Defining the experience of familial intimacy is challenging because it is intangible. The clumsy term we have as a stand-in is “quality time.” Career-driven mothers often triumphantly assuage their guilt with the fact that according to studies stay-at-home mothers quantitatively spend few hours of “quality time” with their children. The argument goes that you can pack the evenings and weekends with quality time and its as good if not better than staying home with the brats.
Mothers of all occupations and none are capable of failing to form a deep relationship with their children. Certainly, many mothers who care for their own children full-time do not connect deeply with those children, but what does it mean to experience “quality time”? True connection is something more than simply going through the motions of a shared activity. That is the fertile ground for the connection of souls, but it does not always follow.
Studying the people who struggle to make connections perhaps can tell us something about the experience of connection more generally. Observing and participating in the Son-Rise Program for Autism is an immersive experience in forming connection. Severely, often non-verbal autistic children are put in a safe and calming environment in their own home. Calm and focused parents, teachers, and volunteers enter the space one by one for an extended period of time. Their purpose is simply to follow the lead of the child. Whatever activity the child engages in, whether banging the wall, lying on the floor humming, or stacking Legos, the adult picks up the activity and participates alongside the child.
After hours of dull imitation there comes an electrifying moment when the child makes eye contact, interacts, forms a connection with the person who has shown love and care by doing what the child found interesting or soothing. This energizing, vital connection is the whole point of our limp term “quality time.” We’re not doing puzzles and reading dull books (well, really, you shouldn’t be reading any dull books) simply to check those items off the list but instead to use those moments of shared activity as a launch point for the intermingling of our being with another, the sharing in the full presence of another person to the extent that we in our fallible bodies are capable.
This is the reason that power-packing “quality time” (whether done by the career woman or the housewife) misses the point. Deep relationship grows not in planned activities executed well but often in the ebb and flow of daily living, the shared living that happens organically in the leisure hours of life or even the mild drudgery of washing dishes and being bored.
Mothers would do well to notice that fleeting, hard-to-describe experience of connection. Where and how can she draw out her child and invite him into a loving experience of presence. There is no doubt that the effects of not having such a relationship can be felt and sometimes observed for a lifetime. On the other hand, the experience of connection with a mother can set an excellent life course.
In St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he remarks on the strength of a mother and grandmother’s faith, writing, “Calling to mind that faith which is in thee unfeigned, which also dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and in thy mother Eunice, and I am certain that in thee also” (2 Timothy 1:5). Here is where a mother’s heart can bring generations to faith and transmit life, not merely the bodily life of earthly birth but the beginning of eternal life.
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