 Fall is my favorite time of the year. I take to the walking path with a renewed energy after the weariness imposed by the summer’s heat. A trail of tiny yellow and orange leaves lines the path offering a brand of magical candy corn that adds sweetness to every step. The trees rustle their leaves in unison providing me with my own Rocky theme song. Everyone I pass seems friendlier. The trade-off to the splendor of fall is early sunsets and shorter days. Daylight saving time ends at 2 AM on Sunday, November 3rd. For one night, we will “fall back,” and gain an extra hour of sleep. I recall a time in my life when that extra hour of darkness and sleep felt delicious. However, I am now at an age where my own days are growing shorter in number. I wonder if sleeping them away in darkness is the best use of what is left. Throughout my working life there were many people interested my retirement savings. I was bombarded with information about IRAs, 401(k)s, and qualified retirement accounts. There were constant reminders to save along with the contradictory warnings that no matter how much I saved, it might not be enough to get me through a long retirement. But no one spoke to me about my daylight savings. No one asked me if I was putting back enough to get me through any future darkness. Youth is all about the present. There is still so much future, so much hope. There will be time, we think. In our young minds, the future is always bright, and sometimes money and daylight get away from us. Too soon, it is the future, and the vault is low on funds. Busy and optimistic with early dreams of retirement, I never considered that my daylight situation could become precarious. I am wishing I had been a better daylight saver for when the sun goes down, the lights are dim and it is hard to see clearly or at all. The world feels unstable right now. We are ill at ease in our own country. There is so much political turbulence and distrust that it no longer even feels like home. We are blinded by the eerie darkness of so much uncertainty and deliberate misinformation. We are counting down the days to the election, trying to prepare ourselves for an aftermath we cannot quite imagine. Like many, I am fearful of what is to come not just for me but for all of us. I don’t know if I have enough daylight saved. If my daylight savings account runs low, I will have to rely on my social security alone. I will have to hope that good neighbors are watching, the bus driver stops, and the kids call home. And so I ask this of you: be someone’s social security. Share the light you have saved. Make hospitality common again. Let us dazzle the darkness with the light that comes from within.
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 Such is the magic of Christmas in childhood… that a single gift can provide one with endless hours of adventure while not even requiring one to leave one’s house. Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow With so much attention on the November election and its potential aftermath, it is hard to believe that the holiday season is not far away. I am doing some light research in case the Christmas miracle is that we do have Christmas this year. What launched my study was a mailing from a large chain store. I received its holiday gift guide, a slender 35-page catalog that I found in a flimsy roll in my four-inch-wide-apartment-sized mailbox. My inner child scoffed at the sight. Talk about shrinkflation! I grew up with the Sears catalog, a compendium of anywhere from 322 to 1,000 pages. I am going to guess that it weighed about half of whatever I did, and it required two hands and a baby brother to lift it into my lap. While it felt disrespectful to Sears and to Christmas wishing, in general, to even consider the flyer a Christmas catalog, I took it to my apartment and smoothed it out on my desktop. I studied the cover. Festive holiday colors formed the backdrop while the featured cover items were some of the classics that have stood the test of time: Barbie dolls, Transformers, and fisher-price Little People. The child in me forced my hand, and I turned the pages. The first page featured gifts “under $10.” There were only nine items in this price category including a Play-Doh Swirln’ Smoothies Toy Blender. Wow! I would have sold my sister for that. Still might. The second page featured items “under $20” and included the classic Lite-Brite. But beyond page two, there were no prices listed as I found myself at a two-page spread for Lego. Perhaps the price tags were missing because today’s parents already know they will need to apply for a mortgage and provide the bank with the credentials of the builder. Curious, I turned to Google for a price check. Most of the Lego sets were priced at $99.99 or more, some topping $499.00. When I was growing up, I could have purchased my first car with that amount of dough and it would have come assembled. Flabbergasted, I moved on to the next pages where my beloved Barbie had been given a two-page spread with similar displays for Disney and fisher-price. Deeper into the catalog, I smiled at the pages of familiar board games many of which still line my closet shelves. The classics still in my possession are also still in the game of games: Clue, Life, Monopoly, Operation, Sorry, Trouble, and the ancient Battleship. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Nerf had an entire page devoted to its guns. They have gotten much larger and more varied. Nerf now makes a machine-gun named the X-shot Insanity Motorized Rage Fire Blaster. Just keeping up with the times…Rage and insanity, the name says it all. After that bit of discouragement, I rejoiced to find that the arts have not gone out of style. There were pages of craft kits with more Play-Doh items, Crayola products, and the ancient Spirograph. Even a few books were featured on page 27. I was all the way to page 29 of the 35 pages before holiday tech made an appearance: lots of dull-looking headphones, controllers, and keyboards. All-in-all this slim catalog didn’t stink, but it sure did shrink. It made me wonder what has happened to the magnitude of our wishes and the enormity of our gratitude. When I was a child we wished hard and expected little. We hoped something special would arrive by sleigh. We marked just about everything in the book in hopes of getting one item that we prized. Our minds got a workout just by looking and imagining. I closed the catalog filled with mixed emotions: the old joy I felt as a child along with the sadness of wondering what has happened to childhood and imagination in the age of technology