Carbon Copy Children?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could understand what was going through your child’s mind every minute of every day? Wouldn’t life be so much easier if you knew, you just knew, what they needed when they needed it? In the real world we must interact with our children using the best available information we can find. In fact, we must interact with everyone this way. And there often isn't much to go on.

There are visual cues like sweating, crying, laughing or squirming. Maybe it is something we can sense like tension, or distance. If we are lucky we are told what is needed – there is hunger, the person is cold, hurt, tired…

Yet without instruction, no matter what state we are trying to read, we are only ever able to perceive it through our own senses and experiences. If we are hungry we might push food. If we have a chill we may hand over a sweater. If we are afraid, we might surround and protect. Only once we master the art of empathy can we take ourselves out of the picture and respond to the true needs of another.

But how often do we misread what is needed from us? This is perfectly illustrated with those who do not actually need anything from us. I have been known to lean over my fellow adult dinner date’s plate and start cutting up his steak. I have assumed that someone in the centre of a crowd needs space. I have turned off lights, closed windows, silenced radios, all in response to what I thought others might need. In the end, I think they were really only things I would have wanted myself.

Here is the thing. As parents we are being asked to care for people that we can’t completely understand. Why? Because we are not inside their bodies or their minds. Though they seem a part of us, they are still so very separate. Frustratingly separate. Their needs are different, their lives are unique, their experiences are their own. And most of the time, our own little interpretations just aren’t going to cut it.

Greater than what goes on in our own little households is the need to educate these little minds. To show them how the world works. To teach them skills and ways of learning and avenues to explore. We hope they will meet their potential. That they will be true to themselves. And for that, we will need them to know that it is okay to be different.

Yet all we have to go on is our own little perspectives. The little window that we view the world through. We have to send them out into the world knowing that they are going to see something different than what we see. They are always expanding into territory uncharted by us. And yet somehow, we are still asked to guide them.

It makes me realize how very important it is for us to let our children know that we trust them. To teach them respect and appreciation for differences. Including their differences. Because all too soon our ways will part and they will be heading in a direction so unfamiliar to us we may no longer be able to get our bearings in their lives.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to justify why I didn’t seem to view the world the way others did. I spent many decades learning how to behave so that I wouldn’t appear so darned odd to the folks around me. I have spent countless hours teaching myself the things I was supposedly taught in school. I didn’t learn the way others did. I didn’t think the way others did. I didn’t say or write things that people could understand.

It is only now, four decades in, that I recognize that it is time to celebrate that difference. As quirky as it may be, our difference is the very thing we have to offer the world that cannot be duplicated.

Can I work harder to see my children through their own eyes? Could I take my own desires out of the equation to see more clearly what they need? Learn ways to listen better, open our minds, accept that appreciating who our children become may mean taking a walk right into the middle of the unknown. Just because we cannot recognize parts of ourselves in our children does not mean they have gone astray.

What a naïve parent I am! To have believed that my genetic code would create something predictable. Something that I could explain.

It is easy to fear something that is unknown. But perhaps if we expect it to be new and different, we will be much better equipped to support what comes down the pipe. Who knows whether our children will be artists or lawyers, whether they will rule countries or study ant colonies.

I figure the sooner we wrap our head around how great it is that we are all so very different, the better poised we will be to cheer on the wonderful human beings our children are well on their way to becoming.

Local Cinnamon Bark?

My four year old recently asked my husband how to make cinnamon. Hubby said it comes from the bark of a tree. My son wanted to know why we don’t make cinnamon from our trees, then.

I’ve resigned myself to the pull of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins lately. For years people have been approaching me and telling me they are reading these books. As someone who usually reads non-fiction and rarely fiction, especially popular fiction, I couldn’t understand what I would enjoy about this book.

I was a girl growing food from my land. I was raising kids in a world that scares me just a little in terms of what we might be leaving them in the future. I did not need a haunting scenario dramatized for me. (That said, Margaret Atwood and Oryx and Crake was a book I got a lot out of – smartly written, not gratuitously provocative). Being afraid of scarcity in our future was not entertainment for me.

But the curiousity got the better of me and now I see something of what I might have in common with this fictional time and place. If you know nothing about the Hunger Games, suffice to say that the folks in this book need to learn how to be resourceful and survive in the wild. It is true that I want to learn basic skills. But this is not out of a fear that they would be needed if technology or political boundaries busted down and we were all stuck to fend for ourselves. I am pretty certain that in the event of a catastrophe or war we would not be left in our bucolic corner to enjoy our cornucopia while others starved. All I have ever been drawn to about our countryside place of abundance is to know where things grow, how they are made, what the original materials are. I don’t do this because I think the world is going to end. I interested in the ultimate things that help us survive. What are we here for if not to learn what sustains us?

As an aside a wee calf entered our lives recently. She is a lovely little dairy specimen (our first after a string of getting female beef or male dairy offspring) that we hope to milk one day. She is lovely and her mother is producing a healthy amount of milk that we will soon be able to enjoy when the colostrum production finishes.

After two years of my son asking when we were going to drink ‘Bonnie milk’ again, I am pleased to tell him that it will be any day now. I only hope he does not start banning milk at day care again stating that he won’t drink anything but milk from Bonnie, our Jersey.

Back to the cinnamon. I can’t tell you how proud I was when my son explored the origin of cinnamon. There are so few things that we don’t bring to our table that he is actually now noticing the exceptions. This is remarkable insight on his part. And tells me this kid knows where things come from. Not because we explained it all to him. But because he has watched it all cycle around.

