Kitchen or the Egg

I was talking with my friend Nora the other day and, as usual, she hit on some fascinating ideas around parenting. She just has a way of wording complex thoughts that makes them so accessible. She’ll spit out her coffee laughing when she reads that, but it’s true, she’s very good at observing and relating profound, subtle truths.

In this conversation, Nora shared a story about her weekend. While deciding whether to attend the local Halloween dance with the kids, she realized, after years of going to it, that they never really enjoyed themselves. So this year she thought, why do it? She asked her family if anyone wanted to go, and they all said no. Except for her younger daughter. Who asked to go with Daddy. Surprise on both counts! Her daughter spent a long time getting dolled up, then off they went.

They returned home within about an hour, if that. Nora wondered what had happened that they came back so early. Her husband said that it was fine. She did what she wanted to do: danced a little bit, connected with some other kids, watched for a while, then asked to go home. Everything was good. And Nora could see for herself that her daughter was alright, that she had a good time. Her girl didn’t leave “early” because something bad had happened. She left simply because she wanted to.

Nora and I wondered together how many times we, as parents, live in an equation of “time invested in getting there” vs. “time spent there” for a given activity? How often do we foster our own problems by trying to get a kid to “want” to stay longer at something just to make something feel more “worth it?” To. us. How often do we do the reverse, try to get our children to leave an activity because we’re done?

We also considered our own personal examples - how long have we, even without the children, unhappily stayed somewhere just because of the effort it took to get there?

How might our lives flow better if we were more in tune with what is instead of what should be or what is our due?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.