It occurred to me this morning my cruciform take on parenting did not come out of nowhere. My father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer until the time came for him to take another posting overseas. Though, with his decades of experience and having last served as a consul, I’m sure he would have moved up the ranks, he chose to take early retirement. This was because he was up for what is called a “hardship post,” that is, service in a country neither entirely stable nor safe for U.S. citizens. He didn’t want to expose my younger sisters, still in the home, to danger, nor did he like the other option of sending them to boarding schools and breaking up the family prematurely. For the sake of his family, he gave up his career, and, incidentally, never brought up this fact to me or my sisters. I’m not sure he even gave the choice much thought.
While we’re at it, the fact we had a family in the first place was because my mother accepted being forced to resign her own commission as a Foreign Service officer to marry my father. What I learned from my parents’ example, then, was that one’s family and (potential!) children are far more important than oneself or one’s own ambitions. My sisters and I are not my parents’ legacy: they gave up their legacies and achievements that we might have and mark out lives of our own.
And in the wonderful irony of the Cross, their legacy is that I find myself setting aside whatever I might have accomplished during these years: time which could have been spent finishing this essay and writing more was spent with my son’s Cub Scout den. I do this so my children, my natural-born, foster, and perhaps adopted children, can have a father dedicated to them and they can take that fact entirely for granted.
We must decrease that they might increase.
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