One thing that they talked about in MER this weekend was different standards and methods in the context of raising children, the laissez-faire versus the structured. Although most fathers freely admitted the former, especially when there was work to be done around homework or in regard to their reaction to the mother's uncontrolled disciplining or frustration thereof, our stance is somewhat even more extreme.
I always get the feeling, indeed sometimes it is fairly clearly expressed, where I'm told that I just want the best of everything, the schools, the experiences, the structure. I want to cloisture them, whereas he would prefer they just have a childhood. There's no need for them to be in good schools, or for that matter, it seems, in good company, they somehow magically, will turn out alright, he would rather them do what they love. There is a sense of, you just want to them to do what 'you' want or think best.
On one hand, that sentiment, though painful, is helpful to hear and think about. On the other, I'm might be the wrong crowd to consider this idea of doing things for love, for I love many things in life and yet don't have a particularly strong sense of what I want to do. I recognize that one can love things without having a real passion and that appreciation and direction are two very different things, neither of which children are naturally inclined toward.
It would be wrong of me to say that I am not definite on what I want. I want them them to be responsible, to be careful, to be meticulous, even. I want them to be people who prepare, who check, who put in effort because I believe there is a discipline in that that comes as much out of love, as out of nuerotism. I don't necessarily want them to work hard all the time but I wouldn't be amused if they didn't have the opportunities, talent, and inclination to apply themselves.
I want them to be people for whom 'life is short' means you care about things and enjoy stretching their minds and their energy to understand people and culture, not that it's a lark and you should do anything you want, especially where that means nothing at all. I want them to love and demand more of themselves than that, to believe as a choice and not as a default. But that doesn't mean I don't want them to enjoy their childhood. I would be the last person, to take away an aesthetic appreciation of the world, from my own children or to mix ambition with aesthetic.
I had, by all accounts, a very naturalistic and generally innocent childhood. Now, that doesn't mean my parents didn't have me in reading classes and drama lessons, or that they never had fights about how much expense or involvement this necessitated. When I was little, my dad worked odd and sometimes late hours, every morning, he would leave me kraft exercise books of pre-written sums and divisions of advanced math, I would do them and leave them out for him to correct when he got home. Sometimes I would put a question mark where I couldn't read his handwriting. Z. seems often pre-disposed to think my parents overly and unnecessarily mad and intense but for me, it was a game, like receiving presents of a father's attention.
Maybe his point is that you only let them be when you don't push at all, but how can one even believe, or contemplate that I wouldn't try, to allow my children to experience what comes naturally in this world? Where in the world does it say that you can't both have strict expectations and standards, yet be the first likely parent when the time comes, to take your kid out of school for a year to just travel?
I only have to recall the last time that I cooked a fresh, hand-picked countryside asparagus, or that my heart still hurts sometimes when I remember looking out my car window at the California sunset, a skyglass of cobalt blue, burnt orange and grey, to know that I want my children to know that same fullness of just living. I want them to see and love God in the details, to know how big and thick roses grow, how artichokes smell in the spring and to run on a white sand beach, or in a deep and remote historical cavern in China, untramelled and know that life is a gift.
