3 ways in which parents are like God (and 3 ways we aren’t–yet)

September 21, 2016September 21, 2016trishmercer 1 Comment

I’ve always known that parenthood is how God teaches us to be like Him, but now that I’ve been at it for 25 years, I feel like I’m finally understanding some of those aspects. For example:

1) God WANTS to hear from us. Wherever, whenever. I know this, because currently our family is spread over the country. Five of my nine children are at home, one’s serving an LDS mission, and three are away at college. My husband also works out of state, so connecting with everyone doesn’t always happen. But on some Mondays (the day my missionary son can email home) I find that I’ve chatted, emailed, skyped, texted, or messaged everyone in my family. Those are successful days when I feel as if everyone’s still connected.

BUT, how I am not like God is that by the evening, I AM DONE! My kids will tell you that there comes a point when I loudly announce, “I do NOT want to TALK or even SEE any more children! I NEED QUIET TIME!”

Invariably this occurs after these children have already been read and prayed away to bed, and they sneak into my room while I’m trying to work on my computer to annoy me with something irrelevant. After my explosion, and they retreat to their rooms, sure enough, that’s when one of my away-children will pop up to chat online, or my husband will skype about something.

You should see the look I give my poor husband when he skypes at those moments. “Ah,” he’ll say, “one of those pecked-to-death-by-ducks days. I’ll make this brief—”

Sometimes (ok, often) I lose it.

But God never runs out of patience, or wants time to Himself, because He doesn’t deal with time. (That still boggles my mind.) He’s got all the non-existent time in the world, and there’s never a queue for those waiting on Him.

I know this, because I’ve prayed at all hours of the day and night, and have never heard celestial bellows of, “I Have Had It With These Children—Today, I Am Done!”

Nope, He’s never going to do that.

2) When you truly love God, you just want to be with Him. I know this, because when I have been patient and kind with my kids (something I pray for every single day—“PLEASE help me be patient and kind!”) they actually want to be with me.

This occurred to me on Sunday as my youngest children squished me on the pew at church. My preschooler is getting too heavy to be on my lap, but since he’s the last, I tolerate it even as my legs lose feeling. My nine-year-old tries to lean on me at the same time because she’s too big for my lap, and my thirteen-year-old will lean on the other side because I’m convenient for when he falls asleep five minutes into the service.

And so I sit, squashed and growing numb.

For a naturally claustrophobic person, this has taken a few years to get used to, but I discovered some time ago that if my kids didn’t like me—or even tolerate me—they’d be sitting much further away. On days like that I think, “I may be doing something right.”

Or I’m just convenient, but I’ll take that.

It’s the same with our Heavenly Father. When we truly know Him and understand His nature, we want to be closer to Him. We read the scriptures more, we pray more, we include Him more in our daily mental conversations. We do all we can to feel closer to Him, and He in turn draws closer to us.

We discover He’s an ally, a friend, a confidante, and while sometimes He needs to chasten us because He loves us, His arms are outstretched still, waiting for us to come back into them.

(I love this painting, “Lost and Found,” by Greg Olsen.)

As a mother, I’m not always successful in this. There are times when my children have done something so heinous (i.e. ruined an appliance/electronic device/toilet) that I have to step away in fury, or my child might be permanently wounded; not physically, but emotionally.

To be fair, this child had permission to destroy the light fixture . . .

. . . only because she wouldn’t let go of the hammer, and I feared for the rest of the house.

There have been moments when I’ve wanted to throw a flood at an “evil” child and wash it far away, but then I remember that God had been warning and pleading with and trying to save His truly evil children before The Flood for 120 years while Noah labored on the ark.

But after 120 seconds, sometimes I’m ready to call down hail-fire and brimstone. (See why I’m always praying to be “patient and kind”?)

3) Heavenly Father wants to be our Father. Before I get into this, allow me backtrack—children need parents. I think this should be obvious, but almost daily I read philosophies that try to downplay the importance of parents, claiming they can be replaced by exceptional schools (I haven’t found any truly exceptional yet), well-structured day-care centers which can care for your child from before breakfast to after dinner, and a socialistic state which “serves” to alleviate the burdens of parenthood, so that adults can do what really matters—work for the betterment of the state.

Parenting, in some socialist theories, is a purely physical function, with those functions ending as soon as the child is delivered.

