From Word To Word

There is a whole set of lies that our culture has been systematically telling its children for some time now.  We tell them that they are especially beautiful and especially smart and especially talented.  We tell them that they can be anything they want to be, that they can do anything they put their minds to do.  We tell them that they are extraordinary, that they will do extraordinary things.  And, generally speaking, far more often than not, this is nothing but lies.

However beautiful and intelligent and talented they may be, there will almost always be those who have more beauty and more intelligence and more talent, and none of these things will guarantee them success in any case.  However much they may put their minds to it, there are some things that they will just not be able to be or do.  However much they may believe themselves to be extraordinary, they will almost certainly come up against the fact that they are as ordinary as the next person, better at some things, worse at others, individual and valuable perhaps, but not exceptional.  They will come up against the fact that their entire conception of themselves has been based on lies told by their parents and family and teachers and counselors and so on.

Now, we tell them these lies out of the best intentions.  We want our children to have good self-esteem, to believe in themselves, to have the confidence to pursue their dreams, but we end up doing exactly the opposite.  Our lies give children a grossly unrealistic conception of themselves, and this self-conception begins to disintegrate when they are exposed to a wider world where others are in fact as beautiful and intelligent and talented as they are.  They are confronted by the fact that they are not naturally superior to their peers and that they have not developed the disciplines they need to succeed in the world because  even their poorest efforts  had always been called exceptional, had not required work or effort or discipline or commitment from them.  Confronted with this new reality, their self-image is shattered, and they alternate between depression and bravado, between accepting that they are not in fact exceptional and insisting that their true superiority has gone unrecognized.  They are trapped in this alternation, immobilized, unable to commit to any direction enough to do the work it would require of them, waiting for the greatness that has been promised them.  They cannot be the best, so they will be nothing at all.

There is now the greater part of a generation who occupy this position, a generation who have never been able to face the truth about themselves.  There is nothing less acceptable to them than an ordinary life, and they are unwilling to live this ordinary life, though it is the life that they will have to live, one way or another.  They came of age in a barrage of superlatives, and any life that is not superlative must be a failure to them, and so they live mostly with failure, still striving to deny this failure at every turn.  They keep insisting on the lies that they have been told, keep ignoring the base facts of their lives, keep hoping that their destiny will somehow, miraculously, reassert itself.

They have never been told the truth, that there is no shame in living an ordinary life, in doing ordinary good, in overcoming ordinary evil, in accomplishing ordinary things, just as countless lives have been lived before them.  They have never been told the truth, that it is no great failure to fall short of wealth and fame, that it is a far greater failure to fall short of being a moral human being.  They have never been told the truth, that the best lived life is one spent, not in exceptional things, but in ordinary things, in being a loving child, spouse, parent, friend, and neighbour.  They have never been told the truth, that the life spent serving others brings more joy than the life spent in pursuit of one’s own pleasures and successes.

We must speak truthfully to our children.  We must tell them that their value does not depend on their beauty or their intelligence or their talent or their success or their superiority to others, but in the love that they might offer to one another, which is their very humanity.  We must praise them when they have done well, certainly, but we must also correct them when they have done wrong and encourage them when they have failed.  We must teach them that there is nothing so very ordinary about living the ordinary life, that this is indeed a life worth living, as complex and as full and as rewarding as any other they might choose to live.

Though I am a proponent of home schooling in many of its guises, I am actually a little wary of the term.  Its connotations are too much about schooling and too little about learning for me to be completely comfortable with it, and it seems to imply that either children are educated at school or they are educated at home, where the fact is that all children, wherever they are more formally educated, need to be learning in the home, because there is much that formal education does not and can not teach us.

So, though my kids are not yet old enough that I am forced to put them in formal education of some sort, and though my wife and I have not yet decided whether we will actually home school our kids when they come to that age, we are already learning at home, not necessarily in very formalized ways, but intentionally and constantly.

As part of this process, I was looking for a way that my kids could express what they are learning in ways that are not just assignments, in ways that are relevant to them, and so I have decided to make a blog that I am calling Ethan and Marlon’s Field Journal.  Though I am doing most of the typing, my kids are directing all of the content.  It is a place where they can tell their stories, show their pictures, and link to the things that interest them in what we are learning. They are very excited about the idea, and I am just as excited to see them learning at home.

Every morning that I take my eldest son to Montessori school, two days a week, he gives me a singular farewell.  He first asks, with much gravity, when I will come to pick him up.  Once I have answered this question, he makes me kneel down to his level, and he takes my face between his hands, and he kisses me solemly on the forehead, like some ancient elder imparting a blessing, and each time he does this I am reminded of how blessed I am.  Each time, I am surprised once more at how good it is for my soul that I am made to kneel and receive on my forehead the blessing of his kiss.

It was a cold, cloudy, sleety day today, one of those days that will consent neither to be truly nice nor to be truly horrible, settling for meteorological mediocrity, which is the worst of all weather.

I decided that the day called for nesting. The kids and I made a pact not to leave the house for anything short of an emergency. We made hot chocolate. We brought our blankets down to the livingroom and watched a movie. We made a tent around one of the radiators and read some stories. We nested.

It reminded me of what Gaston Bachelard has to say about nests in The Poetics of Space.  With nests, he says, “we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world; we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.”  It was just this confidence that we built today in the face of a February day in Canada: the confidence of the nest.

I generally try to make Christmas presents for my kids.  Last year I made them  a set of blocks designed to build castles, and this year I made them wooden shields, with wolves for my eldest, whose middle name means “young wolf”, and hawks for my youngest, whose first name is also the name for a species of small hawk.  They are about two feet by two feet in size and quite heavy, and they came with wooden swords made by the young entrepreneur that I mentioned some time ago, so they would actually be dangerous if I were to let the boys use them as toys, but they are intended instead to hang on the wall as their own personal coats of arms, something that symbolically ties them to our family.

