Gender, overthinking parenting, and Queen Mab

Between two buildings of Queen Mab’s school is the memorial Zen garden—a brick courtyard surrounded by kindergartener-high black-eyed Susans, with a long L-shaped sand table and an even-longer water feature made of massive rock slabs that looks like it was lifted straight out of Turkey Run State Park, populated by a few stray goldfish. During recess on hot days, the kids take off their shoes and socks and wade in the water, or scoop mountains and rivers into the sand table, which they flood with water carried from the little waterfall in a cracked green watering can.

One particularly blistering week near the beginning of the school year, Mab came home almost every day wearing the extra outfit from her cubby, with the clothes she had worn to school folded damp in a plastic bag. So every day I had to send her to school with new extra clothes.

Friday morning, though, we forgot the bag of clean clothes on the desk in the entryway, and didn’t realize it until I unbuckled her from her car seat at drop off. Mrs. R eyed Mab’s pink shorts and thought they were short enough that she’d probably be fine, if she was careful.

So I kissed her and told her to keep her pants dry, then drove home.

On the way, though, I started to worry that she would fall in the waterfall and get really soaked and then have nothing to change into. I imagined how she would have to play to avoid that. Carefully. Not with the wild freedom that she always moves with, as she absorbs herself into whatever world she’s currently created for herself. In short, she wouldn’t have nearly as much fun at recess if she had to be self-conscious about keeping her clothes dry, and I didn’t know how many waterfall-hot days they had left.

I supposed I could let her deal with it as the consequences for forgetting her stuff, but to be honest I had forgotten it too, and I’m an adult and been forgetting stuff my whole life and I still haven’t learned my lesson (for example, I forgot to bring the printout of her kindergarten dental form to the dentist only a few weeks before. The receptionist graciously didn’t make me suffer the consequences of my mistake and force me to home for it—she printed off a new copy herself).

Mab’s only five—she has her whole life to learn about forgetting stuff, but only a few weeks out of these few years to go outside with her friends and splash in the waterfall during recess. I was just reading yet another online article about kids’ development suffering from not playing outside—climbing on the rocks and sliding into the water would probably do her more long-term good than suffering the consequences of forgetting her stuff, anyway.

It’s only an eight minute drive. So a less-than-20 minute round trip to take her stuff to her. What did I have to do that morning? Not much. Just sit outside with my iced coffee while B eats sidewalk chalk.

I could give up 20 minutes of that for her.

So I did.  

What sorts of lessons did I teach her, by saving her from the consequence of forgetting?

I taught her that I’m here for her as much as I can, as much as is appropriate for her at this age, to help make up for what she lacks. I taught her that her time is valuable to me, too. I taught her that it’s important to me that she have the freedom to get messy, because as Apple Jack said, “Gettin’ messy is often a side effect of hard work,” and fear of getting dirty will paralyze her.

Someday (probably sooner than later) she’ll notice the approving tone when people see her all dolled up in her favorite froufrou outfits and her stealthily-applied eye shadow originally purchased for a dance recital and say she’s “all girl.” And she’ll want more of that approval. I don’t blame her—I like approval, too. And she’ll start to figure out what being “all girl” means.

I hope she knows that I don’t care if she’s “All-girl” or only 73% girl or just 18% girl (that 18% is made almost entirely of tulle, by the way) or always neat and clean and careful about her appearance—that I will go out of my way to make sure she doesn’t have to. If she gets mud on her tights and tutu because she’s chasing bugs or doing somersaults down the front yard, that’s fine with me. In fact, I hope she does.

When I picked her up from school that afternoon, of course, I discovered that the dash for extra clothes had been unnecessary—Mrs. R was right, and her shorts were short enough that she hadn’t gotten her clothes wet playing.

But as she climbed into the car, she gleefully announced, “Mommy! Mommy! Guess what?! I touched a fishy!”

“Ooh! What did it feel like?”

“Cool! It was so soft and smooth!”

Ten years from now when she forgets something my response may be different, but right now this is what I want her to learn. That exploration and adventure are worth the risk, and that fish are soft, not gross. And it only took me 20 minutes to do (and a lot of overthinking)

Parenting, prisms, and Corpus Christi

Last Sunday my family and I visited the church I grew up in. My parents are still there, the sort of people you could call pillars of the congregation, who between the two of them have taught almost every Sunday school class and participated in almost every ministry over the past twenty-some years. Because of that, even though I haven’t been an active member for over ten years, I still have an “in”—I mention my parents’ names and immediately everyone knows where I fit in the picture. People who have never met us know where my sister and I live and who’s had a baby recently.