This isn’t how God sees parenthood. In fact, the title this all-powerful Creator of Heaven and Earth has chosen for himself is Heavenly Father. I’ve referred to Him here frequently as God which, while accurate, I think downplays His role in our lives. “God” is often seen as a distant figure, full of power and anger, ready to trick and punish His subjects in Zeus-like ways. The gods love to mess with us puny mortals.

The problem is, much of the world regards the Supreme Being of the cosmos this way. But that’s not a true image. Rather, it’s one Satan tries to promote in his effort to keeps us as far away from our Father as he can.

Our Father is an all-loving, ever-patient, ever-tender Father—to all of us. No matter our race, religion, political background, or any other potentially divisive measure, He wants to parent us, as a Perfect Parent would: solely concerned about our well-being.

Our Heavenly Father has no other agenda, no other pressing concerns, other than our eternal happiness. There’s nothing He wants more than to bring us home again with our souls intact from this life-long test we told Him we wanted to take.

Think about the best dad you know—maybe yours, maybe a friend’s. (Interestingly, a lot of people’s perceptions of God are based upon their relationships with their own fathers.) What made that dad so great? His every thought was for his kids, wasn’t it?

Just like our Heavenly Father.

But we puny mortals usually aren’t as wholly devoted to parenthood. Certainly not me, unfortunately. Sure, I’m concerned about my kids, put aside my own plans to help them with theirs, and often forsake sleep, food, and sanity to help them when they’re troubled.

But even as I type this morning, I’m interrupted by my daughter getting ready for school, my son splashing in his bath, my other son failing again to wake up . . . and here I sit typing. (Notice how I said they’re interrupting me—how I come first, instead of them?) I’m not 24-hours-a-day focused on my children.

“Helicopter parenting,” on the other hand, is not God-like parenting, either, because it’s not done out of concern for children, but out of anxiety of what society may think of us as parents.

While wholly attentive, Heavenly Father is not a helicopter parent. He allows us to make mistakes, to skin our knees, even to punch our siblings, because He knows this life is a test, and no one ever learns from a test if they’re not allowed to actually take it. He allows us to fail so that we can begin to improve.

However, I admit there are times I probably should be more attentive than I am, so that the above-mentioned ruined appliances/devices/toilets don’t get ruined.

Or so that this, for example, doesn’t happen.

That’s not a problem Heavenly Father faces. A nearly-ruined earth, maybe, but nothing that His Son cannot heal. No, Heavenly Father is far more focused and far more in the details of our lives than we’ll ever understand while in mortality.

Only when we get to the other side and review our existence will we see how often He nudged a situation for us, or diverted a disaster, or steadied us, much like we steady our own children as they learn to ride a bike. Rarely do they know, in their excitement that first time without training wheels, how closely we’re running behind them and straightening their bikes until they can do it themselves.

Likewise, we’ll be surprised to see how often our Heavenly Dad’s hand was touching our lives to make sure we stayed on course.

People occasionally ask me why I have so many kids, and I give my usual, flippant answer of “My husband and I really don’t know. What keeps causing this? Can you explain it to me? Draw diagrams?”

But once another answer came to my mind, when my Heavenly Father was gently nudging me to not be so trivial.

The answer was, So that I can learn to be more like my Heavenly Parents.

Because yes, there is a Heavenly Mother, too, but my theory is that She’s dealing with the children not yet born, or who have already died and gone back, so Heavenly Father is dealing with those of us on “away missions” while She focuses on those “back home.” Even Heavenly Parents have a division of labor.

I also have a lot of children because I’m a very slow learner (no, we figured out how they’re conceived a few years ago—glad we got that cleared up). Each child has taught me a different aspect of how my Heavenly Father wishes me to be, and I’m needing lots of years of practice to start getting close to His vision for me.

But, fortunately, I have Perfect Examples to follow.

Mahrree often felt as if she were looking into the eyes of the Creator Himself as Gleace listened earnestly to Peto’s description of kickball, offered advice to Deck on selecting cattle to start his herd, chuckled at Jaytsy’s explanation of her mother’s first attempt to garden, and laughed at hearing how Perrin became a cat owner. He paid full attention to each of them, as if no one else existed, and what they had to say was the most important thing ever.

Mahrree knew there were some people who envisioned the Creator as a great and terrible Being, full of impatient vengeance for the fallibility of His creations.

