I’ve been sitting with a couple of family-ish things on my mind lately, picked up from about the net.
One was that over at Ask Moxie there was a discussion about how to have a happy childhood. It’s a great topic because after all, next to raising responsible adults, having happy kids is probably the number one thing you want to do as a parent.
But I had such a visceral reaction to it that I had to slow down and take a look.
I do have friends who had what they would qualify as happy childhoods and with them, maybe because I knew some of them in their/our childhood, I mostly can see it. Mostly, I say, because of course each family has its hardships and foilbles. But I also have some friends and many acquaintances whose childhoods were decidedly unhappy and I suppose on some level that has become more of a standard in my mind.
When body-language-less people on the Internet say they had a happy childhood, my first (and unfair) reaction is often to think: well, obviously you’re still in denial.
When I think of making a good home for Noah I can come up with a zillion ways that I think we can make it – positive, healthy, all these good words. But I also am aware that some things may not be as positive. There will always be the imprint of his missing sister. Perhaps when he’s at a particularly vulnerable age one of my books will take off and someone will track down this blog in some archive and my parents will flip out, or maybe Carl’s workaholism will lead to a heart attack at an early age and that will be scary at the least. And those are just a few of the oh, ten thousand things I can think of.
To shoot for “a happy” childhood, something sort of foreign to me, seems like a labyrinthine task in the face of reality.
(And I suppose I am also saying that my/our childhood was unhappy… but that’s not quite right either. It had depths of despair that also resulted in living with a lot of fear a lot of the time. But there were also good times, quite a lot of them. I suppose though, on the whole, where I am on it now is that it’s sort of like a white can of paint. You can throw in a little black and not really notice it greying, but after you throw in a certain amount it definitely starts to cease being white. It wasn’t a black, bleak, horrid childhood at all. But it was in those shades of grey, because even when bad things were not actually happening, the taint of it coloured our perceptions.)
~~
Another similar moment was when people were talking about making their kids do chores on another blog. I am all for everyone in a household pitching in – I think it empowers kids (despite the inevitable disgruntlement) to accomplish a chore; it’s instant gratification, and they learn the skill. I also think it’s just a part of living together and being socialized. The summers I was at camp as camper and counsellor both there was something very healthy about the way everyone took care of their space, and the way clearing the table or making the campfire was rotated.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, “making kids do chores” sets off a lot of screaming and throwing of things and scrubbing the bathtub crying in fear that because it wasn’t cleaned right the first time my mother would leave.
In the idealized-future-family-world in my head, I see Noah and I cleaning together with good music on, and none of this: go away and do the chore! thing. I know it won’t actually go down that way, but I hope for something that feels, underneath, collaborative – even if it’s enforced collaboration.
If I’m going to err on either side of the equation, it will probably be to let Noah off chores a bit too often. I just can’t see the make.
~~
Carl ended up having to work a lot this weekend: 7 pm – 4 am last night, 11 am – 3 pm and 6 pm to… whenever he stops, tonight. (He slept 4 am – 11 am, of course.) I was glad for having gotten a break Saturday morning before the madness began, because I do need breaks. I was hoping to get another today and it was a little disappointing that I didn’t.
At the same time something has shifted the last little while: although there’s lots I need to do and can’t when I’m on baby-duty, and that part is frustrating, I no longer have that perhaps new parent feeling that I need a break so that I can be me, or so that I can have regular time. It’s a shades-of-grey difference inside me, but it is just kind of that – I am me, when Noah’s around. The mom hat, for the most part, fits well enough. It’s my every day wear. I still need time to do other things, wear other hats and get back to some other things gradually.
But I don’t need that break to feel myself, if that makes sense. It was a nice realization, even if I’m having trouble putting it into words.
You know, as Noah gets older, he’s going to get very excited about helping you. Helping put away the dishes, helping make things in the kitchen, helping to wash windows and cabinets. I mean, seriously, my kids love to swiffer and to wipe windows (badly) and if I give ‘em a spray bottle with vinegar water, they’ll swipe at anything. They go through periods where transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer is their idea of a fun old time.
So I spend a certain amount of time trying to figure out if there’s some way to keep that joyfulness about chores. Of course there ISN’T. Because being grown up enough to stand on stools and wash the dishes all by yourselves just isn’t exciting when you’re ten.
But I don’t think it’s unrealistic to imagine house-care as a pretty pleasant joint task. Put on the good music, divide and conquer, reward yourselves with a Saturday lunch at the local healthy hippy-dippy sandwich shop where there’s music out on the lawn.
I think kids with responsibilities toward the house and the family, tasks that they can accomplish and that make a difference in everyone’s quality of life, feel better about themselves. And I’m guessing that you don’t go from “everyone do this all together” to “this house needs to be cleaned every [other] weekend, so we can either do this together and get it done so I can drive you to the movies, or I can do it by myself and the natural consequence will be that I’m too tired to take you to the mall for those new … [well, maybe we'll be downloading everything we want by then]” happens overnight. Which is to say, I think there’s a big vast space in between no responsibilities/no sense of personal power and the forced scrubbing of the toilet.
I didn’t have a particulary happy childhood relationship with my parents, myself. Oddly enough, one of the sets of memories that really stays with me, in a more or less okay way, is the memory that on Saturday afternoons, everyone had a cleaning chore and did it. But I can easily imagine how joint work could become oppressive, if handled wrong.