I think I talk to my daughter too much.
Well, not "too much, too much", but too much about things that I feel are important for her to know. We play lots of games together, but the game is always surrounded by topics of discussion, and I realize that most of them are not "fun" in the traditional sense of the word. They are interesting, and Smallsteps (my daughter) finds them interesting too, but I wonder if rather than having deep discussions, we should just talk more nonsense.
We talk a lot of nonsense too.
But it isn't "kid nonsense" so often, it is more "lesson based" where I use a lot of examples to illustrate some kind of thing that might be important for her to learn. It isn't on purpose, it is just the way I am, and I wonder that if I changed the way I was, would she recognize it as authentic. Maybe part of the problem we face in parent-child relationships, is that we might not be authentically ourselves when we talk with them.
For instance, I know people who have teenagers, but they have never told them they were married before their current relationship. And far more common, are parents who think hiding all the crazy shit they got up to as teens from their children, is going to "protect" their children from doing the same.
That is nonsense.
What I am a ware of however, is that since before she was born, I have started communicating with her, writing my first letters to her and then continuing on throughout the last seven years on Hive. I am conscious that I might not get a chance to get everything I want to communicate across to her, but at least that if something does happen that halts the flow in its tracks, she will have pieces of me to look back upon, and maybe even hear my voice in her head at the same as she reads.
There are lots of lessons in my articles.
Not always profound, and not always even correct, but they do give away slices of my mind at a given point in time, and I think that I would have appreciated getting something left to me by my parents similar. Even a simple letter.
My mother lived with cancer for nine years, and she had a couple bad years at the end, but I think that she could have taken a pad and pen and written something, right? My father died a few years ago in his early eighties, and while he had dementia for the last few years, at some point he too could have written a letter to his children. He was a beautiful speaker, and I am sure he would have written well too.
And I could have passed them on to Smallsteps.
Ina world full of endless photographs and on-demand content that covers any topic, I feel that we have forgotten how important it is to communicate with each other on deeper topics, and have real discussions about life. Instead, what I find is that people spend a lot of time talking about the various content that they watch, or what is happening in the news, but don't really dive into how they feel about life, and how they cope through their day to day experience.
The art of sharing experience through words is lost.
I imagine that back in time, every parent was a master, and every child an apprentice, in the sense that they would teach skills along the line, so that their children could take care of themselves, by taking up the family trade, learning to build, cook, and create. With most having no way to write and there being no YouTube DiY videos to follow, or infographics, adults had to learn how to convey skills through words and demonstration. There had to be some kind of dialogue and inevitably, experience shines through as situations are described, and lessons learned are explained.
There is something mystical in the conversations between parent and child, because it is a relationship that will never end, and will always be part of the discussion in some way. It isn't like two strangers who get together and break up and in time turning the other into just somebody they used to know, it is lasting. Even through broken relationships, parent and child will not forget each other.
But things happen, minds go, bodies give up and eventually, the conversation can no longer be spoken and nothing new can be added. All that is left is memory. But, memory is an imperfect tool, and at times it fails in ways that is hard to describe. It is like when I try to remember the face of my parents, or the sounds of their voices, the only way I can do it is in context, where I imagine a scene that I lived with them.
But, most of my life was not with them, and even when I was discussing various topics, it wasn't their authentic selves, because they would whitewash the conversations, omitting inconvenient truths, and interjecting parts that made them feel better about their pasts, or to highlight a lesson they would want me to learn, even though it wasn't one they followed. Do as I say, not as I do.
Does a parent ever tell their children what they did?
Smallsteps is too young for all of my past, and I don't think a lot of it is suitable for a blockchain. Hopefully, I will get the chance to have these kinds of conversations with her when she is older though, and perhaps,
I might have to start getting out a pad and pen.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
