Another Time

I found a book in my attic that caught my eye. My husband is a history teacher, and tends to collect books on people and events in history. This one is called Through My Eyes and it’s written by Ruby Bridges.

Ruby Bridges is famous as the little black girl who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, escorted by federal marshals. So much has been written about what others saw. Ruby recounts what she remembers as a child, and what she thinks now as an adult looking back on the experience. I found the book both fascinating and sad.

Towards the end of the book, she says that she felt no ill-will towards the white children who refused to play with her. When she was told to do something, she was expected to say ‘Yes Ma’am’ and not much else. Obedience was highly valued in her family and in that time. If her mother had told her not to play with a white child, she would not have played with a white child. She recognized that these children were just obeying their parents, as she herself was expected to do.

It’s easy now to look back at an event, an era, and a place and see how ugly and wrong it is. Maybe that would have been easy at the time, too. I live in the North, and it’s easy to vilify the Southerners of that time. When I read descriptions of the crowds of protesters who flanked that elementary school and rioted in the streets of New Orleans, I think of bystanders. There were white housewives. I’m a housewife by day. I have a lot to do in the course of a day. Even if I weren’t homeschooling, I know the constant dishes, meals, laundry, and housecleaning would be enough to keep me occupied. Given that 60 years ago there were fewer conveniences, and higher standards of housewives, I wonder how these women could justify spending hours, days, weeks harassing this little girl? There were also teen boys. Why weren’t these boys in school? Why were they allowed to be out, roaming the streets? There are not a lot of children in those photos, or white men. The men were probably at work, providing for their families. The children and teen girls were possibly being shielded from the spectacle. I cannot think that these women or teen boys acted alone. They had to have support, others who condoned their actions, permitted them to be present for weeks and months, before and after school, all day long. The men who were present were bystanders. Policemen, school administration who didn’t openly encourage the protesters, but they didn’t stop them either.

What is truly amazing to me is that this little 6-year-old girl went back, day after day, escorted by federal marshals, for a whole school year. Ruby’s mother went with her to school the first few days. But she had a job, and she needed to get back to work. She had three younger children as well that she needed to take care of. So Ruby went to school alone Every Day. Number 5 is 6 years old. I cannot imagine sending my little boy back again and again. This mother was a strong mother. There was stubbornness in Ruby, and in her mother, and courage.

I read about the pressure that the family faced that year. Her parents disagreed about integrating Ruby to a white school, and they eventually separated and divorced. Her dad lost his job because his child was attending a white school. Even the grocery story where they bought food every week asked the family not to shop there any more. There was a lot of attention from media. Every day as this little girl went to school ugliness was hurled at her – threats, slurs, even rotten eggs and tomatoes. The pictures of women who probably worked hard to look good on the outside stand with arms crossed, unwelcoming and mean. Once Ruby was in the classroom, she was still segregated. She was taught alone by one teacher in a classroom for that year. She describes being very lonely. Ruby’s teacher was under intense pressure as well and did not feel safe.

Most whites withdrew their children from the school. The few white families who chose to continue to send their children to the school were insulted and threatened as well. Some chose to leave the state completely. And yet under such intense pressure, this little girl remained. She continued on, and her mother steadfastly carried on. Maybe all of the work this family had done for generations made them strong in character as well. I can see why it would have been easy to give in. I can see why the true heroes in this story are the blacks – and the whites who supported them. The heroes in this story quietly did their job when others shouted at them to stay away. Millions watched from a safe distance and only observed on television or in the newspaper. All these photos – angry white men, women, children, and teen boys. Most of them are gone now. Dead. Names are forgotten. Just the images remain, and a past that none can be proud of.

I want to believe that I live in a better time and a better place. Maybe I do. Maybe I’m just staying safe in my house. Is this just a book that I read and find interesting? Is it enough to influence how I interact in my world and what I teach my kids now? Ruby makes the statement early on that children don’t learn racism on their own – it’s something that is taught. It’s evident from the photos of protesters outside the school and in the streets that adults make up most of the crowd. But the children in the the crowd are expected to mimic what the adults are doing, and they were encouraged in that behavior. Ugliness breeding ugliness. These parents – mothers and fathers – thought they were doing the right thing. Do any parents intentionally teach their kids the wrong thing? How else could they justify devoting time and energy to a cause of hatred? I wouldn’t want to be caught in photos, on television, by reporters, projected world-wide yelling vile words, carrying hateful posters, throwing objects. This is the behavior of children who do not get their way – and should not get their way. But these adults really believed they could make a judge, a president, a nation change their mind and go back to the way things were.

