under construction
motherhood seems to come with inherent questions to be faced daily, whether we realize we are facing them are not:
are we to measure the truth of what we read against the truth of our own experience, or are we to measure everything we experience against the truth of what we read? motherhood is not without its sacred texts or its powerful experiential learning. how can we weave these things together into an authentic version of motherhood, or moreover, an authentic way of being human?
on most days, for me, experience trumps book knowledge. i tend to draw much of my parenting tendencies from my own experience of being a child. there are many things about how i was raised that i want to duplicate for my children. i expressed one of these ideals in my post about neighbors, in which i called to mind a time when “there were no scheduled play dates or activities. our parents simply let us loose to waltz through each other’s back doors and live out our days covered in sweat, mosquito bites, and melted popsicle juice.”
but a comment on this post reminded me that we cannot simply transplant the parenting habits of decades past into our lives without having wrestle with our fair share of questions. lane writes:
“I am challenged to find a balance between encouraging the friendships and life lessons of playing outside and the very real dangers that lurk in the spaces that we cannot supervise. How old to ride a bike on the street without a parent? How old to walk four houses down alone to play? How reliable is the adorable dog playing in the yard across the street? How well should you know a family (neighbor, classmate, whatever) before your child has unrestricted access to their house?
A Lebanese coworker of mine commented how Americans are the most generous nation of people to respond in a crisis, but as individuals, we keep our doors locked tight (figuratively and literally!). We DON’T typically know our neighbors, and we often don’t bother to try. I wonder how we can manage to be both at once?”
these are excellent questions, lane, and ones that move me out of the state of idealistic nostalgia and into a more real and complicated place. in fact, this is the place to which i keep returning, whether i want to or not. this place seems to be on the way to everywhere else i want to go. it’s a place of CONSTRUCTION.
what's a blog post w/out a cheesy stock photo?
i started this blog because i perceived that there is a gap between our cultural models of motherhood and the kind of mother i aspire to be. after looking high and low for models, mentors, and reading material to fill this gap, i realized that no ready-made solution exists. i will have to build one to suit me. we all will. so much of a mother’s job is construction.
and here, in the gap between the outdoor play of past and present and in response to all the questions about bicycle boundaries, strangers, and yard dogs, no ready-made solution exists. again, i will have to build one to suit me. we all will. so much of a mother’s job is construction.
i admit that i would often rather settle for a ready-made model and avoid the messy work and on-the-job training involved in building something new. but just knowing that there are other women out there donning their hard hats, scaling towers of literature, and descending into their own histories, actually makes this motherhood experiment fun. i’m so grateful for the company of so many who are committed to crafting something that is good and real.
Tags: construction, experience, lane, literature, motherhood, neighbors, on-the-job-training, truth
May 14th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
I am very fortunate that I have raised my kids in two VERY community minded and friendly neighbourhoods thus far. In the first city, we literally went from house to house, there were always kids playing in the street and running between yards, and everyone looked out for everyone else’s kids and property. Our street was one of the most sought after streets for real estate for these reasons.
In our new neigbourhood, we are a little distanced, mostly because we live in an upper-middle class area where parents are often helicopter-parenting, whether at the park or at school. Seeing how we are more free-range, we tend to seek out other free-range minded parents. Luckily, Sacha and his best friend wander between each other’s places (although he is only 3, so I still need to make sure SOMEONE knows where he is) and play outside for hours at a time. They come in dirty with big grins on their faces, and I know that I must be doing something right.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Im the mom in the neighborhood that all the mother’s talk about…i let my kids walk alone to the cove to play…im the mom who let’s my kids ride their bikes around the block. EEEEEK!!! I am surprised child services hasn’t come and hauled my ass to jail!!!! Don’t get me wrong, I worry about what or who is lurking around the corner. i worry every second as they walk to the cove or ride their bikes alone, But I choose to construct a life for them that let’s them have some room to wander away a bit from my eagle eye…..even though that eagle eye is watching them,,,,, though they don’t know it.