I like to tell myself I’m a patient person. But anyone who knows me will tell you this is fantasy. I try to be patient. It’s a virtue I’ve never mastered, but practice regularly. Often I believe it’s my ultimate lesson to learn, since I am tested on it daily.
My husband and I love to camp. His family owns a piece of land close to our house, in the middle of the woods, where we have worked hard to carve out a little piece of serenity. It’s not perfect, but it’s mostly quiet, peaceful, natural, and serene.
Until you do silly things like invite other people to invade your paradise.
Children were born to be wild things. If you drop them in the middle of the woods with nothing more than their imaginations and the ability to run wild, that’s what they will do. We teach them to use their inside voices, so there must be the opposite voice, right? They will be dirty, disgustingly so, full of dirt, noise, and chaos.
And they will love every single second of it. As long as no one tells them they can’t.
My son is almost three years old, and he is all wild thing. It was chilly over the weekend, so I layered his clothing, threw on his boots, and set him free. He never wanders far from sight, he must be able to put eyes on me or his daddy at all times, so I don’t worry, much.
I allow him to be free because there’s no other way for him to learn it’s his right to be. As his parent, it is my job to teach him many things and to keep him safe from harm as much as possible. It is not my job to police his play.
We invited another couple and their two daughters, family members, to camp with us. They expected the girls to stay clean-ish. Not to wander at all. They expected them not to behave like children. Their mother spent most of the weekend attached at the retina to a cell phone, watching television.
I don’t care if you want to be comfortable while camping. I’m older and have serious back problems, I don’t sleep in a sleeping bag on the ground. I bring an air mattress and pray it stays inflated. It was cold enough our second night there; we fired up the generator we borrowed expressly for that purpose and ran heat into our tents. I’m not above a bit of glamping.
Comfort is one thing. Peace is another.
There’s not a damn thing peaceful about television shows blasting from a cell phone. Nor, is there anything peaceful about someone constantly telling children to sit down, stop talking, don’t get dirty, be quiet, go to bed.
That’s if they paid them attention at all.
Patience is a virtue and one I don’t possess in spades. I have slight trickles and they run out quickly. I failed the tests they issued me this weekend, but I don’t know for sure I’m the one who was being tested. I’ll never understand certain styles of parenting and I doubt I ever will.
I’ll definitely never understand being blessed to exist in such a peaceful place and spoiling it with chaos, drama, and strife. We live in so much of that in our daily lives, much that we have no control of, so when given an out, why not take full advantage?
Life is short and in the grand scheme of things, one weekend being spoiled shouldn’t make or break a person’s life. Experience dictates I have allowed behavior such as this to continue. It’s probably in my genes to enable people, to internalize my feelings and thoughts until I explode. I know my father did it. I was recently reading an article about ancestral DNA and it made me think.
Will I continue to allow micro-aggressions to dictate how my life goes or will I become the pivot character in my family line?
I know I would rather my words, my actions, my experiences, and my deeds be remembered not as the family member who laid down and took it; but as the wild woman who finally had enough, stood up, and took back her life and made it what she always dreamed by beginning to live instead of simply surviving.
Do you want to stop dreaming and live it or will you keep slogging through? Will you be your family’s pivot character?
