
April 20, 1989, was the day I had my first child, Track, and I truly believe my life began that day. It was the day I began to really realize that it’s not about me. Sometimes this realization only comes to you later, after parenthood has made you a completely different person than you were when you began. That day, I began the process of becoming a better person. I became more vulnerable, because loving someone makes you vulnerable. But my heart grew; and I became more open than I had ever been before to the pain and the joy of loving another human being so intensely.
In his heartachingly beautiful book about losing a child and finally finding peace in his family, Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief recounts a conversation between his wife and his four sons one night at the dinner table. The back-and-forth between the little boys and their wise mother shows how a mom’s (and dad’s) heart can expand to accommodate all the miracles God gives them:
“Mom,” Eli asks Celeste at dinner one evening, “who do you love the best?”
“I love all of you the same.”
“But which one the best?” chimes in Isaac.
Celeste laughs. “You are my best Isaac, and Eli is my best Eli, and Caleb is—”
“No,” says Eli, the logician in the family. “You can’t love us all the same. Who do you love best?”
Perhaps a better husband would intervene at this point in an effort to help his wife extract herself from a jam, but I’m curious to see how she’s going to wiggle her way out of this one. I certainly don’t know how to explain to them how it’s possible to love each of them fiercely, yet for different things. I don’t know what Celeste is about to say, but I hope she can explain it to me, too.
“My heart,” she tells them, “is a house filled with rooms. And each of you has a room all to himself.”
Each boy smiles, perhaps considering what his room in Mom’s heart must look like. Maybe they imagine rooms full of toys, a comfy bed, all their stuffed animals. What a little boy can’t know, until he has children of his own, is that his room cradles every giggle, every sigh, every squawk, all those skinned knees and scuffed shoes, each dream carelessly or cautiously shared, all the hopes we have for them, every prayer we’ve whispered over them in their sleep. The rooms of our hearts are full with everything that is them, and when we think back to the days before we had them, we realize how much smaller our hearts were back then.
For Tony Woodlief, home is a holy place, a place “that makes us better than we could ever be alone. . . . It is in our homes where we . . . make children and try to raise them, where—if we are blessed—we one day are allowed to die. If God is not in such a place, in the muck of our daily existence, in our beginnings and endings, then he is nowhere.”
Tony is touching on something very profound. Having a family—having a home—is at the same time ordinary and sacred; it’s as messy as dirty diapers and as sanctified as holy water. And it’s by slogging through all the mundane things of family life—the spilled grape juice, the adolescent rages, and the interminable games of hide and seek—that we truly give of ourselves and become the people we were meant to be.
More important, it turns out that it’s the quantity of time we spend—not the quality—that is best for our kids. Busy parents like to comfort themselves that they can make up for not being there by occasional bursts of special activities. But you can’t just plan on being a good parent; you have to earn it. Journalist and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes put it well:
Forget quality time. You can’t plan magic moments or bonding with epiphanies in dealing with kids. What matters is quantity time. Judging from my own experience—four kids—children crave prolonged attention, preferably undivided. They want whole days and nights of it. . . . Woody Allen may be a lousy father, but his rule for life applies to being a father. Yep, 90 percent of fatherhood is just showing up.
For those of us lucky enough to be parents, there is no greater proof of the existence of God than to look into the face of your new baby. You are filled with the overwhelming sense that you couldn’t have created this beautiful, perfect thing. Something more powerful and more loving is at work here. This child is proof of His power and His love.
In the end, this is the greatest gift of family: putting the big things, and the little things, into their proper perspective. Family makes us understand that the greatest things in life aren’t our doing, that they’re not tidy or predictable. It humbles us in this understanding at the same time that it astounds us with a love that makes all the messiness and unpredictability only add to the exciting challenge that is family.
I remember a brilliant pro-life educational campaign from the 1990s that made this point very well. It was a commercial that showed smiling, laughing children, with a voice-over that said, “All these children have something in common. All of them were unplanned pregnancies that could have ended in abortion. But their parents toughed it out and discovered that sometimes the best things in life aren’t planned.” And it ended with the simple message: “Life: What a beautiful choice.”
There was no call for legal action and no guilt ascribed—just a simple message affirming life and reminding Americans that being open to life and family is beautiful; that it creates something beautiful that can enrich their lives in ways they never dreamed possible.
I think that’s one of the tragedies with our leadership in Washington today. It claims to be about progress and making our lives better. But by asserting more and more government control over us, it actually disrespects our humanity. So many voices in our politics today are trying to convince us that, with enough of the taxpayers’ money and enough bureaucratic control, we can correct all that is wrong with humanity and, as the president so immodestly put it, stop “the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.” But this is politics posing as religion. And the great thing about family is that it has a way of cutting through all this. It’s the love we have for a child that has the potential, more than anything else, to expose all the utopian promises of men for the lies that they are.
