Parenting

I’ve been sharing a few things on Meridian that I wrote while I was still a young mother that was collected into a pink book that now sits on my shelf.

My daughter dances. I remember watching her out the window when she was young, arms out-stretched, palms toward the sky, leaping and twirling and full of life, moving to music only she could hear.

As she has grown, she dances still. When most of us walk into a room, she dances. As she does the dishes, scraping scraps dutifully down the drain, she dances. She dances in front of picture windows so she can see how she moves, she dances when she walks in the door from school to show us a new step she’s learned, dances because there is something inside of her that is light and must dance.

So this explains why one night when she and her dad were grocery shopping she was dancing down the aisles of the supermarket, a low tango right past the tomato sauce, a lilting turn with a cocked chin before the Hamburger Helper. But the last move was an unexpected one both for her and for the grocery cart because she turned right into it, upsetting its brimming contents all over the aisle.

I can see this event in horrifying slow motion. The tomatoes hitting the floor with a squirt like a food commercial. The cans of green beans rolling fifteen feet. Bread smashed with the pattern of the cart on top of them. And the humiliation of it all when the word came over the store intercom, “Clean-up on aisle 16”

Laura looked up at her dad, fear behind her eyes, and then he did the most remarkable thing. He laughed. He laughed until she could, too, which took a moment because she had something to say first. “I was afraid, Dad.”

“What were you afraid of?” he asked.

“I was afraid you’d say I was stupid.”

“I could never say that,” he said as they turned the cart back over and retrieved what they could from the floor. No wonder she loves her dad.

I’ve done some thinking since that day when they both came home, arms intertwined, even closer than they had been before they left. What if it had been different? What if he had gotten mad at her, made her feel stupid, diminished, stopped her dancing with a withering frown?

We don’t want to stop our children’s dancing, for we start out life, each dancing in our own way until something smashes it out of us. We learn that we are wrong, make mistakes, fall on our faces, knock over grocery carts in the middle of our best pirouettes-and we stop dancing.

So we have decided something at our house. We have decided that both kids and parents make mistakes, and we don’t punish or berate anybody for that. Openly defy the rules, fight with a sibling, talk back to a parent-there are instant and sure consequences for these. But break a glass, disappoint yourself on a test, fumble while you learn, find out you didn’t know as much as you thought you did-even leave the hose running and flood the basement—we have a phrase that covers it. We say, “Those things happen.” And then we mop up and go on.

We say this phrase for a reason. It is because life teaches too many of us to be fearful. We feel we have to put up a facade of a perfect performance not to be belittled or not to dislike ourselves. Our self-images are so fragile that we cannot admit mistakes.

We learn to build walls of defense to protect ourselves. But the person who cannot make a mistake cannot grow-cannot be free. Every move has to be carefully calculated. He learns to try fewer and fewer things. She wants safety above all else.

I don’t want children whose primary concern is safety. I want them to blunder and try again, to dance in their own way and knock into whatever happens to be there. After all, those things happen when you are mortal and human and incomplete.

I don’t want to still the music in their souls. Laura dances. In the cool of evening, I like to watch her dance, expressing a love of life and an exuberance that marks her eternal soul. She hasn’t knocked over a grocery cart in a long time.