But Mahrree had always pictured someone else: a perfect Father who wanted to make sure His children knew they were loved and cared about. ~Book 5, Safety Assured Leaving East of Medicetti

If you could give your younger self a message from the future, what would it be?

September 16, 2016September 16, 2016trishmercer Leave a comment

That’s how I felt two days ago, and wondered if I could.

Allow me to back up a bit. My blog is a little late this week, because I spent a few days in a hospital two hours away assisting my oldest daughter with her second born, and then with her toddler son.

When her little girl was only hours old, and big brother was on his way with his daddy to meet her, I warned my daughter, “He may not yet be two years old, but you’ll be astonished at how old your son will suddenly appear in relation to your newborn. He’ll age years in just moments.”

Big brother and baby sister.

Because that was the shock I felt when I sat years ago in a hospital room holding my second-born, and my mother brought my oldest, barely two years old, to meet her.

All I could think was, “Who is this giant child?!” It was as if time had taken a enormous step in seven-league boots, and my first baby was now a kid.

My two oldest daughters, 2 years old and five days old, 1992.

As I warned that same “kid,” now 25 years old, I felt that immense step again, striking me with sudden reality that those two tiny girls were now women; the older a graduate student nearly finished with her thesis, just as I was with small children, the other a nursing student hoping to be a newborn nurse in a couple of years.

I wish I could have stretched through time and tapped my younger self on the shoulder—the me who stared at her two little girls and wondered, What have I done? Why did I think I could be a mother to two children?!

I would have said to her, “For just a moment, look here. See what will happen in twenty-four shockingly short years.

“You’ll have some rough years, difficult months, and terrible days, but also many wonderful ones, and eventually you’ll see this: your two formerly-baby daughters, with your first granddaughter. Hold on to this image for when your hope flags and your confidence wanes. It’ll be good. Eventually, it’ll all be good.”

(I would not have told my younger self, however, that I’d have seven more children. I/she would have dropped in a dead faint, never to be revived.)

As I watched my daughters and yearned to encourage my younger self, I imagined that I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I wondered if it were a distant me, another twenty-four years in the future with too much white hair to pretend it’s only highlights, and with so much experience that I’m sure I’d regard my forty-seven-year-old self as naïve.

I imagined I heard a seventy-one-year-old whisper, “For just a moment, look here. See what’s happened . . .”

I hope that I/she was smiling, as I was this week. I hope that I/she was sending me a message of encouragement, of never giving up. I’m sure there’ll be events that she’ll have witnessed in our future that will be heartbreaking, but others that will be glorious beyond my current imagining. I hope it’s to one of those scenes I/she is wishing to draw my attention, just for a moment.

And I hope that the ninety-five-year-old Trish, witnessing yet another scene of astonishment, is tapping the seventy-one-year-old me on the shoulder, and chuckling and weeping with joy as she does so.

Two hours later an exhausted Mahrree, drenched with sweat and tears, and shocked that so much could change so quickly, stared at the bundle in her arms. Her mother and the midwives were surprised that the baby was so small. Mahrree’s seeming enormity must have been a trick of the eye, they decided, magnified by her slight frame. The baby probably came early.

But she didn’t know what they were talking about; nothing about the newborn she spent the last hour and a half birthing seemed small. ~Book 1, Forest at the Edge of the World

Parenthood, summed up in one horrible bathroom incident

March 15, 2016trishmercer 5 Comments

My four-year-old is my youngest of nine children. You’d think that after 25 years of being a mom, I’d be an expert, but you’re never an expert, I’ve decided.

Especially when it comes to potty-training.

With our first child, I took the excellent advice to “not rush it.” This was the early 90s when having your barely-know-how-to-walk one-year-old potty trained was the rage.

It was actually the mom who was trained, to rush her tiny charge to the bathroom every two hours and plop the toddler on the toilet with great hope. Never being that disciplined, I instead encouraged and suggested, and finally had a trained daughter when she was three.

I followed that same laissez faire approach with my other kids, too, but my sons took a bit longer.

Ohhh . . . my sons and potty training.

Boys are the worst, and I have five of them.

I won’t name names, but one son had a propensity for “forgetting,” and he was well into preschool age before accidents weren’t a weekly—or daily—affair.