I have to stop ugliness in myself before I can stop it in my children. Sometimes ugliness in my children reminds me of the ugliness in me. Those who cannot learn from history are bound to repeat it. I want to repeat the good parts, not the ugly ones. I want to be the one strong enough to stand, and strong enough to expect my children to stand. We have to learn. We have to teach. We have to be different.

 

Need Heroines

I checked out a book from the library called “Big Machines”, thinking of Number 6 and his love for big machines. He isn’t interested in it, but several other members of the family managed to read it before me. I finally got to it today. I thought it was by Virginia Lee Burton, but it’s about Virginia Lee Burton and how and why she created her children’s books.

If you are not familiar with Virginia Lee Burton, she wrote books like “Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel” and “Katy and the Big Snow”. She illustrated her books as well. Her books were published back in the 1940’s and they remain classics.

Virginia Lee Burton wrote her books for her two boys. And I can imagine if her boys were anything like mine, they would have been a captive audience. I was drawn into ‘Big Machines’ because it’s reflects who I want to be. A woman from an earlier time period manages to balance mothering with her talents and interests. I want to be that woman today. I want female role models – past and present – who had children and had lives as well.

Maybe that sounds condescending, but I do not mean for it to. It’s just that in my own life, the days repeat, over and over. All moms are working moms, and there are some pretty mundane, ordinary things that I do over and over – laundry, dishes, cleaning, going to work, doing school, making a meal, wiping a nose, cleaning a bottom, picking up, cleaning spills. And yet in all the mundaneness, I want to know that what I do matters. That I make a difference in the lives of these kids. And if I’m really honest, I want to make a difference in the greater world around me. I want to impact other people’s lives as well besides just those in my immediate family. My six kids span a wide age spread – 3 to 15. This means that for sixteen years now, my day-to-day activities have not changed all that much. The older kids remind me that it will not always be like this. I know I will miss these days when they were little, someday. But right now I want sleep and I want a clean house, and I want to look somewhat fashionable and put together.

When Number 3 was an infant, I took her to a pediatric dermatologist for a medical condition. This female doctor had 6 kids. I was amazed that someone with her education would have 6 kids. Maybe someone with her education and income could have 6 kids and a nanny and a housekeeper. But regardless, she inspired me as a professional and as a mother. Wow!

When I was pregnant with Number 4, I met a midwife who had 4 kids. She stayed home with the kids when they were little, and then when they were in high school she went back to school to become a nurse midwife. Again, I felt this surge of hope that I, too, could do something similar. Wow!

Now a book about Virginia Lee Burton. I’m sure no one had thought of homeschooling back during the Great Depression. Kids went to school, and mothers stayed home, and husbands went to work. But here is a story of a woman who created pictures and stories based on her little boys’ interests. I’m sure she was working in her home, on those pictures and stories while the boys were napping, or after they were in bed, or maybe while they played outside. And boys and girls and parents all over enjoyed those stories as well. Wow!

I have a plan. I want to go back to school. I want to have my own career, and nurture my own interests. The time has not yet come. Right now I am called to these six of mine. I am 45 years old. I want to know that time is not passing me by, that there is still time and space for me to pursue my own dreams, and that nurturing the dreams of these little people was the BEST USE of 30 years of my life.

I want more stories of women in the trenches. Moms who are doing the mundane every day, at home, at work, with 1 kid, or 3, or 5, or 8. Moms who work inside and outside the home. Moms who recreate themselves when the kids are little, or after the kids are grown and gone. Ordinary moms, who are extraordinary, because we keep going day after day after day after day. Who inspires us? Who we will inspire?

I’m looking for a heroine – for me, now.

Maybe I will be a heroine for another woman, another mom. Maybe you will, too. Wow!

Conflicted

In school this past year we read a book on Garbage for Science. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it was AMAZING!! It might have been my favorite Science book from last year.

