There’s a moment each autumn when the glory of the season itself catches me by surprise. If you live in New England—or have visited in, say, October—you probably know what I mean: sunlight, robin’s egg blue skies and golden, orange and crimson leaves convene such that everything seems almost super real. Because the bold leaves don’t cling to the trees so long, because the days contract and because soon enough, cold envelops, this particular autumnal signature, it’s so fleeting.
When I found myself in it this week, I realized that part of what I like and find so hard—melancholy, even—about autumn and its ephemeral nature is how it puts me in touch with that aspect of my life, of our lives. There’s been some loss and some illness around me recently, and it’s all hit me pretty hard. In the wake of summer and autumn’s bounty comes a fallow time. I get it. Endings are not quite finite, because without them—without the clear fields—the next crops can’t be sown, can’t grow. I can step back. I can see that our lives really are gifts and even sadness at loss—old loss, recent loss, the mere idea of losing—is only there because of all we do cherish. Bittersweet was a word coined for this realization.
As I walked, I remembered the sensation of having the milk come in after a baby arrives and how there’s so much power—life force—in that milk and how at the exact same time as all that energy surges toward the newborn baby, there is so much vulnerability unearthed by the fact of the baby’s being so small coupled with the responsibility to care for the baby being so gigantic and encompassing.
**
The most significant things we share with our children aren’t necessarily about the tangibles (not even the breast milk). When you read about parenting, you see that one question people focus upon is this: what can parents do that really matters?
There really isn’t one thing you can point to and be sure that if you do that one thing, all will be well. We know there are important things beyond feeding or shelter. Read to your children. Hug them. Take them outside. That list, arguably, goes on and on and on.
Writer Dawn Friedman has (along with a busy work life) begun graduate school, and for her Life Span class, she’s been pondering this good parent question through her reading assignments. Two words she emphasized are listening and understanding. Kids, she says, need to feel heard and understood. That makes such perfect sense, right? That sounds so basic. Obviously, you don’t have to travel far to discover that these fundamental elements aren’t necessarily easy (simple is not always simple) to manifest. If anything, parenting my children has forced me to think—time and time again and under a wild range of circumstances—about how much work nurturing empathy really requires of us. I don’t just mean to bring it out in my kids; I mean for myself, too, empathy’s a constant work in progress.
I’ve found myself reflecting upon other things we model. Trying to figure out what’s important I think, informs so many blogs people keep about making their homes pretty and organized and figuring out crafty things to do with their kids and chronicling what it’s like to cook for a family and so on. It’s why, I suspect, the far right seized so much power with the phrase family values. We want to have those; we want a compass to create healthy families (disclaimer: I am not saying the far right does that with its wretched mangling of that phrase, not never no how). We want to do right by our kids. That’s where the vulnerability comes in, too.
I’ve been contemplating how children are also given models by their parents by experiencing the fallout of their parents’ choices. Thousands of children whose parents have gone to war in the past decade are going to grow up with that as backdrop, echo, substance, and reverberation. This weekend, I’m hoping to attend a benefit to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, an organization that has provided incredible support to children whose parents have paid high prices for their (often radical) activism. The RFC, started by Robert Meeropol, whose parents were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, seeks to make those children’s lives richer and more kidlike—helping them attend camps and experience other supports that their families, under severe duress, may be unable to provide—because, obviously, being a child of radical political figures is something he understood extremely well.
I have always found myself quite moved by the RFC’s mission, no doubt in large part because my grandmother, Helen Buttenwieser, was a lawyer on Alger Hiss’ defense team and I heard stories about this from my father and grandmother (their points of view, of course, quite different; his funny stories really had to do with swearing into the phone with his friends to give the FBI something juicy to listen to). More than the stories themselves, though, I grew up—with all of my grandparents and my parents—seeing the significant adults in my life make social action and community engagement central. So, it never occurred to me to live differently. I started volunteering at age eight, in the Infant classroom housed at my elementary school—and on from there.
For all my moments of distraction—last night I let Saskia watch a video on the computer with her older brother while I was making a fundraising call for Grow Food Northampton—I would choose my children experiencing my engagement than model a version of the world in which I put them so completely in the center that they somehow came to think I believed they were on the only important things in it. Once I finished the call, I scooped the girl up and tucked her into bed.
*Photo is of Ben James, Town Farm (also, manager/founder of the Tuesday Market in Northampton) carrying his son, Wiley, while working.
