Starting a month or so ago, nearly every morning, as I’m rushing the kids out the door and into the car, Maya, my 4 year old, stops on the porch. This ritualistic stop used to make me crazy. Doesn’t she understand the concept of “we’re late”? Doesn’t she understand that we need to be at school at a certain time? Doesn’t she understand that her pokey-ness stresses her mother out when it’s cold, and, like I mentioned, we’re late.
One day I realized that yes, she understands, she just doesn’t care. She does what her heart tells her to do at the time, and I am conditioning her to set aside her own needs and desires to please other people, mainly, me. Wow. That one hurt. I realized I was unintentionally crushing part of her spirit.
I remembered, years ago, reading an article in People magazine…it was an interview with Harry Connick, Jr., who was talking about how he would always rush his child from one place to another. He told a story about how he was taking his child to the park, and rushing her (I believe it was a girl, but I could be wrong) into the car. But the child just wanted to stop and look at the rocks next to the driveway. Harry had an epiphany and they never made it to the park that day, but they did spend some great quality time looking at rocks that afternoon.
Last weekend I finished reading The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz. While I originally picked this book up at a time when my husband and I were having a rough time, I didn’t read it right away, my husband and I got through our rough patch on our own, and it sat on the table next to my bed for over a year. Recently I picked it up and boy oh boy, I gained perspective on so much more than I had originally thought I would when I picked it up, mainly, about children and how we, as a society, unintentionally create “wounds” all over our children. He writes:
When a human is born, the emotional mind, the emotional body, is completely healthy. Maybe around three or four years of age, the first wounds in the emotional body begin to appear and get infected with emotional poison. But if you observe children who are two or three years old, if you see how they behave, they are playing all the time. You see them laughing all the time. Their imagination is so powerful, and the way they dream is an adventure of exploration. When something is wrong, they react and defend themselves, but then they just let it go and turn their attention to the moment again, to play again, to explore and have fun again. They are just living in the moment. They are not ashamed of the past; they are not worried about the future. Little children express what they feel, and they are not afraid to love.
He goes on to talk about how we (parents, grandparents, teachers, older siblings, and society in general) unintentionally pass our “disease” on to the child, and that “The problem is the program, the information we have stored in our mind.”
So, back to Maya’s ritualistic stop on the porch. You see, our front porch is enclosed by sliding glass doors. And the roof leaks. This often causes condensation on the doors. What Maya stops to do, is draw a picture in that condensation. She draws nearly the same picture every time. And every time, despite having, at the time, wished she would just hurry and get in the car, when I return home after dropping the girls at school, I look at that picture and smile. She doesn’t have the “disease” yet. And I will do everything I can to protect her from that disease, and that starts with a change…a change in ME. I’m changing my programming, so my girls don’t have to change theirs when they are my age.
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