Right around the time when I was starting to get into the rhythm of the speaker’s talk, my 2 year old lost it. His brother, having stolen the black crayon, affected a wide-eyed innocent look that I scarcely had time to enjoy before I whisked the 2 year old out of the chapel. We walked around the building to cool off, playing our favorite game (Find Jesus in The Painting; it’s a classic!) The closing prayer delivered, the chapel clearing, I delivered the babe to nursery and went back to find my husband and 6 year old. They were still on the pew, engaged in a mutual emotional meltdown. Icy, red-eyed stares with a side order of growling, and the 6 year old in tears. I dismissed the child to Primary with a long hug and a few kind words.
“They can’t have coats anymore!” said my husband, as the pews around us emptied.
“What?”
“Our children can’t bring coats anymore!”
“Why is that?” I asked, eyebrows raising at the suggestion that my babies would be let out into our mid-winter tundra without coats.
“When you left, 6 year old started misbehaving! He kept putting his coat on me and bugging me with it! He would stop messing around! It was so annoying,” He quietly thundered.
“So…he wouldn’t stop touching you with his coat?”
“YES! It was so annoying!”
“You mean, you allowed him to annoy you with his coat?”
“They can’t have coats anymore!”
“OK. How about sometimes we hang them up before we go inside?”
“If we ever get here early enough to do that, I guess that would work. He’s just so disrespectful and disruptive!”
“He’s six.”
“I’ve had it with him and his attitude! He’s always forgetting to whisper!”
“OK,” I said passively, trying not to laugh.
“And they cannot sit next to each other! You have to sit between them!” They must be separated!”
“Mmmm,” I said, noncommittally, wondering how it became my job to wrestle alone with the babies during church while he sat quietly trying to enjoy the service. I resolved to let that one go.
“We ask a lot of our children,” my mom said a little later, “We ask them to be quiet for more than an hour in a confined space.” I nodded in agreement.
“Every week I’d ask you all to sit quietly for fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty” said my mom, “Sometimes you could do it, and sometimes I said maybe we’d just try for next week.”
I thought our family had been doing pretty well, to tell you the truth. Yes, I still have to take the 2 year old out, but perhaps only twice a month. It’s been more than a year since I was reduced to tears while trying to manage the rigmarole of Sacrament Meeting. A great deal of that confidence came from one of the general authority’s talks; the one where he comes across a young mother in the foyer trying to control her children, and his advice was to enjoy it because this stage went so quickly. So that’s what I resolved to do.
I have little children. I don’t even have a real baby-baby right now. We’re going to have meltdowns, we’re going to forget to whisper, someone’s crayon is going to get stolen, a coat will be rubbed on someone, an elbow will land on a rib, that cracker is going to bounce away, but I’m going to love it. I don’t usually get to listen to the talks anyway because someone needs a book to read, or a letter outlined. I already expect a lot out of my kids, but there are limits to their abilities. I’m OK with that. Someday I’ll be able to listen. I probably wouldn’t have liked the talks anyway, what with the invented doctrines and misinterpretations that sometimes saunter their way across the pulpit–it’s probably even better for my blood pressure that I don’t hear anything. Someday I’ll even be able to pick and pout over the noisy children next to me (although I hope I don’t.) And someday, I won’t have anyone to sit next to and I’ll long for an interruption of my worshipful monotony.
So shh, the children are still going to wear coats to church.
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