What She Tells The Children

She asked in the car, at the lights, the way she asks about the weather.

Why do we see Nana on the Sunday and not the other one.

And there was about a second and a half, which is how long you get, and what came out was: grown ups are complicated sometimes, love.

Which is not untrue and is not an answer.

She has been doing this for three years.

Every time, a slightly different version. Sometimes it is that people got upset. Sometimes it is that families are like that. Once, on a bad evening, it was something close enough to the truth that she lay awake afterwards worrying about what she had put into a seven year old.

She has never once said the same thing twice, and the children have started, she thinks, to notice the swerve rather than the content.

Here is the rule she has set for herself, and she has never broken it, and she is proud of that.

Not one word against anybody. Not a hint, not a tone, not a raised eyebrow.

They are going to make up their own minds when they are grown, with their own information, and whatever she puts in their heads now they will carry for fifty years, and she is not going to be the reason a child thinks something about somebody who loves them.

And so she improvises, at traffic lights, at forty miles an hour, three years running, and every version is either not quite true or not quite kind, and she has never found one that is both.

If you have been building that sentence in the car, sit down and have a pancake. Nobody at this table is going to ask you anything.

The proverb that puts covering on love's side

There is a proverb about what to do with a matter, and where it files the covering is the useful part.

He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends.Proverbs 17:9

Covering is on love's side of that sentence.

That is worth sitting with, because most people carry an instinct that says covering is the same as hiding, and hiding is the same as lying. The proverb does not agree. It puts covering with seeking love, and it puts repeating with separating friends.

And notice what is being covered. A transgression, which means something real did happen. The proverb is not about pretending nothing occurred. It is about what you do with the details afterwards, and specifically about whether you circulate them.

You are covering rather than concealing, and Scripture puts that on the loving side of the ledger. Proverbs 17:9 sets covering a transgression beside seeking love and repeating a matter beside separating friends, and it is the Holy Spirit who arranged the sentence in exactly that order, which means three years of refusing to say a word against anybody has been the verse being kept and not a truth being withheld.

Why every version has failed

Now the improvising, because there is a reason it keeps not working and it is a solvable reason.

Every version has been an explanation.

That is the trouble. An explanation of a family split has to contain either the reasons, which you will not give, or a substitute for the reasons, which is why it comes out either untrue or unkind.

A child does not actually need an explanation. A child needs a fact and a reassurance, and those are two short sentences, and neither of them requires anybody to be at fault.

You are able to give a fact without giving an account, and no child has ever needed the reasons in order to be settled. Deuteronomy 6:7 says talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and it pictures ordinary conversation across a life rather than one complete explanation, and it is the same Spirit who brings a word back to a young mind years later, which means what those two need from you is a sentence they can grow into rather than one that answers everything now.

What she is actually protecting

Here is what the three years have actually been, and it should be said, because nobody has said it to her.

She is protecting two children's ability to love people she is not currently able to be in a room with.

That is an extraordinary thing to do. It costs her every single time, and she gets no credit for it from anybody, and the people she is protecting do not know she is doing it.

You have been guarding somebody else's place in your children's affections at your own expense, and heaven has that written down. 1 Corinthians 13:5 says charity thinketh no evil, and it is written of a love that refuses to keep the account rather than of one that has no grounds to, and it is the same Spirit who works that love in a person, which means the rule you set yourself three years ago came from somewhere higher than good manners.