Another son would, in a half-asleep stupor, mistake his closet for the bathroom every night. It took us weeks to figure out where the smell was coming from, and why. Once we did, we had to replace the carpet and pad in there, along with a few toys.

Another son simply refused to use the toilet, afraid of it. One of his first public potty encounters was with a toilet which automatically, and noisily, flushed itself. He was sure that all toilets were ready to swallow him whole.

Another child was perfectly easy to potty train, leaving me to believe I’d finally figured things out and was a fantastic mother.

Nope. He was just an easy kid.

And we’re not going to talk about the years of bed wetting. Which were years. (I wept with joy when Febreeze was invented.)

So when it came to potty training Boy #5, I didn’t have any illusions that I knew how to do it within 48 hours, or tear-free, or bribery-free. We just went for it.

(We’ll allow #5 to retain his dignity and remain anonymous.)

(If you’re a bit squeamish, perhaps you don’t want to continue reading. But if you’re a parent, none of this will be new to you.)

Fortunately #5 had no problem with #1. Watching his older brothers (who were happy to show off their skills) encouraged him that he wanted to be as big as the teenagers he adored.

It’s #2 that’s been the horror.

He won’t do it on a toilet. We don’t know why. It’s not as if toddlers are good at articulating their reticence about certain activities.

We started trying waaaay back before his third birthday, and while he’s been an expert at shooting the water for over a year (we won’t discuss aim, which even my bigger boys seem to struggle with until they leave high school), the idea of sitting and plopping was a no-go.

Instead, he grabs a pull-up, puts it on himself, hides in the privacy of his bedroom, then comes out ten minutes later with a coy smile and says to me sweetly, “Mommy? Can you please change me? I love you.” Batting his lashes is the crowning touch.

“But I don’t love doing this,” I tell him each time he assumes the position and I pull out the baby wipes.

“Yes, you do. Because you love me. But don’t tell Daddy I do this.”

It always makes me feel dirty when he says that. But Daddy knows.

Daddy frowns at Pull-up Boy, and promises greater things, like setting off smoke bombs or exploding fireworks tanks, if #5 puts #2 in the potty.

We had success after Christmas, when we promised him a shiny new fire engine that makes noise if he went. (Go ahead, judge me for bribing my child. I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore.)

He did it once, and we immediately took him to Walmart, and he loved his fire engine . . . and he never went #2 again because he got his reward.

I hate it when the kids are cleverer than me.

But yesterday, something changed.

I was in the kitchen making dinner when suddenly my 4-year-old stood there, beaming. The fact that he wore only a t-shirt, and nothing below, gave me a hint as to what he was going to exclaim.

“Mom! Mom! I did it! I put stinkies in the potty!”

“Really?!” I don’t know who was happier.

“Come see!” and he took off running to the bathroom.

That’s when I realized that not all of the stinky got into the toilet. A lot of it was smeared down the back of his legs.

As a parent, there are times that you brace yourself for what you’re about to find, and you recite in your head, No matter what, I’ll be cheerful. No matter what, I’ll be cheerful . . .

When I arrived at the bathroom, the story was waiting for me.

First were his pants and underwear, tossed on my bedroom floor as if he were in a hurry.

Then, the pull-ups, left sadly next to the door, because there wasn’t enough time.

Then . . .

The bathroom.

I steeled myself, because sometimes, no matter how often you tackle a mess, it’s shocking when you first encounter it.

But #5 stood next to the toilet, beaming in joy. “Look! Some of it got in!”

It did, along with half a roll of toilet paper.

The rest was on the seat, the floor, and the bath mat.

Boys struggle with having two outlets, and sometimes they don’t have full control of either. My son stood in a yellow puddle, grinning madly.

There was only one option for me as his mother.

“I’m so proud of you!” I cheered and clapped.

Full of praise and happiness, I suggested we finish wiping him up, waist to toe, and I sent him to tell his siblings the good news so I could tidy up the bathroom.

That’s where my 15-year-old found me a few minutes later. “He actually went stinky in the toilet? Whoa . . .” and he backed up when he saw how I straddled one mess to wipe up another. “I was about to say, Bet you’re glad he didn’t give you a mess in a pull-up, but—”

“But say nothing to him,” I warned Big Brother. “This is a huge step for him—”

“You’ll have to take a few huge steps just to get out of there—”

I pointed at him. “The mess isn’t important,” I said. “Nor is it important that I had to use five baby wipes on him, and that I’ll use about a dozen Clorox wipes in here. What’s important is that he finally did something hard for him. We cheer and praise, and clean up the mess quietly later, without making him feel anything but joy for his accomplishment, which has been years in the making.”

