Discovery

I find that my life isn't all that engrossing. I'm living it, and still find myself often longing for more. I blog life - the deep thoughts and the surface tensions, and I can't imagine that it would be that much more non-boring in the text version as it is in the day-to-day 3D version. Anyway, the daily routines tend to blend together from weekend to weekend, with interspersed highlights of calendar events and a few surprises. I submit that it's the fact the surprises still occur, that I find out there are things I haven't taken into consideration before, that keeps me from going mad. Maybe.

One of those little "discoveries" happened to me this morning. It wasn't much, just a tweak in the fabric of space and time that I wasn't expecting. Our daughter was perturbed this morning - sad and angry over something at home. I was encouraging her to "get over it", knowing that as big as it seemed she would be okay and that there were reasons behind what had happened. My message of "trust us" implied a charge to "trust God" - it's okay to be sad and angry, but work through it to let the best come out on the other side. Something like that.

Anyway, I thought about the photo she snapped of her brother on his birthday a couple of days ago ("Double Digits" below) and how interesting that had been. So I asked her to snap one of herself with my cellphone (the "Smile" post below). After taking it and showing me, she said, "I'm still angry, but I tried not to show it." As I see that photo, I am "discovering" something about parenting: either we're teaching her to hide her feelings, or we're helping her cope with her feelings in a way that won't hinder her interaction with others. The former would be wrong on so many levels, and yet the latter would be useful on those same levels. There's such a fine line - how do you teach "authentic"?

What's the "discovery"? That parenting has so many variables, that raising your child in the way she should go might mean messing up, and might also likely mean doing it right. You don't know until they grow up, do you? What I might see as a positive might indeed be a negative, and it's important to reinforce the positive and to make sure the negative has no fertile soil - even if the negative motivations and positive motivations might come out as the self same thing. Something like that.