Earth Day Photos and Thoughts

We spent Earth Day with our unschooling friends at the park – making slushies, eating homegrown salads, feeding ducks the day old bread from the grocery store and making pinecone bird feeders and solar oven nachos. The kids ran wild through the grass and the playground while the mamas chatted or crocheted with plarn. The wind kicked up before we had the opportunity to make newspaper pots for our sunflower or pumpkin seeds – we’ll do it another day instead.

The day was laced with my thoughts of my father and our relationship and my relationship with my son. It hurts me to think I have so few meaningful memories of being with my father. Or so few stories to share with my son. I wonder what I’m carrying on and what I’m rising above.

At what point do we stop being (or feeling like) a child to our parents? At what point do we cease to need them, to desire their approval or affection. Never, I suppose. But it feels strange to me to ache like a little girl for the kind of father he wasn’t able to be. To want to hug him when the only time I felt his touch in the past 15 years was when I sobbed on his lifeless chest. It feels surprising I didn’t miss these things before.

If there is one thing I hope to do right, it is never to leave my child holding moments that will haunt him; to leave many more memories of my love than of my shortcomings. It’s not that I blame my father and although I’m disappointed he couldn’t be more of what I needed as a little girl or even an adult, I’m not angry. I just don’t ever want Zeb to face the loss of a parent with the additional burden of memories you don’t want to remember them by.

It hurts me to realize my dad bought into the idea that “what’s wrong with youth today” is a lack of discipline and instead never saw that his attention and affection were all that was needed to keep me safe. He never understood the desire of a daughter to make her father smile, if only she feels his unconditional love. I certainly felt his unconditional love and pride as an adult, when he no longer had a fear of who I would grow up to be.

I look at Zeb and the mistakes we’ve already made and how it has shaped him thus far and wonder how it was that I didn’t see it earlier. As a parent, how can we not see the pain or humiliation we inflict on our children in the name of “teaching” or being a “good parent” or raising a “good person”? How often do we really take the time to consider what being a good parent means and what the real effects of our actions are on our children? Does it really mean being “the mean mommy”, breaking our child’s will or leaving them to hurt alone? We all do the best we can but how often do we question what we think we know and try to find another, hopefully better way?

That’s how I wish to be different as a parent. I always want to question what is normally accepted as truth or tradition. I also want to look deeper at what I’m really leaving my child - whether it’s a memorial of affection or one of regret. I want to be a safe place for him to land in a crazy world; the parent *he* needs me to be and not the one society dictates I should be. Because he already is a good person. And I don’t want to mess that up.