I have seen a place where cinnamon grows in a far away land on an island off of west Africa. The climate is a little different there than it is up here in Canada and my guess is that we won’t be growing any cinnamon here anytime soon. Then yet again there is a winery up the road from us producing their own wine from their grapes. It was once thought we did not have a long enough growing season to grow grapes for wine.

May and early June is the season of greens here, especially the baby salad mix kind including hot mustards, young lettuces, and arugula. Later in the month we will see our first strawberries and the arc of colour will begin. Until then, I am helping myself to a milk bag sized bag of greens everyday on my drive home from work. There is nothing quite like the splash of flavour that comes from eating real salad mix fresh from the garden. No dressing required.

Though we won’t be seeing any cinnamon bark trees around here anytime soon, I do know one thing. My little boy is connected to something that took me half a lifetime to learn.

How does your garden grow?

10 Things I Gained From Not Eating Sugar

It has been almost a month since I began my journey without sugar. Over 3 weeks ago I made a commitment to cut out all sweets and baking, all processed, sugary things, almost all refined and processed grains. I have partaken on occasion but the no’s have outnumbered the yes’s 100 to 1. I didn’t know I was capable of the level of success I feel I’ve achieved with this. Here are some of the things I have learned:

1. You shouldn’t tell other people when you are restricting what you’re eating. They either try repeatedly to feed you what you’re cutting out or they tell you in great detail when you’re ‘cheating’ without even asking for details on your approach. (Note that I did not cut out dairy and allowed refined grains and some condiments in a very limited fashion – one fruit a day was also welcome but no fruit juice).

2. Without processed sugary things I have to be creative and resourceful when choosing snacks and do whatever I can to plan in advance. I am learning new ways of eating. It is not difficult anymore to say ‘no’, even to be around a vast array of supposed temptations.

3. A small piece of dark chocolate when you haven’t had any in 3 weeks tastes like something that has fallen straight from heaven. And if eaten slowly, it has far more wonder attached to it than eating a whole bag full of chocolates in ten seconds flat. It is worth savouring. It has value. It is noticed.

4. Forcing any food ‘category’ out requires that you become mindful about everything you eat. It means you can’t eat everything off your children’s plates without thinking. It means you start to think about the other things you might be eating without consideration. It makes you aware of how often you might have reached for these things ‘you didn’t have often’.

5. Some of my new favourite snacks? • Tuna inside half of an avocado. • Popcorn made with organic coconut oil on the stove (let’s me honest, this beats the air-popped business by a mile). • Olives • Seeds and nuts mixed and pressed into a nut butter, wheat germ and date paste (keeping dates to a minimum and bulking up on nuts/seeds). • Carrots and cucumbers dipped in homemade hummus. • A small scoop of ice cream made with real cream and peanut butter. Yup – that was my treat – a true unadulterated off-the-wagon treat. I figured any sugar I was going to eat should be coupled with real fats and proteins to assist with the speed that the sugar landslides into my system. • Peanut butter on a spoon. The stuff without sugar in it. • Apples and cheese • Bag of baby greens without dressing (the new chips!)

6. Let me be clear. This is not a cleanse. It is not a diet. I have not lost pounds or inches. There is no way to tell if I have more energy or feel healthier because coincidentally the beginning of this journey coincided with the breaking of my little toe cutting my exercise routine down to a fraction of what it had been. But I do not get heartburn anymore. I feel less puffy. My skin does not break out. And I can think more clearly now that I reach for protein or ‘good fat’ snacks instead of sugar.

7. I never crave the good things I eat in place of sugar. I still only think about reaching for sugar when I feel hunger – probably out of habit. But I feel completely satisfied when I have taken a healthier choice instead. I stop looking for something else when I am done the first thing, no matter what time of the day, how bored or upset I am and what other snacks are within my reach.

8. When I go on a trip with my husband to Montreal for the weekend for our wedding anniversary without children, my commitments are sabotaged. Yet the mindfulness does not leave me and my bad choices are far fewer than they once would have been even when I am ‘letting go’. I notice that the ‘I’m not really feeling better’ is actually a load of hogwash. I am reminded how TERRIBLE I feel when I eat things with sugar and am less careful about what I eat.

9. Cheap decaffeinated coffee is completely awful without massive amounts of cream and sugar. Best to choose the good coffee.

10. Building in flexibility according to circumstances made sure that I did not give up entirely when the ‘rules’ weren’t followed. What I have gained is an approach that I can take well into the rest of my life. With this, I’m going to be able to carry on for decades to come and not just a handful of days I can mark off on a calendar.

Now for the most unexpected thing that I have learned: the power of saying ‘no’ to things that are not good for you goes way out and beyond the bad thing you are eliminating from your life. You build a new template where things you usually let in that are not good for you become unacceptable. You learn how to REALLY take care of yourself by nourishing yourself with positive inputs from all angles.

Finally, without question, I feel empowered. I suddenly find myself easily taking actions that better all areas of my life. I do not reach for empty things that do not give back in a positive way. I feel stronger emotionally. Removing sugar (and consequently most processed foods) as a major source of energy requires replacing these items with real food that has real benefits to the body.

The result? Feeling more full, more fulfilled, and more in control.

I don’t recall getting benefits quite that lofty from a mock-o-late bar in the past. Maybe it isn’t about what I’ve been giving up at all.

And simply about what there is to be gained.