The colours of their shields and the pattern of three animals come from my mother’s Gordon coat of arms, from my father’s Hill coat of arms, and from my wife’s James coat of arms, and the chevron comes from the latter two, so the boys’ personal symbols are integrated into the symbolism of their parents’ families.  Of course, anyone who takes heraldry seriously would be horrified at this kind of unsanctioned alteration of official heraldic devices, but I am less interested in having the shields be authentic than I am in having them be personal and familial.  I want them to be a symbol to my children that, though they are unique and irreplaceable, they are also always a part of a family and a tradition that can give them a place to belong.

This is the gift that I hope they are receiving this Christmas.

So, as I mentioned last month, there will be no Dinner and a Doc this Saturday.  Instead, it had been my plan to send my children off with one relative or another so that I could have my traditional Christmas baking day with my wife.  I was also going to set up the projector this year, so that we could watch movies together as we worked.  I initially proposed an Alfred Hitchcock marathon.  My wife demurred.  She counter-proposed a foodie-movie marathon.  I accepted, and I was intending to post a request for people to recommend their favourite foodie-movies.  Everything was planned.

Unfortunately, life, or the Christmas season rather, has intervened.  It seems that we will be hosting an annual gathering of friends this year, and this Saturday is really the only day that will work for it, and there are no other open Saturdays between now and when the Christmas baking will be needed, so the annual Christmas baking day has become something like an extended Christmas baking week, where we are making this and that whenever we find a few minutes.  It is not exactly what I had planned, or not at all in fact, but it has been something good even so.  It has allowed us to enjoy the baking at a slower pace and over a longer time, and it has also opened opportunities for friends to do some of the baking with us.  I was not tradition perhaps, but it did what the tradition was intended nevertheless.

Of course, this does not mean that those foodie-movies will not get watched someday, so feel free to recommend them anyway.

Also, for those who are wondering, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc:

January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

My sons have had a disappointing fall for exactly the same reason that everyone else has had such an enjoyable one: there has been no snow. There have been some false alarms, of course, when they woke in the morning to see a skiff of whiteness on the grass, rushed excitedly through their morning routines, and ran into the backyard, only to find that no amount of effort would produce snowmen or even snowballs from the tissue deep snow that was melting around them even as they tried. There was great suffering on those days.

This morning, however, this lovely morning, when most of southern Ontario rose dejectedly to the reality of another winter, when commuters everywhere cursed the first car cleaning and driveway shoveling of the year, my sons were elated. At last there was snow, real snow, snow enough, and packing snow besides, and their was nothing short of jubilation in the house. I could hardly get them to eat breakfast, so worried were they that everything would melt again before the had a chance to pile it, roll it, build it, and throw it, but the wait only served to increase their already heady degree of anticipation.

They built a snowman, or rather, I built a snowman under their very close supervision, and they stuck its head full of sticks and leaves and assorted vegetation. They made snowballs, hundreds of them, and peppered the front wall of our porch, which was made to play the roles, one after the other, but in close succession, of pirates, bad-guy-knights, and Darth Vader. They rolled down the hill until the snow, only a degree or so above melting, had soaked through every layer I had put on them. They were cold and wet and entirely fulfilled.

What is more, they distracted me from the December ritual of marking papers long enough to play with them, and I found that maybe I still like the first snow of the year more than I thought I did, and that maybe I can still find some pleasure in building snowmen and throwing snowballs, even if rolling down the hill is now beyond me. Of course, my recovered sense of joy in the snow might have something to do with the fact that I had no car to clean this morning and that I have still not shoveled the driveway, but it was a joy nevertheless, whatever the reasons.

I woke early this morning to go to the market with my father and my youngest son, three generations of family, and it was colder outside than it has been yet this year, with a strong wind blowing from the north into our faces as we made our way home, and my son began to cyy because of the cold, refusing either to walk or to sit in the wagon, and it was inexpressibly right, somehow, that my father and I took turns pulling the wagon of groceries behind us and carrying my crying son, like a living metaphor of familial care through generations.

I had the opportunity to appear on CFRU’s Family Matters show this morning, talking about fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  Though both of my kids are preschoolers, which probably disqualifies me as a homeschooler in a technical sense, there are few enough homeschooling fathers that just my interest in the idea qualified me to appear on the show.  I am rarely as satisfied with what I say as I am with what I write, and this was the case again this morning, but it was an interesting experience for me, and I do not think that my comments misrepresent me.

Those who are interested in hearing the audio can find it in CFRU’s  Program Archive, but the site does not provide links to individual programs, so you will need to select “Sunday: 2009-11-21″ from the initial list and then “8:00:00 – Family Matters” on the list of the day’s programs.

I try to refrain from sharing sentimental anecdotes about my children since these kinds of stories usually entertain only the parents themselves.  I am about to make an exception to that rule, however, so you may either humour me or find something more interesting to read.

As I was putting my eldest son to bed last night, he asked me, “Dad, can we go in a rocket sometime?”

I told him that not everyone can go up in a rocket, just astronauts.  I also told him that being an astronaut would mean lots of learning and practising and work, but that it would be an exciting job to try.  He was very quiet for a minute, so I asked him, “Would you like to be an astronaut?”

“Yes,” he told me gravely, “and Daddy too, so we can hold hands on the moon.”

I suddenly saw the two of us, hand in hand, standing in the loneliness and the darkness of space, tethered to the barren rock only by the tenuous gravity of the moon, and I could think of no better image to express the love of a father and a son.