My wife and 7-year old daughter are sitting at the kitchen table right now reviewing worksheets that my daughter brought home from 2nd grade today. My daughter loves school. Part of the reason for it may be that it seems to come pretty easy to her. I don’t say that to brag, like she’s Will Hunting kind of smart. I also don’t mean to say that she doesn’t work really hard. She does. But she really loves learning and exploring and discovering. She’ll sit in her bed at night and just write about whatever. In the middle of July she happily does math sheets. All this to say, school is not hard for her, which means it’s not hard for us either. Except on Monday nights when she brings home her work from the previous week and my wife, a 4th grade school teacher, gets to asking her a few questions about why she didn’t capitalize the P in Pennsylvania, or why when the question says to give two facts about deserts, she gives only one followed by an op-ed piece about deserts. Lately, this exercise in detail always results in my daughter bursting out into some kind of hysterical crying that is followed by ridiculous comments. A couple minutes ago I heard her say (while panting!) to my wife, “Why are you mad at me? I had a sub last Tuesday! She didn’t give us very good instructions!” To which my wife of course said, “Honey, no one is mad at you. I just asked you to correct this sentence so you’ll know how to get it right the next time.” But I can tell my wife’s cool calmness isn’t working as hoped for. My daughter is ramped up a particular level of adolescent ecstasy tonight. Right now she is asking to have a minute to herself in her bedroom, to “gather my emotions,” she just told my wife. “No, sit down and stop crying about this. You don’t need to go to your room.” This will go on for another 5 minutes at least. My wife telling her to simply fix her p; my daughter telling her mother she doesn’t know why she’s mad at her and she needs to be alone; my wife telling her she’s overreacting, she’s not leaving the kitchen, it’s just a p. I could walk out there from my spot here in the bedroom and tell them both that I think they need a break from one another, but that seems neither wise nor helpful.
I don’t know but I think what’s going down in my kitchen right now is the stuff covenants are made of. As young as my daughter is and as old as my wife is, they both know that neither of them gets to decide on their own how this is going to end. This isn’t a contract. They didn’t agree on anything before it all started. They got into it by virtue of one being the mother and the other, well, being her mother’s daughter. On the one hand, my wife has experience enough to know that second grade worksheets aren’t going to do any permanent damage to their relationship. My wife has already decided that no matter how much my daughter cries and says she wants to walk away, my wife is never going to walk away from her. What my daughter doesn’t know of course is that this unrelenting love is her saving grace. My wife isn’t feeling personally injured by any of this. And yet my wife is feeling deeply pained for my daughter and what she doesn’t know how to let go of. There is an absolute autonomy that can only be reconciled by an absolute mutuality—an agreement that even though they don’t know how to work this out, and even though they don’t actually know what it is that they are trying to work out, they will work it out, because their relationship not only depends upon them doing so, their relationship is defined by them doing so.
It’s too early still to tell how it will end but like all covenants its ending will simply be its beginning again. Like going to church in search of answers and someone offers to show you to the nursery where the children are sitting on the floor happily passing Cheerios and making sure everyone has just 5. Who convinced them that 5 is enough? Such is the wonder of sacrament. Tonight it may be a warm bath or a shared plate of cookies. 
Hugs, that holiest of incarnations where parent and child get close enough to touch each other’s skin and wounds, will also be passed around. And surely they will ordain one another all over again. They will issue statements about how special and blessed the other person is. They will say, you have a gift, you are a gift, you are my gift. And finally, my daughter will no doubt fall asleep in bed next to her mother tonight. She’ll stay there until I pick her up and move her into her own bed, from which she’ll get up tomorrow morning, happy to eat breakfast at the same table where her mother loved her the night before.
PleaseGrace 