My Son Is Learning And I Cannot Answer Him

Rosalie's boy is seventeen and has his permit, and he has started asking her things.

That began in June and it has been going on ever since, and here is what it has looked like from the driver's seat and from the passenger seat, which are two different places.

From the driver's seat: a boy who is genuinely interested, who has never in his life had a reason to think his mother did not know things, and who asks in the completely open way a seventeen year old asks when it has not occurred to him that a question might land anywhere.

From the passenger seat: a woman doing arithmetic at speed.

Because when he says, "Mom, what's that light mean?" or "Do we need to do anything about the tires or does the place do that?" or "How do you know when it needs oil?", Rosalie has about a second and a half to produce something.

And what she has been producing, for four months, is a small family of answers that are technically not lies. That's a service thing. They check that when it goes in. Your grandpa always said you can tell. None of them are false. None of them are answers.

And here is what she knows and has not said out loud to anybody.

He is going to run out of questions.

Not because he stops wondering. Because a boy who asks four times and gets a certain shape of answer four times learns something about which questions are available in this car, and he stops asking those and asks other ones instead.

That is what happened to her. She is fifty one and there is a whole category of thing she never asks anybody, and she could take you to the kitchen where she learned not to.

The moment that got her was in August. He asked something, and she gave him one of the answers, and he said, "Oh, okay," in a particular way.

And she recognized the sound. She has made that sound herself.

The teaching in the verse is not a lesson

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess at what any of his questions were about, because I have not seen that car and it would help nobody. And I am not going to tell a woman of fifty one what she ought to have learned by now, because that is a stone and I do not carry those.

What I want to look at is a verse that people quote about raising children and almost always picture wrong.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:7

Most people hear "teach them diligently" and picture a lesson. A parent who knows a thing, sitting a child down, and delivering it.

But then read the rest of the verse, because the rest of the verse is where it actually lives. Sitting in the house. Walking by the way. Lying down. Rising up.

Not one of those is a lesson. Every single one of them is ordinary life happening while a parent and a child are both inside it.

That is not a description of a parent transmitting information. It is a description of a parent and a child going along together and the truth getting talked about as they go.

Which means the qualification for the job is not knowing. It is being there.

You are not disqualified from teaching your son by not knowing something, and Scripture puts the teaching in the walking rather than in the knowing. It is written to talk of them when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way, which locates it in shared ordinary movement rather than at a desk, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine relief in a passenger seat.

You have been teaching him for seventeen years without a syllabus, and the passage never once required a parent to have the answers first. Deuteronomy 6 describes life lived alongside rather than instruction delivered, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an old law about walking into a Tuesday afternoon on a back road.

What he is actually learning in that car

Here is the part I most want to hand you, because it changes what is at stake.

He is not learning about cars. He is going to learn about cars from somebody eventually and it will take him a weekend.

What he is learning in that passenger seat, right now, four months in, is what a person does when they do not know something.

And he is learning it from the most influential source available to him, which is watching his mother do it, in real time, under mild pressure, with no time to prepare.

That is the actual curriculum. It has been running since June.

And the thing that makes this hopeful rather than heavy is that the curriculum can change in one sentence. Not four months of sentences. One.

The next time he asks, if he hears I do not know that. Let us find out, he learns something that will still be operating when he is forty.

You have permission to not know in front of your own son, and no verse anywhere makes a parent's authority rest on having the answer. Deuteronomy 6 puts the teaching in the going along together, which requires presence rather than expertise, and the Spirit of God is what makes four honest words the strongest thing available in that car.

And I want to say the tender part, because it is the reason the small answers exist.

This was never about protecting your competence. It has been about protecting his picture of you. Because a boy of seventeen who is about to go out into the world holds a picture of his mother as somebody who has things in hand, and everything in you says do not take that away from him this year of all years.

But listen. That is not what gets taken away. The picture does not run on facts about tires. It runs on whether the woman in the passenger seat is somebody he can trust to tell him the truth.

You were never holding that picture up by knowing things, and Scripture puts the standing of a parent in who they are rather than in what they can answer. It is written that her children arise up and call her blessed, which is Proverbs 31 giving the verdict to a household rather than to a body of knowledge, and His Spirit is what makes that verdict steadier than any answer she could have given in August.