An Unenlightened Me once relished Throwing Things Away. I regularly Threw Things Away, because it was Out of my Space, and Now I had more Space!!

Several years ago, I was troubled by the thought that even though it went AWAY…it went SOMEWHERE and I began to give more thought to that. I RECYCLES and I DONATED and I felt good about that.

Now enter a book on where garbage goes once it leave your house and what becomes of it. Details about how much there is and how much there will be and we’re running out of places to put it. And Children Who Actually Pay Attention to What I’m Reading to Them and Want to Make a Difference.

So my biggest initial take-away from the book was that we need to start composting. Awareness is always the first step. Putting it into practice took a little more effort, and there were (and are) missteps along the way. But we’re getting there. I want to compost, and some people in my family want to compost. Other members of the family think it’s smelly and gross, and yeah, it is, but we’re keeping it out of the landfill and we can actually use it again in a better state. Right now we’re in the State of Education about Composting, because those members would rather throw it away. And yes, I do dig things out of the trash that can be recycled. And I have been digging banana peels and coffee grounds and egg shells out of the trash to go in the compost, but that is a little more gross. So today I argued with myself about the benefit of digging a banana peel out of the trash, vs. letting it go into the landfill. I’m sorry to say that I still have not made a decision. I am a Conflicted Earth Lover.

Number Three’s biggest takeaway from the Garbage book and another book we read on the Environment was Ride Bikes More Often. It sounds fantastic, and we get exercise at the same time. The reality is a little more difficult. Making sure every member in the family has a bike that works, for example. Or what to do with Number Six, who doesn’t know how to ride a bike. Take today for example. I have a small goal for myself to post to my blog once a week. If you’ve been reading this all summer, you’ll notice that Today is the First post I’ve written all summer. July is almost over. My current preferred location to write is at the local library, by myself. (Yes, you begin to see why there aren’t more posts this summer!) So an Earth Lover would welcome the opportunity to bike to her local library. She gets exercise while she Does Not contribute carbon monoxide to the environment. And while it take 30 minutes to bike to the local library with Small Children, she can do it in 15 minutes By Herself. But the Conflicted Earth Lover has already gone running this morning with Number Three to get ready for Cross Country in the fall. And there’s a good chance that she’ll have to walk to the local car repair shop later to pick up the vehicle that was experiencing problems earlier in the week. So she’s definitely gotten and will get her exercise today. Finally, those 30 minutes total that she could be biking back and forth to the library are 30 less minutes that she’ll have by herself. Let me tell you, she is focused on as much Time Alone as possible. Which is why I drove to the library. And I have other errands to run while I’m out.

I’m trying not to beat myself up too much about this. Change is a process, right? And Habits are formed over time, right? So SOMEDAY, I will bike as many places as I can ALL THE TIME. And SOMEDAY, I and Every Member of my Family will Compost ALL THE TIME. We won’t even think about it. It will be a Habit. It will be weird to Drive, or to Throw Things Away, but we’re (and I’m) Not There Yet.

I think I just needed to confess!

 

Five Little Words

It was a small sentence in passing, part of a longer comment about how my husband is teaching himself to do small home improvement projects on our house. “I’m better than my dad.” That’s it. Five words. And yet I think they sum up so much of our parenting decisions and behaviors.

One thing my dad and my husband’s dad had in common is that they were not handy men, by any means. Owning and running a farm is easier if you’re handy. As a kid, you don’t know anything different. As an adult, I look back and realize that the whole place was pretty much held in place with baling twine. If you’re a farmer, you’ll recognize just how fragile that is. To someone in the city, the equivalent might be a house held together with duct tape. It works…BUT. My husband doesn’t remember his dad doing any home repairs. So we both came into this marriage lacking in repair skills. They come in pretty handy as a homeowner, and the people who are handy come in pretty expensive when you don’t know what the heck you’re doing!

I try to take each of my children on dates at least twice a year. When there’s six kids in a family, Mom’s attention is pretty divided. It’s a few hours one-on-one where they pretty much get to call the shots. Number three asked me what I did with my mom when we went on dates. I told her my mom didn’t take me on dates. She was sad to hear that, and maybe it was, but I didn’t know any different. I want my parenting to be intentional. I don’t know how much of it actually is, but that is one thing I do to intentionally spend some time with each child, one-on-one, scheduled, and just be.

