Tag: wonder

Lessons Learned Late

New parents rapidly and inevitably learn that children – much less babies – do not come with instruction manuals.

New parents try to sort out daily childrearing based on a phantasmagoric blend of memory, history, personal experience, advice from anywhere, parenting books, doctors, their own parents.

Their own common sense.

New parents’ instincts are informed by a years long steeped soup of knowledge gathered since childhood that they bring to the task.

Depending on the novice parents’ own degree of personal healing and maturity, the baby benefits. Or it doesn’t.

After the birth of my first child, the initial shock settled in that the irresponsible hospital professionals were actually going to release this vulnerable infant into our care.

The initial shocks and semi-settling in with baby hardly foreshadowed the barrage of oncoming shocks and changes that would erupt in our lives.

That vulnerable infant and his sister who followed shape med and my parenting in ways large and small. They still do.

I was only half-healed when my son arrived. Maybe not even that. My son’s arrival ushered in a whole raft of new traumas and attendant insights connected to my upbringing that were utterly unanticipated. I was living with one foot in the present and the other one firmly planted in the past.

For most of my children’s early years, I tried too hard. I was up against dynamic opposing forces. I wanted to do everything right. I had no idea how. I wanted to teach them survival skills and show them the whole world and give them the learning and knowledge they needed to protect and raise them up.

I led with my head, which I trusted more, and less with my heart. I was wrong to have done so. Yet to be fair to me, the heart wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

Someone had been putting beach sand in my carburetor. I was only just coming to realize that.

I need not have done anything more for my precious babies than to let them be who they were and who they were going to become. I simply needed to love them. I didn’t know that then like I know it now.

Once the necessaries of hygiene and hunger and sufficient sleep and shelter had been tended to, the rest of figuring out how to navigate life was pretty much up to them. What kind of life they would choose to build and who they choose to build it with and how would be their work. It still is.

With all of this background, the bit of writing below spoke to me. As a hyper-vigilant and insecure parent, I know exactly why and how I tried too hard. Can’t change the past. Only beg for forgiveness and understanding and try to make up for it in the here and now.

One day, much later and when they were much bigger humans, I relaxed and let go. I realized all they needed from me – and all they ever need from me that they can’t get anywhere else – was my love and support.

Would that every parent knew that in the depths of their bones and blood.

Your own sense of self may be shaky but to your children, you are who they love and all they know.

Children develop their sense of self and security in relation to you and the family who love them. However imperfectly.

I learned that lesson late but I learned it. I hope they pass that lesson on to theirs when the time comes.

At least it keeps it all interesting, doesn’t it?

“Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is the way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.”

The extraordinary will take care of itself.

William Martin

Tadpoles and Fireflies

Chasing tadpoles was a great way to spend time on weekends when I was a little girl. Armed with rinsed-out peanut butter bottles with holes in the lid, we’d head for the ponds near the railroad track to collect them.

I don’t think we gave much thought to what we would do with the tadpoles once we caught them. They were fun to watch swimming around in the jars. It was fun to contemplate that those little squirmy black things would one day become frogs. Of course, none of our tadpoles ever did.

There is wonder to be found in the fragility of nature. On other expeditions, we would sit quietly at night watching and then capturing fireflies in our trusty peanut butter jars.

I know now there was something in those activities about chasing and holding on to wonder. As much as I know now about phosphorescence, it never fails to amaze me. As the captive fireflies blinked on and off in their glass prisons, I was sure as a kid they were speaking directly to me if I could but interpret their messages.

The mind of a child isn’t particularly logical. That is both its blessing and its curse. In a freeform brain still unmodified by life’s harsher realizations and realities, a child can imagine damn near anything. And does. The best children’s authors know that and taper their stories to that malleable world of dreams and imaginings. I envy children’s authors for that ability. And they seem to have a lot of fun in the mix.

My friend Canadian Sheree Fitch has published dozens of children’s books It is hard to say what is more delightful and pleasing to the senses: the words or the pictures.

Parenting allows us to revisit the world of childhood which most of us lost touch with somewhere around our transition into puberty. In the course of reading bedtime stories to my children, favorite storylines and characters inevitably emerged. Watching children’s movies with kids transports us back to what was important about that time in our own lives.

Children seek structure and consistency and certainty. The best stories provide that or focus on seeking it out. There is a lot of gratuitous violence in children’s stories. Some academics say that is because childhood is full of nightmares for children. Children are largely powerless and have little to no control over what goes on around them.

I have read that is why the Harry Potter series has been so wildly popular. J.K. Rowling imbued young Harry with qualities and characteristics children long for. He was odd and longed to fit in. He had powers that could only be accessed through rigorous training. He made strong friendships with other weird and different kids like him. From a difficult beginning, Harry Potter took control of his own power and destiny.

That’s an easy sell to kids trying to sort themselves out as they grow up and experimenting with where their powers will lead them in adulthood.

In one of my unversity yearbooks, each faculty’s title page portrayed silhouetted adult graduates as children. On the Law page, a young boy no older than nine wore the black robe and white tabs of a future attorney holding a weighty tome in his little hands. The Engineering faculty was portrayed by a little girl of about seven years old who wore a hard hat and dungarees and held a slide rule and blueprints.

If I have grandchildren one day, I hope to help them explore the world around them beyond the world of bits, bytes, and WhatsApp. I want them to feel confident to test their own part in the world around them. We’ll bake cookies so they will know the magic of making their own creations. We’ll spend more time playing cards and puzzles and board games instead of in front of the television. We’ll wander in nature to encourage their appreciation of the world around them. we might even camp out and make S’mores over a campfire. That will be the greatest act of love. I detest S’mores.

And who knows? We may even find some tadpoles to collect and take home. We may talk about their dreams to become biologists or veterinarians one day. Childhood should be a time of dreams and wonder. In these fragmented times, dreams and wonder that can one day be put into action is needed now even more than ever before.