And that, I realized, summed up parenthood.

Along with this request to Big Brother, “And bring me another trash bag, please.”

Oh yes, being their mother was by far the most difficult work she’d ever undertaken. And it also was, by far, the most satisfying. At the end of the day she knew she’d accomplished an enormous amount of work, even if the house looked as messy as it had in the morning. But at this point of her life, messy meant success. Things happened.

~Book 2, Soldier at the Door

We adults have ruined the world for our kids

September 24, 2015September 24, 2015trishmercer 7 Comments

Once again someone has sent me a trite old email about “How great things were in the past!” and “How awful things are today!”

Surely you’ve seen these before, the less-than-subtle comparison that when we were kids we knew how to be kids, unlike kids today who are pathetic pansies.

However, there are two major problems with such grossly inaccurate nostalgia trips:

1) Life was never as good as we remember it, and;

2) If we don’t like the way life is for our kids, we—their parents and grandparents—are to blame.

First, let’s look objectively to some of the ridiculous claims about how we “survived” and are somehow inherently “better” than the younger generation. Many pieces like this one detailed below float around, but since this is the most comprehensive, we’ll use it to demonstrate the selective memory problems so many in the older generations suffer from. This one is called:

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED
The 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s

(From: http://www.corsinet.com/braincandy/hage5.html)

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. So there’s no problem with mothers smoking and drinking during pregnancy? Or are you willing to admit that no, not everyone emerged as “good” as you?

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes. And they also had a lot more problems during childbirth as a result. But you don’t remember your birth, so obviously this detail doesn’t matter.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. Lead-based paint causes problems in mental acuity, which the author of this piece of propaganda demonstrates all too well.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking. And the author also doesn’t remember that children died from poisonings at higher rates than they do now, and that many children suffered from brain damage or worse when they crashed on their bikes. There were consequences. Although brain damage causes us to forget . . .

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. And the families who died in car accidents back then aren’t around to explain how seat belts and air bags would have saved their lives.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat. Stupid, but special. Again, loss of memory=brain damage. (Or marijuana use. Go ahead–ask Grandpa about the drug culture of the 60s and 70s.)

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. So why don’t you let your grandkids drink from the hose?

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. No one dies now, either. It’s usually kids’ parents and grandparents who freak out about them sharing.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING! But an enormous amount of the adult population is overweight now, because you never outgrew drinking soda and eating sugar. Type 2 diabetes, anyone? Everyone?

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. So why did you create a society where your kids and grandkids can’t have such freedom? Why do you call social services when you see kids walking by themselves to a nearby park?

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. It’s not kids who buy cell phones to carry around; it’s their parents.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. But when your kids/grandkids ask to use supplies in the shed, you yell at them to not make a mess, not make any noise, and go to their rooms and be quiet. So they turn to their games . . .

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! So why do you now yell at the neighbor kids when they’re outside running around and making noise? Why do you call their parents and threaten to sic the cops on them for accidentally running across your lawn?

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. Kids don’t file lawsuits; their parents file lawsuits. Why are you doing this now?

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. So why do you not let your own kids/grandkids explore this way?

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes. Kids don’t call the cops on other kids with BB guns. Adults do that. Why did you change?

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them! So stop accompanying your children, or telling them to use a phone, or tell them that you don’t want them out on their own.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! So now that you’re coaching these teams and have put your kids in these sports, why have you changed the rules?

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! So why don’t you respect the law anymore, and defend your precious “innocent” babies instead?

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! And has also produced adults that over-parent their children and limit their development. Why is that?

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. Surely you don’t think YOU’VE accomplished all of that, do you? Millions take credit for the work of just a few thousand.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! And yet you’re afraid to let your children and grandchildren have that same experience?

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. Ah, I see! Individuals don’t have any responsibility—it’s all the lawyers government’s fault!? You just claimed earlier to have “responsibility,” but only when it’s convenient? No, I’m sorry. You can’t pin all of these changes on the government. And how many of you are lawyers? We all have to take responsibility for how our children turn out.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were. And just how dramatically they changed the world you now live in. Yes, your parents and grandparents destroyed everything when they became grownups. Remember that when you choose their nursing home.

