I’m doing my best, but I’m sure I’m letting you down

I realize it is the most basic white man thing to love, but there is something about a good podcast that I just cannot explain. If you listen to podcasts, we all have slightly different things that we enjoy about them. Some people really like a presentation of facts. They love to learn, and they want to cut through the filler, and get straight to the knowledge.

Aside from those who back into parking spaces, I cannot think of people that I am less like than these humans that just want to get facts. I will not judge them as we all enjoy different things, but my joy from a podcast comes from hearing conversations that I would never have on my own. Feeling like I am sitting at a table listening to interesting people talk about anything and everything, getting to the real meat of the chat after thirty minutes of shooting the breeze is the type of podcast that fills me up.

Cynically, this probably has a lot to do with not having a close circle of friends with whom to have these conversations in real life. In college, sitting around on mismatched furniture in a dirty living room, or gathered around a single shared appetizer at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, having long conversations vacillating between extremely poignant thoughts and quotes from Anchorman, were the moments that made college all worth it for me.

In the adult world, conversations like this truly are few and far between for me and probably many others. Podcasts fill this void and, like a good book, transport me to places I could never go on my own in my current state of life. In order to have a long late night chat with good friends, we all would have to miraculously (1) be in the same town and (2) all have free childcare at the same time allowing us to linger as long as we want without concern of running up the babysitter bill.

Because these circumstances are almost complete fantasy that cannot be achieved in this life, I hang out with my friends on podcasts.

I go through phases with podcasts in which I am obsessed with a particular show, then lose interest and move onto another one. Many times, I never return to the podcasts I have moved on from, but there are a few that I believe will be part of my life as long as they put out episodes. Recently, I picked back up “Dadville,” a podcast by musicians Dave Barnes and Jon McLaughlin.

Although music is often mentioned, the two interview a different (usually famous) dad each week. For the month of May, they are featuring moms, and the first in this series was with Amy Grant.

A Contemporary Christian Music icon who achieved crossover success in Top 40 pop, I have always been aware of her. My mom loved her growing up, and Amy’s Christmas albums truly are the soundtrack of my holiday memories. I was eager to hear more of her story, and glean some insight about parenting, and I was blown away.

There is a portion of the interview where they start talking about letting their kids down. I have been pondering this idea for a while now; no matter how hard I try, I cannot be enough for my children. One day, they will look back, and have multiple grievances with how I parented, and there is nothing I can do about that. Two things in this portion of the interview really stick out to me.

Jon mentioned that many of the things our kids will find lacking in us when they reach adulthood will be things we think we are doing really well. The example he gave was about jumping on the trampoline. Jon imagines his daughter one day saying, “You just never jumped on the trampoline with us.” To which Jon sees himself responding with an incredulous, “I was always on that trampoline!”

This struck me because I never thought about my kids feeling I failed in areas that I currently feel pretty good about. I am positive that they will remember me looking at my phone WAY too much. But to imagine that there are things I am working really hard at right now, and doing well, that they will still one day feel were areas that I failed is a difficult reality to handle.

Amy responds with a lot of great insight, but she gave an example of a parenting attitude her own mother displayed that shaped how she handled moments when her kids expressed frustration or disappointment with her.

“I’m doing my best, but I’m sure I’m letting you down.”

This one sentiment shared by Amy truly stopped me in my tracks. I think, for one, it is wild for most of us to imagine our parents saying something so vulnerable and emotionally intuitive to us as children, much less as adults. Expressing, honestly, that they truly were trying their best, while recognizing and accepting that their best was not good enough in some ways. Too often, when faced with criticism in any area of life, our gut reaction is to defensively express that we were trying our best, without recognizing that the other party was still let down, and has every right to be disappointed.

Secondly, I imagine my children reaching adulthood knowing this about me, and it is imperative for me to figure out how to communicate this truth to them. I think it’s rooted in an apologetic, but not self-abusing, mindset when we fail our kids.

Recently, I took my son to his gymnastics class and we are in a season where he needs to potty at the worst times. We beg him to try before leaving the house, and sometimes that helps. I made sure he tried before leaving the house, and not ten minutes into his lesson he had to poop, which requires my assistance. I was livid. I tried to communicate to him that this is why we really try to potty before we leave, and next time he needs to make sure that he is truly trying to use the potty before we go somewhere. I said I will never help him potty at gymnastics again and next time he is on his own, so he should make sure to go before leaving.

Fast forward to just one week later, we get done with gymnastics and he says he has to potty but he held it because he didn’t want me to get mad at him. Our children have ways of saying things so casually that somehow feel like a knife right to the heart. He was proud of holding it because I was so mad last time, and I felt like a total jerk that even though he had to potty, he spent the lesson thinking that if he went to the potty, I would be angry with him.

I apologized for how angry I was last time, and tried to communicate to him that when he needs to go to the bathroom, it’s important to go to avoid accidents. As a 5-year-old, he has yet to learn how to hold a grudge, so he moved on quickly, while I felt like crap for a good twenty-four hours about this parenting failure.

I was trying my best, but I let him down. Apologizing and recognizing when we let our kids down is a significant step toward healing any damage we might do, but it must also be coupled with a displayed willingness and track record of actually changing our behavior. By combining these two things, I believe my kids will one day truly understand that I did my best, and will be able to be gracious in areas where I failed. They will know that I recognized my shortcomings, and did my best to be a better dad.

It’s amazing how a podcast can place a brick in the parenting legacy you are seeking to build each day, but you truly never know where valuable insight will come from.