Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I had a marathon phone conversation with my friend last night.  We talked babies and caught up.  I love hearing about her care of her granddaughter who is a week older than my grandson.  I also like hearing the truth about the ups and downs of our relations with our kids around their kids.  Finally people are opening up about the experience, and like any other, it is complicated.  I just read an interesting book by Alison Gopnik called "The Carpenter and the Gardener", about her observations as a grandparent about the parenting stresses on people today.  She makes a distinction between the carpenter who thinks he/she is building a person and the gardener tending a garden but with respect for how it grows and the surprises a garden brings.  When people ask me about parenting I usually say think of the the baby as coming from another planet, then ask, "What did I get?  Who is this little being?"  Our children are not clones of us, and part of the joy is seeing who they become and how they are different from us.  I have four kids and they couldn't be more different.  Yes, there are threads, but in the same environment they've turned out so uniquely.  I don't "know" them better than anyone, in fact, they surprise me still.  When I had my first child I read him books I liked, and then books he gravitated towards - mythology and mysteries.  A few of those books worked for the second child, but she loved books about horses.  Then the third loved science and sci fy, then the forth wanted fairy tales and Roahl Dahl.  Yes, they all read some of the same books, especially as toddlers, but soon after they demanded what interested them, not me and not their siblings.  They were their own persons right from the get go.  Molding a child is impossible and disrespectful to who that child is.  They aren't here to fulfill our unmet dreams.  They're here to show us the wonder of development and the joy of diversity.  We learn from them.  I've read a lot of books I never would have left to my own devices, and encountered new worlds through them.  Who's molding who?!