How many of us have naively imagined Thanksgiving looking like this? How often have we actually achieved it? Everyone smiling? Yeah, me too.

The problem is the “good ole days” never really existed. Even in the 1950s—a classical age many of our older generations hark back to—we knew this.

Morris Wright in 1957, wrote this about the beloved Norman Rockwell paintings that I’ve used in this blog:

“We might say that Mr. Rockwell’s special triumph is in the conviction his countrymen share that the mythical world he evokes actually exists. This cloudland of nostalgia seems to loom higher and higher on the horizon . . . and disappears from view . . . leaving the drab world of common place facts and sensations behind.” [emphasis added] (Approaching Zion, Hugh Nibley (1989), page 523. )

Here’s another plug for “Those were the good ole days” that never were. https://www.facebook.com/1035wimz/photos/a.180388971978038.49555.121975634486039/871131596237102/?type=1

And another that touts many poor decisions as “ok” and “Hey, we survived.” However, I appreciate that she prefaced her list with this:

Now, as a parent myself, my own parents like to tell me I’m too overprotective.
“Really?”
“Well, you survived,” they say.
“Yep, but it seems like the odds were against me.” http://thestir.cafemom.com/big_kid/165499/21_Things_80s_Kids_Did

Another “We had it so tough but we also had it so great, so we’ll just ignore all the other bits.” https://amyunjaded.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/70s-80s.jpg

This one’s more balanced, with an interesting comparison of a few decades ago with today. There are advantages and disadvantages to both times, and let’s remember that. http://preventdisease.com/news/15/020515_10-Differences-Child-Grew-Up-70s-Compared-To-Today.shtml

Check out this video by Nature Valley Granola, and ask yourself: who bought all the gadgets for their kids and grandkids? Who’s responsible for teaching them how to really play outside? It seems that some adults are realizing that hey—all of this is our fault. And we’re also the solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is5W6GxAI3c

The next time someone older than 30 (yes, don’t trust anyone over 30!) sends you a nostalgic turn of the belly via email or social media, challenge them with this: Prove that life really was better “back then.” And don’t let them use only their hazy and selective memories. Make them use real data.

Don’t worry. They won’t. They can’t. They’re still not sure what “Google it” means.

In many ways our society is far better than it ever was. Yes, we have huge and glaring problems—I rant about those enough, so I won’t do so here—but we’ve also done a few things right. For example:

We’re far more compassionate.

Many decades ago a relative of mine committed suicide. His grieving family was shunned, and even a basic burial was denied him. Today, we’re far more helpful to those suffering from mental illness, and we open our arms to love those left behind when someone loses the fight.
To those of various religions. Only fifty years ago this was a very Protestant country. Catholics and Jews were commonly snubbed. Ask your grandma about the fear of a Catholic John F. Kennedy running for president. Although we still have far to go, we tolerate others’ beliefs far better than we ever have. Mormons like me haven’t been run out of a state since the 19th century.

We’re far more accepting.

Of different races. Seriously, we are. Ask anyone who grew up in the south in the 1940s and 1950s. Ask them what they remember about where the blacks and whites lived, and where they got drinks of water, and where they worshipped. We’ve made HUGE strides. The problems we have now are frequently manufactured and piddly in comparison.
Of homosexuals. The closet door has been open for a long time now.
Of different lifestyles. Just a decade ago anyone who was a vegetarian was snickered at. Now, a lot more people are looking to eat healthier, smarter, cleaner. “Alternative” is becoming “mainstream.” We’re less worried about “fitting in,” which is marvelous progress.

We’re far better about acknowledging and fixing problems.

Not so long ago, alcoholism was ignored. It was a condition whispered about, but rarely helped. Just ignore it and the problems will go away, was the shallow hope.
Oh, and advertisements used to feature doctors, babies, and even Santa to sell cigarettes. Admirable, very admirable.
Abuse in the home was also another “Don’t talk about” issue. Kids would come to school bruised and battered, wives (or worse, husbands) would have black eyes from “accidents,” and it was very rare that anyone ever stepped in to help.
Same with sexual abuse. We tend to think that’s a recent problem, but it’s not. Kids who were sexually abused in the 1970s were told to just “forget about it,” and their parents would as well. Employ the trusty, “Ignore it, and it’ll go away,” like that giant elephant in the living room which grows bigger and stinks more horrendously every day.

