We got home and one of Z’s ribbons was on the floor, half unraveled and tangled in the robot vacuum cleaner.
“Put it in the trash, Z,” I said, trying to simultaneously change out of work clothes and start dinner.
“But I want to keep it,” she whined, dangerously close to tantrum territory.
“Z,” I snapped, “it’s trash. Throw. It. Away.”
“Can we take a picture?” she asked. “So we can keep it.”
“It’s just a ribbon,” I said. “Let it go, baby.”
She came into my room, ribbon clutched into her hand and tears streaming down her face. “Please mommy?”
I’m trying to teach her how to let go. She desperately wants to hold onto every drawing, every treasure she finds. There is not enough room in our small house for this. Sometimes I make her recycle her drawings herself. Mostly I sweep up the artwork and the dried play doh scraps when she leaves each week.
I went to a workshop a few weeks ago. “Practicing non-attachment, find a new partner,” the facilitator said at the end of each exercise.
Yes. It is a practice. I am practicing letting go of my expectations. Of other people, of myself. I am practicing letting go of old loves and new ones. Of the stories I hear at work each day, the rapes, the assaults, the abortions. I cannot hold it all and still have space for myself.
We took a picture of the ribbon, and she threw it away.
It’s kinda pretty in its new form like, ‘oh, the robot vacuum made art!’ But, it’s also the kind of thing where the discovery is cool, the new thing can be appreciated as new and interesting, if only fleetingly. Most of those things are, as you say, just ‘stuff’ later. It’s like finding cool rocks or sea shells is fun, but they are far better left for others to discover than brought home to be uninteresting on second look.
How do we teach kids to see things in certain ways – can’t tell them how to think. Of course, there’s the ‘by example’ method where learned to look at things scientifically because we do. But then there’s the ‘counter example’ where I’m pointedly not things that one or the other of parents was because I could see how silly or, worse, terrible it was. Raising a kid is pretty awesome, the good news is that they come out good no matter how we raise them.