I think of my parents’ discipline, if you could call it that. My mom was afraid to hurt our feelings. She still is afraid to ‘hurt’ the grandkids’ feelings. My dad yelled a lot, and said unkind words. Spanking was reactionary, and out of anger. I wanted to discipline my own kids differently.

In a lot of families, the oldest child is the guinea pig. Whatever fantastic aspirations parents have they pour on the first one. My oldest was going to be potty-trained as an infant. (Failed on that one). She was also going to be bi-lingual. This only works if one or both parents are bi-lingual, and we’re not. So of course by the time the next kids came along, I moved on to other more realistic pursuits. I had the benefit of step-children before I had children of my own. The step-children were more guinea pigs than they know. Much of what I disagreed with their mother on, I did differently with my own kids. Pediatrician, vaccines, swim-lessons, hygiene. Again those five words at work, ” I’m better than…”

We don’t say the words out loud, most of the time. Just that slip by my husband. But we think those words. “I’m better than my mom.” I’m better than my dad”. “I’m better than the parent in custody for child-abuse.” Those words might rule what we feed our kids. Where we live. Where they go to school. How they dress. Church or no church. It’s unconscious, but it’s there.

I think in every parent is a desire to be better than our parents. We don’t say it like that, because it sounds arrogant. But we would say that we want to give our kids a better life than we had as children. My dad was born in 1929, right before the Depression hit. His family was so poor, they couldn’t tell there was a Depression. He worked hard to make sure that we had a better life than he did. He shared a bed with his sisters. We each got our own bed. We had meat, and potatoes, and vegetables every night. He had beans for lunch and dinner. He walked. We drove. He wore the same clothes every day, all week long. We got new clothes each school year, something for every day of the week.

If I were to be honest, I would say that my parents provided for our physical needs, but not so much the emotional needs. So I provide for the physical needs of my kids, and try to be emotionally intelligent with them as well.

And for as hard as I try, I still fall short in my own eyes. I think my kids see more in me than I see in myself. It’s a gift, and I need their grace. I wonder what my kids will do differently as parents than I did? What will their five little words be about? “I’m better than my mom.” And I hope they do. I hope they excel in all the areas I don’t. I hope they have their lives more together than I do. And I’m willing to be the inspiration for someone else to be better than me.

 

Meaning and Easter

This week the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral burned. The first news I heard of it was followed by the expression, “and during Holy Week!” Holy Week? What is Holy Week? In theory, I know what Holy Week is. In practice, nothing about my week seemed any different from any other week. Oh yes, it was a four-day week. My husband and daughter got out of school today for Good Friday. I wonder why most schools in this country do not hold classes on Good Friday? In our church, we had a Good Friday service at 7 p.m. Plenty of time to treat the day like an extra Saturday in the week. I cannot imagine what kind of activity in another church would require a WHOLE DAY off on this day. And in a very secular America, I’m impressed that there’s enough …Conviction?…Tradition?…I’m not sure what exactly, that holds so much sway as to rule in a Public School calendar.

As a Christian, our family tries to keep some meaning in Christmas. We definitely have more traditions around Christmas. Easter seems like the bigger, more important holiday to me, but the churches I’ve been a part of don’t know what to do with it. We as a family don’t know what to do with it. A couple of years I even worked on Easter until I was reprimanded by my husband and a co-worker. This year my husband might be going to a movie with the guys on Easter. I’m planning to get my nap, as usual. When the my girls were little I did attempt to make a nice meal after church. I made hot cross buns one year. They liked them, but I haven’t done it since.

My husband and I hate the Easter bunny more than we hate Santa at Christmas, and all of the ads for candy and toys. There have been years when we’ve COMPLETELY forgotten anything for the Easter baskets until the morning of. The few Easter decorations we have I put out about a week before Easter because that stupid grass gets EVERYWHERE regardless of the form it is in.

So yes, I’m a Christian who is admitting I don’t get Easter. But I want to. And I want to get it differently than Target tries to sell.

