My four year-old daughter Julia is quite adept at manipulating her parents. Unfortunately for her, she hasn’t yet learned how to keep her methods secret.
At one recent dinnertime, I made the mistake of giving Julia something she was pitching a fit over (another roll, perhaps?) without making her stop her little tantrum and ask for it politely. I wasn’t trying to simply shut her up, since I would have given it to her if she had asked in a pleasant manner, but I should have taken the time to correct her behavior before complying with her request. As it was, she learned the wrong lesson: a few minutes later, she turned to my wife Kristen and said, “Mommy, guess what? I screamed and cried and then Daddy gave me another roll.”
Another trick that my daughters have learned is to ask the other parent when one parent doesn’t give permission to do something. Kristen and I try to present a united front to the kids, but sometimes it just doesn’t work, usually because I am unaware of what has transpired at home during the day. For example, Jaymie, my seven year-old daughter, might come up to me and ask for a piece of paper to draw on. This is a common request, and I usually give her one without thinking. However, it happens often enough that Kristen has told the girls not to draw until after dinner, or until after some task has been completed, but I am unaware of the restriction, so I unwittingly undermine my wife’s authority.
Since Kristen and I don’t communicate telepathically, these breakdowns occasionally occur, and when they do, our kids learn that instead of obeying their parents, they can sometimes get away with asking the other parent, and thus receive parental sanction for what would otherwise be a forbidden activity. This is not a lesson we want our kids to learn, and we work hard to avoid situations where they might receive mixed messages from us. Still, Kristen ends up playing the bad cop to my good cop sometimes, and I know my girls have noticed this.
As I reflected on the difficulties of acting in unison with my wife despite our best intentions, my thoughts turned to my relationship with my Heavenly Parents. I don’t generally worry myself with questions about my Heavenly Mother, but it occured to me that if I were to have petitionary access to Her via prayer, I might unintentionally learn the wrong lessons about prayer and my relationship with Deity, much like my own children sometimes do in their relationships with me and Kristen.
The problem would be a bit different, of course. Our problem as parents is that we do not know perfectly what our spouses are thinking and intending, so we sometimes err as parents. Our problem as children is that we do not always interpret signals from our Heavenly Parents correctly. Presumably, our Heavenly Parents are united in purpose and will. However, our own apprehension of that will is imperfect.
Suppose I prayed regularly to both my Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. I might address one more often than the other, say Heavenly Father. Perhaps some of my most heartfelt petitions would go seemingly unanswered for a time as They waited for me to work some solutions out for myself. In frustration or desperation I might turn to my Mother for additional assistance. Suppose I were to get what I felt to be an answer only after doing so, even though receiving that answer is in reality more or less independent of who I pray to. I might mistakenly conclude that my Heavenly Mother understands me better and is more loving and more willing to grant blessings, even though this is not the case at all. My feelings for Her might take on a different character from my feelings for my Heavenly Father. In an extreme case, I might reject Him altogether as an uncaring, unfeeling God. Others might have similar experiences. Who knows, we might even form our own church.
This may be a commonplace observation, and it certainly does not account for all, or even most of the reasons that we know so little of our Heavenly Mother (I don’t claim to know any of the reasons, mind you). It’s an interesting little thought experiment, nonetheless.