Every week on Tuesday, the doorbell rings at exactly 5 p.m. Standing on our porch is the piano teacher—and depending on the day, she appears wicked witch or best friend, her invisible costume entirely dependent upon one factor: if we are prepared.

This week on Tuesday, at exactly 4:30 p.m., my oldest was in hysterics and the tears slid out of her puffy eyes, and her breathing was hiccupped and her nose was leaky because of one simple thing: she didn’t practice.

At all.

I hugged her. I tried to help her stop crying. I squeezed onto the piano bench next to her and we ran through her scales together. Which was nearly impossible with all those tears, and yet we persisted.  I promised her that her teacher wouldn’t be mad, that she wouldn’t be mean, that nothing dire would come from the impending thirty minutes of doom—but she didn’t believe me and dissolved again into traumatic wails and at that point: there were no more scales.

By the time her teacher arrived, my daughter had composed herself enough to open the door, to walk towards the piano. But she plead with me quietly in her heavy-lidded gaze:

“Please tell my teacher for me.”

I paused.

Do I tell?

Do I let my daughter tell the teacher herself? Do I let her deal with the consequences of what happens when you don’t practice, not-a-once?

*   *   *

One year, in the fall, when I just had one baby (and she was still a baby), and I looked to my older neighbors with eight-year-olds and toddlers and multiple children as mentors and compatriots, I had an evening exchange over a pile of yellow leaves on the sidewalk.

My neighbor told me how she’d been to her son’s school that day and that as she was walking out, she saw her son being bullied, pushed, yelled at.

“What did you DO?!” I gasped.

“What could I do?” She asked, composed, but her eyes were wet.

“Um. You could go smack that kid that hurt your son?”

And everyone around me, every mother years hence on her mothering journey, told me as they shook their heads sadly: “No she couldn’t.”

But why?

*   *   *

On a fast Sunday it was hot outside under sweltering sun but the building was already full and bright at nine in the morning, the air conditioning the reason one sister hugged a cardigan around her shoulders even as she cried at the pulpit.

She relayed the trial of a middle son. There was a phone call in the middle of the night—sobbing, prayers, pleading to get better on one half, pleading to come home on the other. There was a mission call waiting, there was a bed vacant at the MTC; there was a mother with a heart to mend even while her hands were tied by her faith.

“More that anything I wanted to tell him to just come home, I wanted to hold him in my arms…” And here her voice cracked: “But I can’t.”

*   *   *

We all have to suffer. Suffering is one of those bittersweet complexities intrinsic to life, and eventually, the icy finger that touches us will touch the fleshy, soft youth of our children. I remember reading somewhere that having kids is like having your heart walk around outside your body—and if this be the case, then the suffering of our children will be suffering we have to endure too. Maybe more so.

How pained do you think the Father was to watch His Only Begotten nailed to a cross? How difficult for the mother who watches her children waste away in sickness? For the grandmother who watches her child suffer that same loss?

There are trials we can’t anticipate and certainly ones that we wish we could take away but can’t. And in these both parent and child seek the Lord through faith and prayer—knowing but perhaps not remembering how the Lord will always bless them.

But what about the other things?

One time seventy, Elder Alexander B. Morrison said, “I believe our spiritual strength is directly related to the extent to which our souls are stretched.” And Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin adds: “Sometimes the very moments that seem to overcome us with suffering are those that will ultimately suffer us to overcome.”

Heaven knows I don’t want to deny my kids this growth. But I find the instinct to protect them and make things okay a temptation more persistent than I can oft’ bear and so I do tell the piano teacher (and I’ve told the coach and the teacher and the principal, for I’m reigning queen of the disclaimer and this has found its way into the lives of my offspring). Moreover, I probably would have gone to defend the honor of my child on the playground.

(And totally embarrassed him in the process.)

For God, there is a seemingly divine selection in His intervention: He knows what will be for our good, He knows when to jump in or stay His hand. His love is perfect; His discernment ennobled by knowing the beginning and the end. As a girl just attempting to get through today, to make sure I don’t muck my kids up too much from who they’re supposed to become, I wonder over this balance.

How do we balance loving them (fixing it) with loving them (allowing a bit of suffering to occur)? And how do we balance interceding with allowing them to endure trails come about possibly by their own accord? Especially if we know it might be for their own good?


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