A few years ago I purchased the book Liturgy of the Ordinary, by Tish Warren. I thoroughly enjoyed it and reread it and will reread it. I’ve been in conservative, evangelical churches all my life. I’ve participated in a handful of services with a liturgy. A younger me would have told you that liturgy was boring, staid, old. The services I participated in were alive, contemporary, relevant, …or so I thought. Reading a prayer had no appeal to me. Anyone could do that. Guided reading? It sounds like I can’t read myself, and I can. And doing it was just awkward. Tish writes about the church following a calendar. Yeah, we follow the same calendar everyone else does, right? The point is, I don’t know anything about liturgy.

Tish made me curious to know more. In all the contemporary worship music with no-organs-but-yes-drums and worship leaders who are barefoot up on stage…something is missing. The church I attend meets in an old Lutheran church. There is stained glass on the windows and pictures in that stained glass that I don’t really pay attention to. Hundreds of years ago when few people could read, the Gospel, Scripture was taught in pictures. It was put up in stained glass windows for parishioners to learn from. We don’t really need pictures today…or do we you with your Instagram?

I know people who are Catholic. They show up on Ash Wednesday with dirty foreheads and I have to catch myself before I say something out loud. I don’t know what the significance of the ash is. I don’t know why they give up something for Lent. I don’t know what Maundy Thursday is. I can only think of a few people that I have confessed to and it wasn’t in a church. I understand the break between Protestants and Catholics. I don’t think of Catholics as people who read their Bibles, who have a personal relationship with Jesus, like I do. I think of them as people who follow rules they don’t understand, and rituals they cannot explain, and I would like to practice a faith I can explain. But they might have something to offer me. I wonder if we Protestants can learn from Catholics? Can non-liturgical churches learn from liturgical churches?

A friend forwarded me a link to the Holy Week celebration at a church 45 minutes away. It intrigues me. A whole week to celebrate Easter? A Holy Week? I wonder what it would be like to keep an Easter vigil? What would it be like to watch a dramatization of Holy Week, or of Scripture? It doesn’t look dry or dusty. It looks ALIVE and fresh and…needed. I need it. I need a church calendar to follow. I need words to read when I don’t know the words to say, or even the words to think. And maybe the Liturgy isn’t just for Priests, but for ordinary people, like me, and like you. Maybe I can learn from pictures in stained glass, literate though I am. I want to be there, not outside looking for plastic eggs.

It’s not too late to make Easter meaningful this year. Yes, we’ll take the kids on an Easter egg hunt. I’ve been making Easter about the kids. That’s not what I want it to be. I want it to be about me, following Jesus. Thinking through the significance of each event then and what it means for me today. And bringing the kids along with me. This is the start of something new.

Belonging

I’m an introvert. I like to hang around the edges of a crowd and observe before I decide to jump in. Maybe because of that I talk myself out of a lot of situations. By that I mean I tell myself why I don’t belong to a particular group.

So for example, I don’t belong with my siblings, who are out of state, because they make more money than my husband and I and spend accordingly. When we are together, their new, trendy clothes/houses/cars and gadgets stand out against my family’s hand-me-downs and thrift store finds. I don’t think I envy them, I just don’t ‘belong’ with them.

Last year our state enacted legislation which enables families which could not otherwise afford private school tuition to apply to a scholarship fund and make that possible. This scholarship fund amazingly allowed my oldest daughter to attend a private high school. Dropping her off and picking her up daily there are a number of Honda Odyssey vans like our own. There are also a number of luxury vehicles dropping off their own kids. First semester she told me one student in her Psychology class missed a week because he went to Hawaii for his birthday. Hawaii?? For a birthday?? She notices the gadgets the other kids have and sees the difference between what she has. Because I’ve home schooled for so long, I don’t consider myself a Private School parent. Every day as I drive out of that parking lot I think, “We don’t belong”.

Last weekend I was a bridesmaid in a wedding. I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of the wedding, and I didn’t think much more about it at the time that I accepted. Last weekend, though, were the festivities – bachelorette party, rehearsal, wedding. It was clear that I was a lot of things the other bridesmaids were not – older, for one, a mother, for another. If nothing else, the music selection emphasized another generation. And I caught myself with the same nagging doubts… “I don’t belong here”.

