Ann. Letter: Following The Crayon Marks

Of course, the first people we aim to affect with a better world are our children. Choice is a frightening concept when it comes to them. We parents quake with fear over the choices they may be about to make, while trying to stay optimistic, even excited, about the potential. It’s pretty hard to write about our kids and avoid the critic’s eye. And with teens, nearly everything has gone underground, below the radar, and you gotta be a detective to catch what’s really happening inside them. We want so much for them; we hope they will become the people we’ve always wished them to be, despite the glaring contradictions, naiveté, and vanity of those dreams. Yet they are fast becoming the people they were meant to be, people that will probably surprise us.

A block from our house is the doorway at Washington School where we dropped off each of our three children on their first day of Kindergarten. Ages ago to them but only yesterday, of course, to us. Once we walked among their strewn crayons, now we walk together through the halls of the Met and the myriad examples of humanity’s universal desire to express itself. All those memories of the struggles with day care, “enrichment”, and midnight awakenings amazingly fading away. We still have uneaten vegetables, sibling rivalries, and cluttered rooms, oh hell yeah, but we also have discussions about the wide, wide world they will soon inhabit fully. Where once we watched a million Disney videos and “Blues Clues”, we now watch “The Civil War”, “Ghandi”, and “Schindler’s List”. They are learning about human nature and human potential; the dark, the light, and the possible. The requisite of war and the way of peace; the ease of evil and the difficult necessity of love. The lessons are tougher but hopefully so are the students. And don’t worry, we still have a bit of fun,..we never miss an episode of “The Simpsons” or “My Name Is Earl”!

We all went to see the fantastic movie version of Narnia. Anna & the kids had read the books and loved the faithful recreation on the screen. The story is so good at presenting the sweet impression that so many of us feel that something great lies just beneath the surface of everyday existence, a calling for each person to be noble, strong, graceful, and caring, and that it permeates the spiritual landscape of humanity like the very air we breath. Yet at the same time there is a counterspirit just as pervasive, also barely hidden, that wants to drown out that calling, to distract us with minutia, petty wants, individual anxieties, and a charmless grey repetition. The former calls us to honor and dignity, the latter to extinction. To most of us, it is difficult to fully perceive either nature, and to nearly everyone the divide between them is imperceptible. Great, compassionate people can fall, ruined souls still find redemption. The struggle, however, takes place most often in the vast middle ground of souls, starting in adolescence. To young children the difference between good and evil seems so simple, yet it becomes so cloudy, so soon. Our children are now at that age where they are trying so hard to hold on to that uncomplicated view of morality yet they yearn to be accepted and sail out into that sea of impulses and desires that independence embodies.

Earlier this year we journeyed together to see U2. Fantastic show, lead by Bono, the new Time Magazine Person of the Year. We were inspired by this great showman and humanitarian to think more about the power of one faithful person, armed with well researched facts, a clear voice, a handful of charm, a disdain for wishful thinking, and a simple love of humanity, can end hunger, end crippling international debt, end disease…to change the world. And that it isn’t just something for a celebrity to take on, but, as Bono pointed it’s critical that we do it. “The only thing that balances how preposterous it is to have to listen to an Irish rock star talk about these subjects is the weight of the subjects themselves.” No preaching, just the right amount of persuasion, and I could see my children listening… What a thrill to share at least one more thing with our finicky teens.

We do wish our kids could become sophisticated and a bit more worldly, so they might build upon the better parts of growing up in a small town and thrive in the wider world, but (irony) how can they do that while living IN this isolated small town? We don’t have the funds to travel 12 hours round-trip to San Francisco very often so here they sit, amid all this beauty and some very good people, but far from most of civilization’s wonders.

Aren’t kids something? After all these years, all these lessons, all these many weighty issues to ponder, they still don’t have the sense to notice all the mud they tracked in. “Where?!” they ask incredulously, standing right there on a mopped and now freshly defiled floor while you scream at them, as if you have lapsed back into your senile tendency of senseless accusations. Even though they now are in sight of official adulthood, good sense still eludes them with startling frequency. The good news about their being older, is that by giving them more chores than ever, chances are that, say, big sister mopped that floor and will graciously deliver the obligatory beating to the clueless transgressor for you. I love these kids and I want so much for them, yet discipline is such a hard job, such a feat of endurance. I once listened to a video tape of me disciplining the kids; I spoke so sharply I sounded like an obnoxious jerk. It shocked and even shamed me that I should sound so harsh. I vowed to handle things differently… so now I don’t speak on tape.

...to be continued...