I Want To Give My Kids What I Barely Have

She asked you a word on Tuesday and you did not know it.

She is six. She asked in the completely open way six year olds ask things, expecting an answer the way she expects an answer about anything, and you said you would find out, and she said all right and went back to what she was doing.

And you stood in the kitchen feeling like a fraud.

Because here is what you have been doing for about eight months. You have been teaching your children a language that you are learning at the same time, roughly one week ahead of them, and some weeks not even that.

You are not a speaker. You are a woman with a list and two children who think you know things.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

That feels dishonest and it is not dishonest, and those are two different things that have been sitting on top of each other since about March.

It feels dishonest because you were raised to think a teacher is somebody who has the thing already. That is a reasonable picture and it comes from school, where the person at the front genuinely does know and the people in the chairs genuinely do not, and that gap is what makes the room work.

You have no gap. You have about six days.

So I am not going to tell you that learning alongside them is beautiful, even though it is, because that sentence is what people say to somebody who has asked a practical question and it will not survive Tuesday.

We will not hide them from their children

There is a line at the start of Psalm seventy eight about what a generation does with what it has.

We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done. (Psalm 78:4, King James Version)

We will not hide them from their children.

Now look at the shape of that commitment, because it is negative and that is not an accident. It is not we will teach them everything. It is not we will be sufficient. It is a promise to stop concealing, which is a completely different and much smaller undertaking.

You have been asked not to hide it rather than to have it all, and a refusal to conceal has never once been the same job as being a teacher. Psalm 78:4 makes the whole commitment a negative one, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a kitchen with a woman who did not know a word on Tuesday.

Now stay on the word shewing, because it is doing something specific.

Shewing is not the same as explaining. It is not lecturing and it is not instructing. It is pointing at a thing in front of both of you and saying look, which is an activity that requires the person shewing to be looking at it too.

A teacher stands beside the thing. Somebody shewing stands in front of it, facing the same way as the child.

You have been standing in the right position the whole time, and somebody looking at the same thing as a child has never once been the wrong person to be doing it. The Holy Spirit is the one with a woman about six days ahead of a six year old, and Psalm 78:4 asks for showing rather than for expertise.

And here is the third thing, which is about who the psalm says is doing this.

We will not hide them. It is a whole generation speaking, ordinary people, not a class of qualified persons. The psalm assigns the handing on to everybody who has anything, and it never once establishes a threshold anybody has to reach first.

You were never required to qualify for this, and a generation with a partial hold on something has never once been excused from passing it on. Psalm 78:4 puts the job on everybody rather than on a trained few, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman who feels like a fraud at her own counter.

Six days ahead is a real position

Here is the practical half, and it starts with what actually happened on Tuesday.

You said you would find out. Stop there, because that was the whole lesson and it has been filed as a failure.

Your daughter watched her mother be asked a question she could not answer, say so plainly without embarrassment, and undertake to go and get the answer. That is a complete demonstration of how a person learns anything, and she got it for free, in a kitchen, from somebody she trusts.

A woman who knew every word would never have been able to show her that.

You have handed her something on Tuesday that fluency cannot buy, and not knowing out loud has never once taught a child less than knowing. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman who felt like a fraud after doing the most useful thing available, and Psalm 78:4 promises not to hide rather than promising to be enough.

Now here is the thing about being six days ahead, which is better than you think.

You remember what was hard. That is the enormous advantage and it goes away permanently once somebody becomes fluent. You know which word confused you last Thursday, and why, and what finally made it stick, and all of that is still fresh enough to hand over.

Fluent people cannot do this. They have forgotten the difficulty and they teach the thing as though it were obvious, which is why most of them are hard to learn from.

You have the difficulty still fresh in you, and a teacher who remembers last Thursday has never once been the weaker one to sit beside. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman close enough to the hard part to hand it over, and Psalm 78:4 asks a whole generation only not to hide what it holds.

You have an advantage that disappears the moment it stops being difficult, and being one week ahead has never once been a worse place to teach from than ten years. Psalm 78:4 asks for showing, which is done facing the same direction as the child, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman who still remembers last Thursday.

And here is the thing about the children themselves, said plainly.

They are not evaluating you. Six year olds do not have a category for a parent being under qualified. What she registers is that words in that language exist in her house and her mother uses them, and that is the entire mechanism by which a language survives a generation.

The words do not have to arrive perfectly. They have to arrive at all.

You are the reason those words exist in that house, and a word arriving imperfectly has never once been the same as a word not arriving. The Spirit of God is the one who has kept a language alive in a kitchen through a woman with a list, and the written word commits a generation only to not hiding what it has.

One word, from somebody who has more

So here is the assignment, and it puts somebody else in the room with you.

Learn one word your family would have used and say it to somebody in the family.

Go and get one from an older relative. Not from the list. From a person, specifically the one who has more of it than you do, and ask for a word your family actually used rather than the standard one.

Then bring it home and give it to your daughter that evening.

You have somebody older who holds more than the book does, and a word carried from an old mouth to a young one has never once been a small piece of work. Psalm 78:4 has a generation shewing to the generation to come, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman carrying one word from an aunt to a six year old.

And here is what to do next time she asks something you do not know, because she will ask again this week.

Say you do not know, and then say let us find out, and then actually find out with her in the room. Let her watch the finding.

That is the shewing. Not the answer, the looking. And a child who watches her mother go and get a word will go and get words for the rest of her life, which is worth more than a parent who always had them. Then stop, because one word is the assignment and nobody owes a six year old a lesson plan.

You have permission to say you do not know and look it up in front of her, and a mother finding out with a child watching has never once been a worse teacher than one who already knew. The Spirit of God is the one in the kitchen when a woman says let us find out, and Psalm 78:4 commits a whole generation to not hiding rather than to being sufficient.