4M

This past Sunday, I went to Soul Sanctuary, which is a family-friendly dance jam over at Ashkenaz, a Berkeley institution. It was a lovely experience. It felt like Church in the best sense of the word: community, openness, joy. Nice music, nice Berkeley hippie folk, no rules, just music and moving and grooving. Cool. So after the dance, we had a little circle time. The DJ told us that his theme for the set was “freedom”. We were invited to share what we would do if we had a little more freedom in our everyday lives. Well, one of the people there was a very special, un-self-conscious, limber, sweet, happy little girl, about 8 years old or so. It was a joy to watch her dance and play and interact easily with all the adults and other kids there. She went and got a drawing she had done while we were dancing and it was a very vivid picture of a person smiling, but with lots and lots of bright tears on her cheeks, and the words, “try to be sad sometimes.” She started to explain it and got a little shy, and asked her father to explain what it meant. He said that they had had a conversation a few days prior about how it’s ok to have all kinds of feelings - anger, sadness, joy … the whole gamut.

I was moved. I wonder if I’m raising a person who will be able to experience and express the whole range of emotions and be empowered to be fully himself, and love himself even when he is angry or depressed. Days later, I still clearly see that drawing in my mind. I keep asking myself when I talk to Brandon if I am treating him in a way that encourages him to be free to be who he is. And I’ve realized that I am not as compassionate or empathetic as I’d like to be.

As a single mom, I don’t have a counterpoint, so I have a choice: be good cop or be bad cop. Because I don’t want to raise a spoiled, whiny, out of control, intolerable, manipulative little person, I lean towards bad cop. Maybe too far. Maybe I need to be more gentle and more permissive - with him and with myself.

Thanks, Maya, for being who you are. I hope to see you again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 2:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Brandon, Life in Marisaland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.