“You aren’t supposed to lead play, just watch,” the parenting expert voice in the back of my head said. So I sat there on the living room floor and watched, keeping my mouth closed, lest I pass judgment on how my kid was playing.
Even though something felt ‘off’ about this statement, I couldn’t help but see it as the culmination of so much parenting advice – and more strikingly, parent shaming.
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Often, the most beautiful things aren’t neat and tidy, but messy and unexpected. As someone who finds a lack of control stressful, this can be tough for me to deal with! It takes a lot of effort for me to move past something not meeting my expectations to find the good in it.
But I’ve made a real effort to keep my eyes open for these small moments of joy, both in nature and with my kids. I’ve found them in my kids geeking out together over a shared topic, adorable bumblebees in my yard, the way clouds part just-so around the sun, birdsong, and reading to my kids. And these bright flowers in my neighbor’s flower box.
Some psychologists call these small joys “glimmers,” which are opposite of trauma-induced triggers. They can help counteract the everyday annoyances of life and the endless march of our society’s soul-crushing injustices. With our kids, noticing and remembering these times can really help when we’re frustrated with them or just so tired.
Glimmers aren’t a quick fix or easy solution. They won’t solve those aforementioned problems. But they are a way to find more joy, which can be helpful to most of us.
“Can you water your garlic?” I asked my younger son, referring to the elephant garlic we planted in our garden. He loves elephants, so of course we had to plant an elephant plant.
“Sure!” he replied.
Now, did he actually water it? Well, no. He tried, but the rain barrel was out of water and then he got distracted.
Thankfully, the garden isn’t school and watering is not homework. But there is much my kids will learn from it, above and beyond the practical skills that go into planting and cultivating seeds. These lessons are drawn from my own experience, but also heavily influenced from broader points I’ve picked up from the books Braiding Sweetgrass and Lessons from Plants. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.”
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As I finished reading this beautiful book with my younger son, we read the section in the back where the author (Fidgets and Fries) describes how it’s based on her relationship with her nonspeaking autistic son, although he’s older now than the kid in the book. I mentioned that she’s autistic as well, as is her younger son.
“What’s autistic again?” asked my son. “I forgot.”
So I explained to him how it’s a set of ways some people’s brains are different than the average, including differences in communication, reading social cues, interests, sensory perception, and sometimes coordination. (We have multiple neurodivergences in our family, so he’s familiar with the idea of people’s brains being different from the average.)
I then paused and thought about how to phrase what I was going to say next. “I think I might be autistic too. It’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re an adult and have learned some of those skills.” He nodded, not particularly surprised that my brain (or anyone’s in our family) doesn’t work like the average person’s.
Thank you to Tiffany Hammond for writing such a beautiful book that offers both important representation and the opportunity to start and continue important conversations about the beautiful diversity of all of our brains.
“So there’s two regular swings and a baby swing and regular swing and an adaptive swing and regular swing,” I spoke into my phone while trying to maneuver the camera on it so my kids could see the bulletin board in front of me over FaceTime.
They were staying at my parents’ house (thanks mom and dad!) and I was at our neighborhood community center. The bulletin board was covered with photos of options for a future playground at the park across the street from our house. The community center had invited the kids in the neighborhood and after school program to do ranked voting for their favorites. That day was the last day to vote.
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1958? Wow, I didn’t think this book was that old, I thought as I looked at the title page of the classic children’s book Beezus and Ramona. Ramona’s four year old behavior – eating one bite out of each apple in a bag, writing her name on every page of a library book – seems just as relevant 65 years later as it did then.
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My children are dandelions. They are not sturdy, resilient standbys like tulips or delicate, like orchids.
My dandelion children are wild and bright, standing out in the manicured environments that society so often shoves us into.
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Watching our rabbit sniff and scratch at the floor, I wonder what he’s experiencing.
From reading Ed Yong’s brilliant book An Immense World, I know our rabbit’s sight alone is far different from ours. Rabbits don’t have the cone in their eyes that distinguishes between green and red, so they’re essentially red/green colorblind. Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, they have much better peripheral vision than we do, but don’t see particularly well straight in front of them. And that’s just vision – his sense of smell and hearing is likely far different from mine in a way that’s hard to comprehend.
Yong talks about how we try to force our sensory experiences onto other animals and assume they experience the world how we do.
But the fact is, we do it with people too. I just have to put on my husband’s glasses to be reminded of how radically different the visual world is for him. (I have glasses too, but I merely get a headache without them – he can barely see a couple of feet in front of him.) Or watch my kids slosh the unicorn slime from hand to hand that touching it makes me shudder. While all humans have approximately the same sensory systems, we still have radically different experiences of how our bodies take in and process that information.
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Warm weather in January stirs up a lot of ambiguous feelings in me. On one hand – it’s beautiful out! On the other – it’s probably because of climate change! (It’s also called climate chaos for a reason – the up and down unpredictability is part of it.) And back to the other hand – we should enjoy it while we can! In reality, it’s probably a combination of all three.
Bringing kids out in nature and modeling enjoying it is one of the best ways to build lots of emotional and physical skills as well as environmental awareness. You don’t need to get all apocalyptic, but it’s also a chance to draw attention to how it is unseasonably warm and how the climate affects it. You can get curious, asking your kids what they think we can do to help. (It’s very possible they’ve already discussed it in school.) We don’t want to put the whole burden on them though, so be sure to talk about what adults (including yourself) are doing, like Indigenous water protectors fighting oil pipelines or Black and Hispanic activists working to close coal and natural gas plants in their neighborhoods. And of course, all of the people working to build renewable energy!
If you want somewhere to start, check out the Family Climate Justice toolkit I created with Raising Luminaries.
(I originally wrote this post on New Years’ Day and posted it to social media then.)
At least I’ve found one good thing about Elon Musk – as an object lesson for my kids on what kind of person not to be. Both my husband and I are big Twitter users (me for work particularly) and so the kids have heard us complain about the ongoing saga at that particular social media platform.
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