We’re far better at talking.

About all those issues above, and many, many more. Some senior citizens think we talk too much—they derisively call it “gossip”—but frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in any other generation. Yes, we’ve got problems far worse than many of our ancestors faced, but we also are tackling them in ways they never dared.

“But the older generation, with its propensity to remember everything far better than it ever was, will be a harder sell.” ~Chairman Nicko Mal, Book 3, The Mansions of Idumea

“She knew that in a very real way, she controlled the world. At least, she controlled the way her students would see it.”

June 22, 2013May 27, 2015trishmercer 2 Comments

“That’s right, sweety—that’s a dog. Doggies are bad. They will always bite you, even if they look nice. Keep walking . . .”

That was the conversation I overheard between a mom and her three-year-old daughter yesterday. I was pushing my son in a stroller past them, and glanced over at the evil beast behind a massive fence.
It was a small, fluffy mixed breed dog, panting happily, not snapping at all.

Not that I’m a huge fan of dogs—I tolerate them, at best—but I worry when an adult passes along their fears, irrational or not, to their children.

I cringed, but the damage had been done.
The child shuddered obediently and gripped her mother’s hand as they rushed home. The girl had been indoctrinated.

The thing is, we all indoctrinate our children, in good ways and bad.
I’ve heard some adults argue that “religious nuts” brainwash their kids into believing in their faith, but it’s still propaganda when adults persuade children to not believe in anything at all.

As parents we literally present the world to our children—a view which they then spend the rest of their lives believing or disproving, or talking to a therapist about.
A difficult question then is, What view of the world have I given to my children?

My mother was a classic case of paranoia run amok. Suffering in Germany as a child during WWII, losing her parents, her grandmother, and several cousins to the war, seeing some of her family interred in concentration camps, then escaping from her home (now a part of Poland) to the west by herself as a 16-year-old, just one day ahead of the invading Russians, is going to leave some scars.

Unfortunately, she refused to have those scars looked at, insisting every time we tried to get her treatment for her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that she had things under control.
She didn’t.
She feared the world. She was afraid of people in uniforms (she hated the Boy Scouts—just like Hitler Youth, she claimed), people in stores (you never know why they’re looking at you), and people just chatting in the halls at church (she knew they were gossiping about her). Every person was a potential threat to her happiness, as it were.

Sometimes she was fine, going for months being cheerful and even joining in the conversations with other women in our neighborhood.
Then suddenly something would snap again—we never knew what the trigger was—and for many months and even years she was sure everyone hated her for her German accent, and that someone was coming to get her.

All of that rubs off on a kid, and even though I learned to distance myself from her delusions and paranoia as a teenager, I still feel my chest tighten when I see a group of women and I think I’m supposed to talk to them.
But rhetoric courses I took in college demonstrated how each person views the world in a different way and, most importantly, those views can change.

In my mom’s later years, her paranoia blossomed—one of the lesser-common side effects of Parkinson’s disease is hallucinations. And she did them magnificently.

My 40^th birthday will always be memorable because she called to wish me a happy birthday, then said, “Well, your father’s all but out of the family now since I discovered he’s been having affairs.” The man was 78 at the time. My mom also complained about the listening devices in the house, the person living in the attic demanding sugar, and the horrible statue garden my brother and his wife had put up in the backyard.

My older sister called me two hours later to say, “I just had Mom committed to the mental hospital to stabilize her. How’s that for a birthday present?”

Now, four years later, my mother barely knows where she is or who she is. As her life slips away, I mourn for her that she never fully knew just how wonderful it could be. The world held her hostage since she was a little girl. She never knew how to change her view of the world, nor did she fully realize that for the past sixty-plus years she had a very easy life. All she could focus on was her fear.

That’s why I cringed when I heard that mother yesterday telling her daughter to be afraid of dogs. Undoubtedly she’s had some trauma in her past that she never got over, but to pass those fears on to someone innocent?
To taint an entire collection of creatures with just one ugly color because of a bias?
To assume that we as adults truly know how everything is, and that we’re completely correct in all our assumptions?

I don’t know whether to call that prejudice, or arrogance, or ignorance.
Whatever it is, it needs to be resolved to give our kids a fair and fighting chance.
And that’s probably the toughest thing for a parent to do.