I watched a mother teach her daughter how to tell which glove was for the right and the left hand and I thought of all the things that we teach our children without plan. I remember so many moments such as how to hold a sippy cup and how to use a fork and spoon. Another was how and when to cross the street. Oh my, that was a difficult one, allowing my precious child to walk across at street, with the danger of traffic always there. None of these lessons were particularly significant, except for my children as they gathered the necessary knowledge to live in this world.
Other little lessons: How to tell the front from the back of a piece of clothing? What about learning to tie a shoe? Each are tangents to a bigger project, the creation of a person.
These are intimacies that we forget. How important was it, how useful, to teach your little one how to button their coat, use a zipper?
It was Sunday morning after church when, in a very crowded Nojaims, while debating whether to add cottage cheese to my basket, I bumped into a gentleman near the dairy section. I apologized for being in his way. He smiled in acknowledgement, but then stopped and told me this tale. Last week he held the door for a woman who asked why he did that. Taking a step and moving his head a bit closer to emphasize his message, he went on to say that his father would have given him a good lashing if he forgot his manners.
“I will always hold the door for a woman,” he concluded.
I smiled and said that I appreciate anyone holding the door for me and that if the occasion occurred, I would hold the door for him.
Yes, there are all those little things that we teach our children, things and ideas that form the basis for our reality – how to behave, how to negotiate commonalities.
I sat with a group of professional women over lunch one afternoon. The conversation was about meshing motherhood with work. (As if motherhood wasn’t work.) One brought up the idea of going to church on Sunday, the way she did as a child. She confessed that her children have only been in church when they attended a funeral.
“What I knew, they don’t know” … most of the mothers concluded that their lives were too busy to add something like attending church services every week. There was skiing in winter, soccer practice or something like it on Sundays, sleeping in on Sundays … the list was long.
“I don’t think that church is necessary,” one said. “I teach my children good values and healthy living and that is enough.”
My parents taught me to call adults by their surname, to choose the “good clothes” for church and special occasions, to ask to be excused from the dinner table, and so on. We went to church every Sunday. My children did the same. And then life happened and, as time passed, many of those little things changed, leaving us confused, uncomfortable. What was correct was no longer correct. There is an underlying discomfort when what you learned, what you believed, is no longer relevant or true. The me that was made up at least in part of those behaviors that have been rejected is sometimes confused, reticent even, to question the changes.
Some institutions that defined how we lived our lives have been lost, or at least demoted in importance, as are the cultures associated with them.
Change is constant, and in a highly technical world, faster than many can easily manage even though culture is something we create ourselves with our tastes in music, fashion, food, entertainment and what constitutes moral behavior, etc. The choices and preferences for how we create culture are seen to be out of our hands. The differences among generations and areas of the country are astoundingly visible when it comes to many of the cultural preferences we don’t share.
But there will always be shoelaces to tie, buttons to button, instructions about crossing the street. The loving warmth of parent and child in those little things is eternal.
