Reading into Childhood...
“Hazel?”
“Hazel.”
“Hazel, can you hear me?”
My 9 year old daughter, Hazel, loves to read. She gravitates to books like a snake to a warm sunny rock after a big meal. It’s sweet to see her captivated by a story.
What’s harder for me as a parent is the way she’s engulfed by them, entrapped in an alternate you universe. Getting into the world of her book, and luring her out into the world we share often feels like a mission only James Bond can accomplish. Or maybe Spider-Man, Spider-Man has some legit moves. Batman’s got some clever tricks too, so I guess I could emulate him too… but I digress.
The thing is I struggle as a parent to help her find that balance between retreat from the world we share and participation in it. To help her develop the discipline to tend to her new responsibilities while there‘a a carefree adventure to escape into to.
I’m also jealous. Because, let’s be real, I wouldn’t mind plotzing onto the couch to get caught up in a novel myself. Dinner…? Eh, maybe we order in?
And so I’ve been sitting with this curious tension… the values in reading and the values in participating in the family. Where do I push or pull, what boundaries do we set?
And it seems that she, 9 years into her unfurling life, is working, not for the first time, with tensions between self and family, the innocent freedoms of childhood and the ripening responsibilities of agency. One moment she’s excited to cook a meal all by herself the next moment she’s angry about having to clean up. One moment she wants to be alone in her own world, the next she’s asking to be picked up and carried like a toddler.
In a way all this tension is beautiful because it creates discomfort that invites us to grow and find healthy resolutions to the tension. In a way it totally sucks because, well, it’s uncomfortable which creates temptation find resolutions in unhealthy ways.
What a dance?!
What I’ve been trying my best to do lately is to sit in the tension with myself and with her. To help name all the pieces of the puzzle we’re trying to put together and be okay with the fact that we’re still figuring out how to fit them all together.
And to remind myself and her that the puzzle pieces will change with time and need to be rearranged. Rather than feel defeated (which is an understandable response), the what if we treat it like a cliffhanger?
I mean, a good book draws us in a pulls us through by creating tension with a story and then propelling us to keep reading to get the resolution… ending each chapter at the Hight of tension…
What do we do with that tension when we have to stop reading?
Ohhhh, would it be wrong of me to end this email without full resolution? To let you know you have to wait until my next email to feel resolve?
Hang in there,
Love the tension like a good book,
Warmly,
Noah