Bloom

When I was the still the parent of just one young child in elementary school, I used to say that your parenting was likely to get results for what you focus on most.  I said it with more confidence than I would make any such statement now that I am a more veteran parent.  I know now that I do not parent my children in a vacuum, that they are who they are from the start in many ways and that we control very little that actually happens on this complex and spinning wonder that we call Earth.  I wouldn't make many universal statements now much beyond "love good" and "hate and violence bad".  Even then, there would be qualifiers.

That said, things have turned out pretty much as I expected they would with the Girl when I said things like that back then.  Except that my expectations were cerebral and reality is emotional - very, very emotional.  Emotional in bad ways and good ways. Very.  Both.


Back then, I was talking about my basic philosophy of parenting, which I would call values-based, if we must be like that.  My philosophy hasn't really changed - just my whole idea of results.  I no longer count on results, even though I have gotten them.  I fully realize that the results may have happened for reasons having nada to do with my parenting - there are too many variables even in our neurology, and certainly too many in the wide world to believe that we can have a real handle on cause and effect.  I know now that the chaos comes anyway.  No matter what you do, it comes.  Parent for love, parent for hope - don't attach yourself to results:  that's what I feel we should probably do, if we could, which I can't usually.

Still.

Back then, I used to read the studies on parenting styles - all about whether people were authoritarian, authoritative or permissive (you wanted to be authoritative, the research said).  I knew, though, that my parenting wasn't a good match to any of the three - I was all over the grid.  This can suggest that one is too flustered to have a parenting style but that wasn't it - I knew my parenting always had a unifying theme; it just wasn't about control, being firm but fair or being fun and cool either.  It was about my values.    I have always been very permissive about some things and downright authoritarian about others.  I don't believe kids can get a strong message of what's important to you if your style is the same for everything.  I figure there is no room to sweat the small stuff because the big stuff will take all of my effort to impart.  I am intense about kindness, compassion and social responsibility.  I am loose about messes, etiquette and matching clothes.  For a start.

Sure enough, years later, the Lone Star Girl is kind, compassionate and socially responsible.  Sure enough, she is messy, annoying, loud (and possessed of terrible table manners).  She often embarrasses me.  Other kids seem so much more neat and polite and appropriate alot of the time.

Guess what, though?

Few of the polite and well-dressed kids seem able to articulate any clear values.  They don't stand for anything or stand up for anything much of the time.  They are more interested in clothes and purses (or, for the artsy ones, music and shows and comics) than in cleaning up the contaminated land that makes little children sick or in eating low enough on the food chain that there is enough food for everyone.  They are very much about appearances and entertainments.

Sometimes, I am so overwhelmed by my considerable duties these days in my role as the Manners Police that I forget that a lovely and polite child who doesn't care deeply for humanity is not what I wanted anyway.

And sometimes my Girl reminds me.

Last night, she firmly but appropriately pinned down the State Toxicologist from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality at a meeting about what sort of study the TCEQ would do in Hillcrest to determine the contaminants in the neighborhood.  It has been amply proved that the soil and water in Hillcrest are contaminated with all kinds of nasty things and that the blood of the people there is similarly contaminated.  Still more study is needed, they say, to prove that permits were violated, so that anything can be done.

She told him it didn't matter if the permits were violated.  The state of the area was a fact and if the permits that the TCEQ was issuing were resulting in that, why were they issuing them?  Shouldn't they have higher standards?  That man gulped and shook a little and said they would have to agree to disagree, that he thought their permits included safe parameters.  He knew she was right.  He knew he was lying.  Everyone did.  He was ashamed to lie to her.  Her eyes blazed with the righteousness of the Light.  She was magnificent.

So many adults came by to tell her, as they left, how well she had spoken.  They were proud to have her among them.  Her young Light was a great hope to them, a future.  Days like that make me want to retire as the Manners Police.  They make me remember that we always wanted a Girl just like this one.