The Assumption of Butting Heads

Mostly I am writing this entry down because I don’t want to forget it. Feel free to read along, but don’t feel compelled.

Parenting has been a struggle for me, for sure. Sometimes the struggle is to be patient, and sometimes it is to let love dominate when I could be angry. But this weekend it was to not struggle quite so much.

I know, in principal, that growth springs from the organism itself, and that eventually our children will be on their own, responsible to their own consciences and reliant on their own will. However, for the seven years that I have had children ex-utero, I’ve had the idea that I must kneed and form them into a civilized shape — I must be the mold that they push up against.

In short, I struggle with them.

Somehow, that habit, or conviction, or practice, or whatever it is, has been gradually eroded. Until this weekend I put two and two together, under circumstances that I don’t remember, that:

1. Children want to improve (thank you, Georgia, for stating that explicitly about yourself — I want to be the best person I can be) and be good people. It’s a deep spiritual impulse, as far as I can tell, and it comes from them, and not from you.
2. I want them to improve and be good people, too.

Once you can really see that in your own kids, and you can see it in yourself, I think it removes a big struggle. We’re both working toward the same destination. The thing is, though, that children don’t always have the same route in mind as I do for their journey. But that’s okay; we’ve got some time, and if they can see that I am working together with them, they’ll be happy to go along.

It’s worked pretty well so far, helping to diffuse fights, for example, between Maya’s and Georgia’s warring routes toward virtue (as I like to describe them), and to help Georgia rise above Maya’s needling during a van ride. It’s important to recognize when they’re just too tired to do it on their own, though. I need to figure out how much help to give — how many shoes to help put on when I think that someone could actually do it by herself.

I also realize that many parents never even struggle with this, because it is part of their basic assumptions, because somewhere their ancestors already figured it out and incorporated it into the family culture. I think there’s still a chance that Maya and Georgia can be in that category. Or maybe they already are, thanks to Bahiyyih.