I've been thinking a lot about what happens when a person feels empowered. What are the consequences? How are outcomes changed? What's it like to parent an empowered person, who believes their choices are theirs to make and the consequences are theirs to accept?
Sandra Dodd said recently she can't understand why people get upset over an election (something to that effect). She said something to the effect that maybe we should get back to unschooling our children and creating a nest for them. I've been reading her writings for 9 years now, and I've heard her say something like that many times in different circumstances. I agree with her. We can't walk around in fear all the time and we can't walk around worrying about what's happening in the wide world. We should focus on the now and what's right in front of us.
I remember back when I was a new parent. I was 20 years old. For the first few months of Jake's life, I remember believing that there is no stimulus, no experience that happened to Jake that I didn't know about. I remember thinking that everything he knew, I knew. I believed that for a long time. And then circumstances changed and I went to work and he stayed with his aunt, and I felt safe about that because I trusted her. I remember walling off what happened to him, his experiences and stimuli, while he was away from me, so I wouldn't grieve the not knowing.
I remember thinking that he could be conditioned to accept the world as it is (not an unschooling mama, then), and the conditioning would strengthen him. I remember when my sil asked how I got 9 month old Jake to eat Cheerios, I answered that he'd never eaten anything sweet, so he had nothing to compare it to. Until I discovered unschooling when Jake was 13, I subscribed to the idea that “children learn what they live”, and so I was going to control what they lived, to keep the bad stuff out!
I see lots of younger mothers using this philosophy on their kids. Many of these mothers are unschooling moms who “get” unschooling. I know of families whose children think meat is nasty and pus-filled. They’ve never had meat, and 3 year olds learn (however inadvertently) to be judgmental towards people who eat meat. I know of other families whose teenager may have talked that way about meat at 3, but now asks for meat when away from mother. The mothers believe that if they never present meat to their kids as infants, and condition their children against it, then the kid will never want to try meat.
The problems begin when the family goes out for sushi, and the little ones are finally tall enough to see over the top of the all-you-can-eat buffet. The little one points to the deep fried bananas, except it’s not a banana in the batter, it’s pork, and then mom has to say no, you can’t have that. The best moms in this situation are adept at distraction and sleight of hand. The moms feel strongly about eating meat, and so I’d rather see them do that than go on a rant about meat right there in the buffet line.
But I don’t believe many of them are considering the larger picture, taking the long-term view of the whole of the child’s life. It’s not just some of the vegetarians I know. It’s lots of different kinds of philosophies and lifestyles. The issue isn’t what they control, but that they control at all.
I’d like to think that I when I was a controlling mom, I was one of the better ones, adept at distraction and sleight of hand. Happy and cheerful about what was allowed, not mean and dour about what wasn’t. However, if you have a child over the age of 6, you realize how quickly distraction and sleight of hand stops working! Just when you get really good at it, the kid develops a new awareness and understanding, and your old tricks don’t work. It was my dad who first told me about not saying “no” to children if you can avoid it. Jake was an infant then, and Dad was speaking from a grandparent’s perspective. Still, he was right.
Many of us don’t realize that one of the first things kids become aware of is that mama is holding something back, and maybe she shouldn’t be trusted to tell them about the world.
So, fast forward to Jake’s 12th year. He’s a big brother now. He’s been moving along trying to sort out how to get by in school, while at the same time trying to get around the controls placed upon him. He’s brilliant, with an amazing ability to adapt. He’s been conditioned to adapt, and he’s learned how to work every system he’s a part of. I can hear him say “shit” while playing basketball with neighborhood kids in the driveway on occasion. His little brother, shocked, reports this to me sometimes, too. Little sins against the rules accumulate, little deceptions and avoidances and omissions.
I don’t get upset about them, as my mother would have done. I think carefully about what is happening during my windshield time back and forth to work. We have a nice safe talk about why some words are bad, and I make sure I hug him afterwards. Meanwhile, Jake’s little brother Jon is developing his own self. Never a child to conform, as brilliant as his brother, but with a different set of personal boundaries, and a highly sensitive bullshit detector. He uses the rules to get by in a different way. In fact, being different is what’s most important to him. His idea is to make everything the most fun possible. Not about to do anything against his will, he questions all arbitrariness, and actively points out hypocrisy in all authority.
Eventually Jon can’t take anymore of the hypocrisy in school, and he’s starting to get to me, too. An incident at school, a suspension, and there we are, never going back to that place. There was a single moment when a switch was flipped in my mind, and I can thank Jon for it. He was RIGHT. I’d been living in this dichotomy of controlling my children, while having my father’s words and my children’s example haunting my every step. Jon’s problem with hypocrisy had finally, finally gone to my core.
