The brown flower pot was criss-crossed with gold paint, highlighting the cracks where my child had glued the pieces together. A chunk of the top was missing, a section we couldn’t find.
This broken pot was not an accident. In fact, it was an arts and crafts project at church. But there’s been no lack of shattered pots in our household, physical or metaphorical.
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It’s really easy to say “no” as a parent. No, you can’t have candy at bedtime. No, you can’t play video games for another 20 minutes. No, you need to stop kicking your brother. Not saying “no” can end up with having no boundaries and no limits on your kids. Not good.
But as a parent, I’ve also discovered the power of saying “Yes, and…”
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“I swear, this hike felt a lot easier when I was 15,” I said to my kids, huffing as we hauled up what seemed like the endlessly steep mountain.
I had promised an “easy, fun, not that long” hike. I was right that it wasn’t that long. What I had forgotten was that it was nearly straight up, complete with patches of steep, smooth rock. It had rained the night before, making everything slippery as hell.
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Sometimes your kids take a cautionary tale as an questionable opportunity.
When I was about eight – old enough for my front teeth to be permanent – my mom sent me off to the park for the first time without her. I was with our next door neighbor, who was a few years older than me. He was supposed to be the responsible one.
I was quite fond of hanging upside down from various items of playground equipment, including things that probably shouldn’t have been hung upside down from. Including the bars on the infamous merry-go-round.
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“Hey, does anyone want to go down to the creek?” I asked my kids, who were sprinting across the sprawling playground equipment at a local park.
“No, we’re racing,” my older son replied.
“Well, I want to go down to the creek,” I said, with a hint of whine in my voice.
“You can,” he stated, plain as day.
“That’s true, I can!” The fact that they could play on their own, that they were big enough not to be constantly supervised and could come get me if there was a problem popped into my head like a cartoon lightbulb.
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“You should be so available to play that your children never need to ask,” read the meme. Or least that’s how I read it. (Although it really was close to it.) But what if they always want more than I have to offer? I thought in desperation.
Other memes or oversimplified advice extolled the virtues of connection, especially when it came to getting your kids to do what you want or need them to do, like brush their teeth or come to the table for dinner. Some even made the connection explicit, saying that your kids will be cooperative if only you’re connected enough with them. Of course that message implies the opposite – that if they aren’t cooperative, it’s because you aren’t connected enough.
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“Baby Yoda left,” my older son told me as I was tucking him in. He was referring to our Baby Yoda Tamagotchi, which eventually leaves with the Mandalorian if you take good care of him.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah, I looked to see how Baby Yoda was feeling and he was gone. And I was like, Oh, that’s how he’s feeling,” he said.
“Mmmm, well, you know something?” I whispered to him. “That’s how it feels to me with you.”
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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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“Nothing is wasted in nature,” I whispered to myself as I dumped moldy strawberries in our composter.
I despise wasting food. There are so many things wrapped up in the production of our food – from how farm workers are treated to the amount of fertilizer used – that throwing it away feels a bit like sacrilege. But we bought far too much for our Christmas fruit salad and the extra got shoved back in the fridge with the other holiday leftovers. So into the composter it had to go.
I at least had the solace that this food wouldn’t be wasted – it would break down into good compost to feed our garden next fall. Just like the fallen leaves in the forest feed the insects and fungus, which in turn feed the roots of the trees and other plants.
In fact, this is idea that nothing is wasted in nature is a mantra I’ve been trying to adopt in life far beyond our composter.
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