Somewhere in the midst of that, I slapped myself. My friend asked me to be in the wedding because she wanted me tobe. She had other friends she could have asked. She asked my family to be at the wedding because she wanted us there, and she proved it by paying for our food and entertainment. If I don’t want to belong, I don’t have to. I could have said ‘no’ when she asked me to be in the wedding, but I said ‘yes’. So I get to choose to belong. Yes, I might be older than the others, and I might have a lot of kids, and I might not be familiar with the music, but I can still have fun and I can still participate because I choose to. I don’t have to check-in with my friend to make sure she wants me there. She does.

I see how I’ve done that in those other areas as well. So what if we don’t have the same income as many of the kids at the private school? We belong. We belong, we fit, because we choose to. We picked that school out of many others in the area. Whatever amount we pay is enough to be ‘in’, to be included. We belong there because we choose to and no one there can tell us differently.

Even with my family, if I don’t want to belong because we live out of state I can. But my siblings and my parents have not said they don’t want us around. Quite the opposite, they’d like to see us more often. And they never say anything about the income disparity.

I’m a Christian, and I think Christians are better at making anyone feel like they don’t belong than possibly any other group. And as a Christian, I struggle with my identity as a child of God.  Its something I know in my head, but you wouldn’t always be able to tell by the way I act. I love a song by Hillsong Worship called Who You Say I Am. The chorus says, “I am chosen, not forsaken. I am who You say I am. You are for me, not against me. I am who You say I am.” I am who God says I am, not who I say I am, or who you say I am, but who God says I am. I belong with God. I belong in God’s family. And I belong in church.

If you struggle with belonging, don’t believe the lie! Are you making up your own roadblocks? Where do you want to belong? Who do you want to belong with? You get to choose whether you belong or whether you don’t. And if they’re richer, or poorer, or younger, or older, or fatter, or thinner, or better-looking, or worse-looking, or have different taste – that’s not enough to determine that you don’t belong. You’re here. Be here. Stay here. You belong. I belong.

Recognition

Growing up I participated in 4-H. There were a few other random activities in there: field days, choir, speech. For each of these activities I was rewarded according to my performance. I have a lot of purple ribbons. This would be the equivalent of Winner! or Grand Champion, or maybe even A+. I have a lot of blue ribbons. This would be the equivalent of Good Job! Close! Nice Work!, or maybe a B. I have some red ribbons. Red is like Average, Mediocre, or C. There is a white ribbon or two in there, and I believe a green one. These are the equivalent of, “I Noticed You Showed Up, But There’s Really Nothing Worth Noting.” Maybe Last Place or F.

I didn’t have a letter jacket in high school, but I did get The Letter and The Pins that could go on a letter jacket if I did have one. Like the ribbons, you only got a pin if you scored in the top three places in a sport or activity.

All of these awards and plaques have gone into a cardboard box and been forgotten. My mom dug them out of what used to be my closet and gave them back to me awhile back. My girls wanted to know what was in the box and we went through them one afternoon. They were impressed with all the pretty colors of the ribbons.

My oldest observed, “They don’t really do this anymore.” I asked her what she meant. “They don’t really award places anymore. Everyone gets the same medal or trophy for participating.” I thought about it a second. The girls have been in baseball, soccer, basketball, and a science fair. We attended a spelling bee recently. Every single kid gets the exact same award – it could be a medal, a trophy, a certificate, or a t-shirt – but there’s nothing to distinguish the kid who sat on the bench the whole game from the kid who was the MVP. She ended by saying, “I wish they still did it the way they did when you were growing up, Mom.”

She might be on to something. I didn’t grow up full of myself. Yes, there were things I was good at. There are still things I do that other people don’t. And there were a lot of things I wasn’t good at – team sports and ceramics. The kids who were good at team sports weren’t necessarily good at sewing, like me. I think I had a balanced view of myself. It was okay for kids to have different talents and abilities. Yeah, you could be on the track team, but no one was going to give you an award for coming in last in every single event.

I’m not a fan of Valentine’s Day. Don’t give me roses when every other woman in the U.S. is getting a bouquet. I want to be special. Get me a bouquet on a Tuesday because I’m the only one you can imagine doing life with. Similarly, my daughter doesn’t trust the “Participation Awards”. She doesn’t want an award just because everyone else is getting one. She wants to be awarded for exceptional performance. If you’re giving her an award just for showing up, what does that really tell her? Not much. Does she have a motivation to try harder next time? Or to go out at all?