Except it wasn’t just his problem with hypocrisy, it was mine, too, which I had subjugated to the circumstances of life. I felt powerless to do the things I felt I had no control over, even though I exercised my power well and often in the things I could control. I could control the environment and the stimuli of an infant. I began to see I had been losing ground on that for years, and it was only going to get worse.
We left that school and vowed he’d never have to go back. That was the beginning of living fully with our choices, and reveling in the ability to do so. That was also the beginning of Jake’s true sense of empowerment, the first time he’d ever been allowed it. It took many years for him to fully realize it, and he felt safer in the environment of school, so he stayed there for the most part. However, he looked at it in a new light. He still went for the grades and the scholarships, but he became openly cynical, and admitted that he was working the system. He used the tools he had developed through being controlled to make the best outcome for him. He could see no other way.
Jon, just two years younger than Jake; he was different. He wasn’t impressed with being empowered. He was claiming what he knew to be rightfully his. It was just a matter of course, for him. I can’t say that his life has been smooth sailing ever since. It’s not. He was conditioned against exercising his own empowerment for the first 11 years of his life. He has struggled with some serious issues that other people inflicted upon him, and those affect his behavior in various ways. But intellectually he held to the idea that his choices are his to make.
Jake is heading to Iraq in a couple of months. I grieve the fact that I have no way of knowing every little detail about what is and will be happening to him while he’s there. He’s a married man, now. I don’t know everything that has happened to him in the past 20 years like I did when he was a baby. I’m used to that. In Iraq there will be important and life-changing things that he experiences that I will want to know about. I will want to know about everything he knows just like I did when he was a baby, and I will ask him in my letters and he won’t tell me a lot of it. I can’t know everything and he can’t even begin to tell me everything. It’s impossible.
But he will tell me what he wants me to know, and he will hold back what he doesn’t want me to know. He will protect me from certain things, and he will share some things only with his wife or his brother or his fellow soldiers. He goes to Iraq knowing he made the choice to enlist in the reserves, knowing that he would probably be deployed. I know he is afraid, but I know he is prepared as best the Army can prepare him. I know he feels prepared to do his job. He will be shocked by a lot of things. He will feel unprepared for certain things.
Of course, I worry about the worst and all the things that can go wrong, and I worry about mundane things like will he really hate the heat and will it make him grumpy all the time. I worry if the circumstances will alter his personality permanently. Will he learn to live with the harsh conditions, or will he complain about them constantly? Will he feel empowered to at least change the things he can? I realize I can do nothing about these worries. I can’t help him in any way except to send care packages and write letters and be there to listen if he wants to tell me.
I hope that his sense of empowerment and his full knowledge of the choices he made helps him through. Not in a “you made your bed, now lie in it” sort of way. But in a hopeful, living in the now, looking towards the future, sort of way. I want him to feel empowered to change his perception of things, to accept the circumstances as they are, and adjust the way he thinks about it to allow the greatest amount of peace of mind. He couldn’t make those adjustments if he didn’t feel empowered in his choices.
That’s the way I feel about my son going to war. I have done my best to point him towards his empowerment. To finally step out of his way. I have my own choices to make as a result of his choices. I can choose to be angry with him for choosing to enlist in the reserves in a time of war. I can choose to be angry at the circumstances that got us into this war. I can choose to ignore any kind of news about it, and stop reading his letters when he says anything about it. I can get enthusiastic about the war and fully support the war effort. There are hundreds of choices I can make right now about how to think and act about my son in Iraq.
What I’ve chosen to do, from the center of a mother’s heart, is be proud of my son. To fully acknowledge his choices as his to make, and be proud that he made them. I don’t have to agree with his choices, but it doesn’t help either of us for me to be vehement about my disagreement. I understand why he has made the choices he has, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have made the same ones for him, had I had that option. I honor his choices by working for peace in small and subtle and big ways. I remind people of peace with a sticker on my car. I remind people of our soldiers in harm’s way with yellow ribbons on my car. I flash a peace sign instead of a wave. I try to live in peace, and I consciously choose to think about peace, and make my environment peaceful. I voted. I write letters. I ask people in Wal-Mart not to spank their children. I could do more. I will.
It's a natural instinct to want to protect our children. We should do it to the best of our ability. But we can't. Because their freedom of choice leads them away from our peace-loving homes and towards circumstances outside anyone's control. We can only hope that the practice they've had making their own choices, and the empowerment they feel being their own person helps them live unregretfully with the consequences.
Some parents think they do have control over their children, but all we really have is influence. Control is an illusion. Even the minutest amount of control we have over a newborn child evaporates with the passage of time. Empowerment starts early. We can’t make them eat. We can’t make them sleep. Children should be raised in a way that allows them to assert their natural empowerment. The sooner in a child’s life the parents realize that, the more peaceful the world will be.
Children learn what they live.
posted by Karen Ann @ 8:19 AM
0 comments
