My tender mother’s heart recently sustained a stinging injury. It was a minor pin prick of reality. But it hurt. I doubt if my son even registered what happened, but I did. Memories of the long, painful process of learning to fit my square peg self into the round hole world I grew up in came flooding back to me.
My kindergartener, “Sweetie Bird,” participated in his school’s annual fundraiser. For each goal level the school reached, they earned a reward. One day was no uniform day. Another day was crazy socks & hats day. I loaned Sweetie Bird a colorful striped hat of mine and some multicolored striped socks that he pulled up over his pants all the way up his thighs. At home, before he left for school, he was thrilled with his look. Those boney striped legs were killing me. I swoon hard over his whimsical tendencies.
When my husband came back from walking our son to school, he said Sweetie Bird self-consciously pushed his thigh-high socks down and back under his pants as soon as they arrived in the classroom. My heart seized up a little as I considered this. It overjoys me to see our son thriving in all his strange, uniquely individual ways. While I knew the day would come when he would realize he was a little different or didn’t quite fit in, I hoped it would not come quite so soon.
This was merely one of the first of multitudes of little spirit crushes he will endure as he spins on this giant space rock with seven or eight billion other people. It’s a kind of slow death by a thousand cuts of his precious one-of-a-kind self. Whatever shell of that sweet, magnificent boy remains when society has had its way with him will muddle through life as best as he can. He will likely feel compelled, as most of us do, to conform in many small ways over time. Some of these little compromises help us survive, some keep us safe, some protect our hearts, some buy us a little peace, and some hurt like hell. They diminish our uniqueness. They dull our shine just a few lumens at a time, but in a lifetime, it makes a glaring difference.
I cherish my little weirdo more than I can express, and naturally I mourn the loss of each and every eccentric zig and zag of the stripes on his freak flag. In our house, weirdo is a compliment. When I marvel at how odd his latest fascination seems to me, I say it with a playful smile and follow up with a comment about how boring it would be to be “normal.”
Thankfully, Sweetie Bird seems to be pretty well attached to his unique personality just as it is. He is stubborn and likes to do things his own way, according to his personal tastes and preferences. He loves Spider-Man, but doesn’t like to wear his Spider-Man jacket to school because another boy in his class has the same one. He doesn’t want to look like anyone else, to my frequent joy and occasional frustration — unless everyone else looks like Captain America, then he’s mostly OK with it.
Superheroes have a way of uniting us…
As I thought about why this seemingly insignificant episode touched me so profoundly, I realized that I have been relearning what it means to be methrough him. I believe that since I have known him these last six years, as I have watched him grow and develop, I have gradually figured out little ways to be my authentic self again — that childlike self I stifled bit by bit as I grew up. A certain degree of homogenization is, of course, a normal thing that happens as kids learn to get along in the world. It’s OK for kids to bend a little, we just have to be careful not to let them break.
The beauty and innocence of Sweetie Bird’s untrampled soul unfurled before me every single day has had a liberating effect on my overly adulterated soul, long-since stiff from disuse. Naturally, it is heartbreaking to see that beauty tarnished or chipped.
It would be unfair to expect him to be any more resilient in his peculiarity than I was, but deep down, I realize that I want to be all the MEs I could have been through him — if only I hadn’t folded so much under the pressure from others. I want him to be his full self, to feel at home and supported in all his glorious HIMness, to heal me from being afraid all those years.
That’s a lot to ask of a child.
I’m reminded of the observer effect, where the act of observing necessarily affects the observed in some way. All we can do as parents is strive to minimizethe effects of our observations. Our job as parents, is neither to push our children toward greater conformity nor toward greater eccentricity. We are meant to nourish, protect, and love them, not decide for them who they will become. In consciously nurturing (not manipulating) my son’s individuality, I believe I am becoming more familiar with and confident in mine.
As parents, we can still have expectations, that our children make their best effort, that they learn to be kind, that they are honest. But we must also remember not to expect them to be like us, to follow a path of our choosing, to live their lives according to our ideals. Our children are an integral part of us, but they are not defined by us. They can inspire us to be ourselves, our long-forgotten and neglected inner children, but they cannot be the children we want them to be — for better or for worse.
Thanks for reading!