The scene in The Incredibles 1 when Dash is in the car on the way home from school comes to mind. Mrs. Incredible says, ‘Everyone is special, Dash.’ ‘Which is another way of saying no one is,’ he retorts.

I heard a Millenial gripe about this a few weeks ago. “In high school they say you can be anything you want to be. No I can’t. I want to be a tomato. I can’t be a tomato.” She was frustrated because hearing that she could do anything or be anything was too broad and unrealistic. She feels less sure of herself as an adult. It’s a popular motivational saying with no real meaning.

There has to be some balance here. As a kid and a teenager there were some activities I never tried because I knew I wasn’t as good as the really talented kids. There were activities that just weren’t available to me then and there. I think kids (and adults) need to have the resilience to try new activities and be surprised when they’re good at it or they like it; or accept it when they’re awful and they hate it.

Is it okay to fail? Can I be loved if I’m not good at something? Can I be celebrated if I’m better at something than the Average Joe? Is it okay to be a rockstar? Can we teach this to our kids in a different way than we do right now with the ‘Participation Award’?

When is it okay to be mediocre, to just fit in with the crowd? When do we need to push ourselves or set higher standards for our children? These are questions worth considering – for ourselves and for our kids.

 

The Incredibles- If Everyone Is Special, No One Is

I found this blog post that continues along the lines of Recognition.

Lessons From The Mouse

It amazes me how Pixar can sometimes slip unpopular themes into its movies and often come out unscathed. The Incredibles is the poster child of this! Would you believe that The Incredibles is a commentary on parenting? There are three different scenes in this movie that leap out at me when we are talking about this: The first one is when Dash gets in trouble in school; on the car ride home, Dash says “Our powers make us special,” to which Helen (Mrs. Incredible) says, “Everyone is special, Dash”. Dash retorts back to her, “Which is another way of saying that no one is.” This is not just the opinion of a frustrated little boy, he is parroting the frustrations of his father who later on is arguing that a 4th grade graduation ceremony is silly (in his words, psychotic) because, “They keep celebrating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but…

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Super Powers

When Number One was 8 or so, she gave me a one page written note telling me that she was disappointed with me and a long explanation as to why. Her grievance? I was not a Super Hero. She wanted both me and her dad to have secret identities as Super Heroes. She had spied on us both at night, when she was supposed to be asleep, and she was disappointed that we were not going to a secret room and changing into cool costumes and flying out into the night to save the world.

I read this note in her presence and it was difficult to keep a straight face. (I kept it, of course, and I’ll give it to her when she is a parent of an 8 year-old herself)! What I told her at the time was that this was not going to be the first time that I disappointed her. I told her I would disappoint her a lot more times, not because I wanted to, but because I was human and we do that to each other. I told her that she needed to rely on God as the Only One who does not disappoint. Many would say that even God disappoints…

She has a bad habit of eating ice. I know that this can be a symptom of low iron levels. She’s had the finger prick at the pediatrician’s office, and her iron levels always fall in a normal range. I asked them to test it again at her last well-visit. This time the pediatrician suggested a full panel at the lab, to get a more accurate reading. This week the pediatrician called with the lab results. She wanted to speak in person, not on the phone, and she strongly suggested I bring Number One with me, as she’s old enough to take responsibility for her own health now. Any parent would see this as NOT GOOD NEWS, if a doctor won’t even tell you the results on the phone. Number One however, was excited! She was very hopeful that this would finally be the time when the doctor told her that she had Super Powers!

As it turns out, Number One is deficient in Iron, Calcium, and Vitamin D. We’ve started her on supplements and we’ll redo the blood work in three months to see if those levels increase. She might begin to feel better, to be less tired, and less winded when she runs. When the doctor asked if she had any questions, she said, “So…I don’t have any Super Powers?” Her greatest disappointment is not that she has to take supplements, but that the test results did not reveal any Super Powers.

I want desperately to be a Super Hero, to wear the cape. I collect Wonder Woman memorabilia. I watched Linda Carter as Wonder Woman as a kid and still have a drawing I made of her when I was 6. In my daydreams, I often tell bad guys to drop the gun when they attempt to rob the coffee shop where I work. Or I confront an active shooter that walks into my church. Anybody else? I suspect, given the number of movies and TV shows based on Super Heroes in the last fifteen years, that I’m not alone.