I thought about this when I heard President Obama mention what his eleven-year-old daughter, Malia, said to him one morning during the Gulf oil spill. He was shaving when Malia popped her head into the room and asked innocently, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”
Who among us hasn’t had the experience of a simple question from an innocent child bringing our ego crashing back to earth? Of course Malia’s daddy hadn’t “plugged the hole”—because doing so was beyond his capability, even as the most powerful man in the world. The faith of a daughter in her father’s ability to work wonders—from protecting her from things that go bump in the night to fixing a broken bicycle chain—is a part of family life to be cherished and preserved for as long as we possibly can. But as Americans, Malia’s sweet question should also remind us that we’re not children, and President Obama is not our father. Government can’t work wonders—sometimes it can’t do anything at all—and it shouldn’t (unlike real fathers) even try.
By reminding us that we are fallible and fallen, families show us in concrete, everyday terms that which is not. I picked up the book Witness again for the first time in a long time. It is the first-person account of an American, Whittaker Chambers, who was a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Chambers eventually renounced communism and turned in his fellow spy, high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss sued Chambers for libel, and the trial that ensued captured the world’s attention.
The Hiss-Chambers case as told in Witness is a genuinely intriguing cold war spy story. But more important to me is the story of redemption in Witness, and the role family plays in it. For Chambers, communism was once his religion. Witness tells the story of his path away from communism and toward God—and the high price he paid for traveling it. The book opens with a beautiful letter from Chambers to his children. In it, he describes the critical moment he began to break with communism:
I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss’s apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind, but I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
That’s a wonderful way to put it: Our families lay the finger of God on our foreheads. They bring us closer to our Creator, but they also bring us closer to our communities and the wider world. Understanding parenthood brings you out of yourself, not just spiritually but socially as well; it takes you beyond an often isolated, self-focused world and into the wider community. When you’re a parent, a stepparent, or any caretaker of a young life, you have an investment in the world—a child—and you want to make sure that the world is a safe, welcoming, and prosperous place for her.
Unlike about the nature of our freedom and what constitutes good government, America’s Founders didn’t write much about family. You won’t find any mention of family or marriage in the Constitution. Part of the reason should be obvious: family simply wasn’t on the agenda in Philadelphia in 1787. The Founders had gathered to establish a form of government that would honor the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ensure the preservation of the union, not delve into the private lives of Americans.
But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures. I came across a wonderful book written just a few years after independence, in 1782, by an emigrant Frenchman turned American farmer with the impressive name of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. The book is a series of letters from Crèvecoeur to a friend in England attempting to answer the question “What, then, is the American, this new man?” In addition to amazing insights about the new world and its inhabitants, Crèvecoeur’s letters are full of truths that all husbands and fathers would recognize, such as the peace and joy that wives (!) and children bring. This passage, in particular, spoke to me:
At home my happiness springs from very different objects; the gradual unfolding of my children’s reason, the study of their dawning tempers attract all my paternal attention. I have to contrive little punishments for their little faults, small encouragements for their good actions, and a variety of other expedients dictated by various occasions.
What father today—or what mother, for that matter—doesn’t recognize the subtle art of guiding and teaching children? The wonderful thing about America is that our Founders didn’t set out to intervene in these intimate details of Americans’ lives. They understood that this was—and should be—beyond the proper scope of government.
The Founders simply took it for granted that a republic relies on informed and virtuous citizens, and that informed and virtuous citizens are created in turn by strong families. Some think this view is no longer relevant today because the men who held it were old white guys who don’t represent the diverse country America has become. And it’s true that the famous Founders were white and male. One important exception to the largely male, largely white perspective of the Founders was that of Abigail Adams, the wife of America’s second president, John Adams. The wonderful letters between Abigail and John, I’ve found, offer the best insights into the role the family was meant to play in the new republic.
During the 2008 vice-presidential campaign I was sent a book of these letters. And the more I read about Abigail, the more she became a hero to me. She had a brilliant, insightful mind that, like so many female minds, played a powerful if indirect role in shaping America. She endured long separations from John, which forced her to run the family farm and raise four children alone. But busy as she was, she took the time to encourage John, who was off at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, to promote independence for women. “Remember the ladies,” she admonished her husband:
Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of Eminence. . . . Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit Instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equal the most Heroick of yours.
You go, girl. Abigail and John also exchanged many letters about the upbringing of their children. These letters echo
in the most intimate way the Founders’ understanding of the importance of the family in America. “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families,” John Adams wrote. This was critical because, as he later wrote to a friend, “public virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public interest, Honor, Power and Glory, established in the Mind of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.” John and Abigail Adams agreed that raising small-r republicans meant raising good and decent children. As John wrote to Abigail:
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
The Adamses must have heeded their own advice. Their son John Quincy Adams went on to become the sixth president of the United States.
Still, the Adamses’ wonderful insights on family life were the exception for the time. It sounds strange to us today, given how preoccupied we can be with the problems the family faces, that the men who laid the foundation of our republic said so little about the institution of the family. But this fact is itself a tribute to the system of government they created. The Founders took it for granted that strong families instilled in children the habits and disciplines necessary for those children to govern themselves in adulthood. Being a part of a family teaches us to trust and respect others, to put their needs before our own, and to avoid shortsighted decisions by planning for the future.