and AI. I saw into a future in which the human mind becomes as flabby and diabetic as our bodies did in the age of conveniences. I don’t think I ever realized how much our young minds grew just from imagining what we could do, what we would do. And then, after the present arrived, what we did do: all of those hours of Barbie dramas, Erector sets, coloring books, Play-Doh, improvisation, playing games, learning rules, taking turns, it all amounted to something. Now, at this stage of my life, the thing I prize most is my mind, the one that grew from all of that wishing, imagining and playing. But then came the October surprise. About a week after receiving the catalog, a coworker reported that her nine-year-old daughter watched an old-time detective show on television. The child was fascinated by the lack of technology and the way the investigators used their minds to solve the case. “I want to do that!” she said in awe. Awe and ah! A Christmas miracle in October! I plan to give her the Christmas catalog and show her how it’s done.  A friend of mine recently shared some doubts about an important parenting decision. Feeling her angst, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with my graduate school advisor who said: “It doesn’t matter which side of the tightrope you fall from; either way, you’re dead.” I can’t recall the professional dilemma under discussion when my advisor spoke those words, but the tightrope analogy has proven as applicable to my life as a parent as it did to any of my professional pursuits. When I was a child, I sometimes whined to my mother, “It’s not fair,” as an older sister got to stay up later than me or a younger and only brother got to go on a special outing with our father. “Life’s not fair,” was my mother’s predictable response. Mom didn’t seem to agonize over her parenting decisions, and no further explanations were offered. A lifetime later, I wonder if she lived by that philosophy, or if she tortured herself as I do over what she did for one child and not for another. As a child I firmly resolved, “I WILL NEVER…”and then the realities of parenting set in. Family life does not offer equal opportunity for all. Sometimes our parental resources differ over time leading one child to the conclusion that they are favored less than one of their siblings. As parents, we are young and naïve with the first child, older and more experienced with the next. We are starting out and of little means with the first child, better established with the second, and then paying college tuition for the older children as the last in line moves into high school. One child experiences the brunt of family health crises while another suffers the trauma of a parent’s job loss. One child grows up in the same neighborhood attached to lifelong friends and neighbors while another is torn from his moorings by a parent’s job relocation. Sometimes divorce, dating, remarriage, and blending families add to the juggling act. And those are just the parent-driven life changes. The world intervenes too. Everything from politics to health care affects family life. Will the children growing up through the COVID years feel differently about the parenting they received than children growing up before or after? Will high inflation and social unrest affect choices and decisions about things like where to go to college and a child’s evaluation of what is “fair”? Will there be a medical treatment available for one that was not yet approved for use by another? The basic and differing temperaments of the child play a role too. We can’t know what will come wrapped in that bundle of joy. Temperament is like the seed inside a fruit. The flesh grows around it. One child is born independent and eager to be out in the world. “Don’t hold my hand,” she says. The next child comes along, quiet, reserved, and hesitant: “Don’t let go of my hand,” he says. One child needs independence another needs a slow and gentle release. One child is impulsive and needs plenty of rules and oversight. The other is capable of adult judgment and full of moral resolve in preschool. Sometimes a child’s temperament is at odds with that of a parent or parents. Despite great love, there is also great opportunity for frustration and misunderstanding. And just when you think you’ve got the system down, one child suddenly blossoms in an unexpected way and another suffers an unexpected crisis. As our parents warned, the worst payback can be when a child is too much like us. Our worst or most challenging features can slap us in our faces making every interaction a contest. Other times, our children are so different from us that we feel lost about how to nurture them or their interests. As everyone weighs in: family, friends, casual observers, teachers, coaches, therapists, parenting “experts,” Dr. Phil, and even uneducated TikTok influencers with issues of their own, we teeter on the tightrope wondering if we are just overly-sensitive and embarrassed, or if we are experiencing an actual boundary violation or invasion of privacy. Society grooms us to believe that if we are competent, if we love our children enough, parenting will be easy. While we have to make room and find opportunities for the gifts our children carry, we still need to keep our own lights on. There is no practice or dress rehearsal regardless of how large a family you come from, how much babysitting you did as a teenager, or how you make your living. With parenting, we don’t get any pre-performance practice. The 10,000 hours of rehearsal that makes one a master, comes while on the job. In those 10,000 hours, your child becomes a grown-up. I never saw myself as an athlete, but I wish I had understood at the outset that parenting is a tightrope act considered by many to be an extreme sport. We step onto the wire with a baby in our hands. We have to develop mental fortitude, toughness, and a comfort with heights while in the thrilling but risky emotional state of ecstasy combined with terror. Making our way on the parenting tightrope requires focus and small, thoughtful steps, while never giving up on the belief that we can make it, we will make it, even at those times when we live suspended in mid-air unable to move. Inch by inch we pray that our children will come to understand it all on some day in the future, perhaps when they have children of their own. Parenting is life on the wire, my friend. Sometimes it seems like a circus, but there is only one way to do it: keep looking ahead. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
January 2025
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