I like coming back to the place where so many of my ideas about life and God and community were shaped. I have a lot of wonderful memories of love and friendship in those halls, and there are many people there who I look forward to seeing. My parents worship there. There’s hot chocolate mix and hazelnut creamer to put in my coffee during social hour—it’s like caffeinated Nutella. But there’s a reason—a lot of reasons, actually—why I haven’t been an active part of that church since I graduated from high school. Some of them I’ve mentioned in other posts, and some of them align with the theories of handwringing bloggers bemoaning the departure of millennials from the church.

My kids’ initial response to the service (it’s not like they’ve never been to my parents’ church before, but it had been awhile) was how I imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder accidentally stumbling upon a rave. But they caught on pretty fast and Queen Mab told me later that she “liked the music.”

When it was time for communion, I decided to stick with our own family rules and let the kids participate as they do in our home church. If you’ve seen my facebook posts about my kids and communion, you know it’s important to them. Mab wants to be a priest or a pastor when she grows up so she can give communion, and B will randomly point out the window at Church Across the Street to announce “Body’a Ch’ist” and will put tiny invisible pinches of something in my palm while whispering, “Body Ch’ist, daketa you.” So even though it’s not a thing at my parents’ church to give communion to little kids, I figured that since they both had been baptized (as infants, but whatever) and it wasn’t like there was anyone policing the aisles (the plates were being passed by guys from the youth group) I would go with my own best judgment.

Mab passed the plates and got her little cracker and juice cup like a pro, and B saw what we were doing and stuck his little hand in for a cracker as well. But then he did something he’s never done before.

Instead of putting it in his mouth, he tried to feed it to my dad, then to me. We both tried to explain to him that it was the “Body of Christ,” and I even tucked it in his palm with the usual “Body of Christ, broken for you,” to try to make it clear to him. But he just grinned at me and shoved it in my mouth, repeating, “Body’a Ch’ist,” and I realized—

He thinks this is a game. He thinks we’re only playing communion and doesn’t recognize it as the real thing.

I’ve always wondered what B means when he says “Body’a Ch’ist”—how does he define it? I’d been worrying that maybe he just thinks of it as “snack in church,” but apparently his definition is more nuanced. He’s taken it from Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors, familiar faces and complete strangers, as a thin white cracker or hunk of chewy brown bread, standing in line or at the altar, beside a firepit and in the middle of 6^th Street, but this was the first time he’d refused it (not counting the time he held the bread in his cheek until the end of the service, then when the rector came around to say hi and held out his hand to B, carefully pulled out the soggy wad and laid it in the open hand. Sorry, Father Bradley!).

Apparently the ritual makes the difference.

My feelings on this are mixed. I’m happy that he’s learning to appreciate something that I’ve come to value deeply, and that his understanding is a *smidge* deeper than I’d been afraid. But in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi, she describes stories propagated to encourage lay piety and adoration of the Host which featured an innocent child refusing to participate in the Eucharist, thereby revealing that the Host had not, in fact, been properly consecrated due to the priest’s impiety. And I don’t particularly want my kids to actually think that this other way of celebrating communion is fake.

Ways of celebrating communion have been on my mind lately, because within our own home church, there are many parents who are making different choices about their children’s participation in communion than we are. It’s been traditional in this congregation to wait until 5^th grade, but participating younger is allowed. Our pastor would give it to every child who reaches for it, but she respects that other parents have their own reasons for letting their children wait. These conversations in our home congregation brought to mind a lesson my dad gave once about communion, years ago, at that very same church where B refused communion, standing right where the praise band was set up on Sunday.

He told us about coming to our denomination (which was then known as the Independent Christian Church) from having grown up Nazarene, and worrying about the new denomination’s practice of weekly communion. In the Nazarene church, communion is monthly, or even quarterly, which made it a special event, outside the everyday, and he was afraid that if he participated every week, it would lose its sacredness.

He discovered that any sense of specialness that was lost by partaking weekly was made up for by the constant reminder of Christ’s love and presence. But then, instead of announcing that our church’s way was the best way and he was glad to have switched over to doing it “right,” he pulled out a prism on a chain and let it hang in the air, catching the spotlights and scattering them like sparks.

Both practices, he explained, brought out different facets of communion and enhanced its beauty.  I’ve never forgotten the image of him in a dark suit, holding out that glittering prism.

It makes it harder to snark about a way of worshiping that I left behind a long time ago when I remember that this particular way of doing church is one of the facets on the prism that helps diffract the light into brilliant rainbows. A flawed facet, sure, just like all of them, and yet still clear enough for me to have met God there, over and over, in the songs and the prayers and the people, until I stumbled my way down the path that led me where I am now.  And it reminds me that the different choices that other parents make for their children often emphasize different truths. While I want my children to value the things that I value, I also want them to learn to respect the perspectives that other people take and to see how those perspectives help transform white light into dazzling colors. It’s not that everything is true or that everyone is right, but I suspect that there may be more ways to be right than to be wrong.