Behind the Curtain
There’s a new season of Bluey on Disney+ and our family has been in heaven. (If you haven’t watched Bluey, you should check it out. It’s a kids show, but it’s so so good). The last episode has the father telling a story from his childhood and his kids ask, in horror, “Didn’t you have bike helmets?” His response sounds so familiar in our house, “Nah, man, it was the 80s. Things were WILD.”
My kids think that we were raised in some Mad Max ThunderDome and between Forrest’s farm upbringing and the slightly feral neighborhood I grew up in, they’re not all wrong. I like to think we tell them these stories so they have a little gratitude. But it’s also fun to shock them. I think the most difficult thing to believe is that their beloved grandparents were just plain parents back then, and young ones at that. Not every decision was easy or correct, and as the Bluey episode said, “It was the 80s. Mums were allowed to be mean.” I nodded. Those mums never got lectured at for putting us in time out.
It’s nice to realize in middle age that all of our parents were figuring it out as they went along, making the best decisions they could with the information they had at the time. I like to think that Forrest and I give our kids a look behind the curtain earlier than most - showing them that all people make mistakes, that it’s ok to be wrong and apologize, and that we’re learning every day too. But as my kids age, that understanding has extended from their generally well-meaning if flawed parents to the idea that larger systems are made up of all types of people - responsible and incompetent, giving and selfish, wise and rash. And not all of them are learning every day.
That, combined with the low level of civil disobedience that we nurture in our kids, sometimes puts them in direct conflict with the seemingly inane rules that make up the modern middle school. Vandalism leads to new rules about bathrooms. Classroom time requirements make for crowded halls and short breaks. Fears about school shootings mean every door is locked, every single time. And my scientifically minded child brings her own understanding of statistics to bear. She’s frustrated.
I remind myself that this is as it should be. Young people’s frustrations with the world lead to change. When I was young, those frustrations let me to be a small part of creating a different world for my daughters. I still feel passionately and I still work to make those injustices right.
Just yesterday, a friend and I were talking about her summer job. She’d led a teen girls’ camp that spent a week doing trail maintenance as a service project. And as you might expect, a group of women doing manual labor in the woods led to more than a few comments. But this friend, younger and fiercer than me, made sure to push back on every single comment. Exhausting, perhaps, but the modeling for those teens is something that we could only have dreamed of in the 90s. It just didn’t exist.
But it does now. Because our parents taught us that we were valuable, worthy of dignity, and most of all, that fighting for that dignity isn’t unseemly or aggressive. It is noble. And now we get to figure out what that fight looks like in our time.
I spend a lot of my time working with the PTA at my kids’ school. It’s a big commitment. It sometimes feels exhausting or futile. But a few weeks ago, as I was blathering on about getting some sign printed or some event set up, that same middle school daughter said, “You know, Mom, watching you do all this PTA stuff makes me realize that even grown-ups are just making it up as you go along. And it makes me feel better when I feel like I’m never going to know how to be an adult. Because neither do you!” Then she laughed hysterically while I felt my heart grow three sizes that day.
Because my kids are surrounded by systems and institutions that are flawed. And those flaws can seem set in stone. The Grown-ups Have Spoken. But knowing that those grown-ups are just, well, people, gives my kids both compassion for the people in them also hope that maybe those systems can continue to grow and change to meet the world we live in.
I don’t know what the future holds. I wonder if my grandchildren will say, “The 2010s were WILD.” But I hope they know that whatever challenges come their way, they are just as equipped as anyone else to meet them.