My daughter wants to be a Super Hero as well. Her question says as much. What I told her in the car on the way home from the doctor’s office is that doctors and labs don’t have the ability to test for Super Powers. They’re not the final authority on Super Powers.

The truth is, her dad and I are Super Heroes. She sees only a little of what we do as parents. Someday, she’ll realize how amazing we really are. I AM a Wonder Woman. I believe that most women are Wonder Women. We express it in different ways, whether we wear the bustier or not.

She’s a Super Hero too. Her talents are only beginning to come out, but I already know that her kindness has meant a lot to kids that others don’t always see. Kindness is definitely a Super Power we could use more of today.

I can think of a lot of Super Powers that are under-estimated. Patience. Hope.  Friendship. Perseverance. Grace. Thankfulness. Forgiveness. How about you? What Super Powers, true Super Powers could you use more of in your life? What Super Powers can you bring into someone else’s life that would genuinely make a difference? We can be Super Heroes to each other here, now. And we don’t need a doctor, or a lab, or even a child to tell us differently.

Better

There was a time in my life when I didn’t want children. Hard to believe now, with six. I had a long list of reasons why, all perfectly valid. I shared this with my sister-in-law back then. She was surprised. She told me that having kids made her a better person. I nodded outwardly. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. She was a high-school drop-out. She needed to be a better person. I graduated from high school and college with honors, and I’d completed one year of a Master’s Degree, and I went to church on Sundays. I didn’t need to be a better person.

When Number One was little, she would ask to go around the block and pick up trash. We did it, because she wanted to. That’s not something I do on my own. She made me a better person. She also would cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers and then go around the block and put them in people’s mailboxes. My husband couldn’t stomach this. I went with her. Who knows what people thought when they pulled a random picture out of their mailbox? She was trying to brighten their day.

Tonight we attended a school activity. A younger girl from her school came up and wanted to sit with her. They did. I haven’t heard about this girl before, so I asked about it on the way home. She admitted that she’s recently met this girl. She doesn’t quite have this younger girl figured out, but she wants to be nice to everybody. Then she made an amazing statement. “The one thing I’d like most in the world is to be stuck on a desert island with five people that I hate. Then we’d have to figure out how to get along and we’d be friends by the time it was over.” I’m still in awe of her statement. She’s absolutely serious.

I’m an adult. I can easily think of ten people that I hate. They’re not famous, or celebrities, and the last thing I’d like to do is be stuck on a desert island with even one of them! I’m a Christian, and I’m willing to believe that eight of those ten would call themselves Christians as well. My husband’s philosophy is: ‘we’re going to live together in heaven someday, we might as well get along on earth.’ Not me. I’m more of, ‘If we get along in heaven, fine. No need to do it here.’

You can say what you want about my position. I’m older, experienced, jaded, cynical, hurt, realistic. I hold grudges. I don’t forgive easily. My daughter doesn’t just make me a better person, she is a better person. This is one more proof.

You can say what you want about her. She’s young, idealistic. She doesn’t know how this world works. She hasn’t been hurt, betrayed, etc. yet. Maybe. Maybe she’s giving me someone to look up to.

She’s not perfect. She’ll tell you herself that she has people that it’s difficult to be nice to. She heard something recently that stuck with her. If you see something in someone else you don’t like, you probably have that same quality yourself. So she’s begun asking herself, ‘what is it that they have that I don’t like in myself?’

These are the kids that will change our world. My kid, your kid. My sister-in-law was right. Kids make you a better person. You do things for them that you won’t do for yourself. Pregnant women stop drinking, or smoking, or eating junk food. They can’t do it for themselves, but they’ll do it for the baby. And then when that little baby starts talking and mimics a swear word, dads (and moms) start monitoring their language. When the paycheck comes and it’s a choice between a new toy for us, or new clothes (or food, or activity) for them we choose them, every time.

Maybe New Year’s Resolutions aren’t the place to start to make ourselves over. Maybe having kids is the place to start to make us better people.

Matthew 19:14 Jesus said, “Let the children come to Me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belong to those who are like these children.”

Isaiah 11:6 And a little child will lead them all.