Boxes of Darkness
An Inheritance for Our Children
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
—Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”
Dear Mama,
Last week I spent quite a few hours lying in bed with my son cuddled against my side, staring up into the darkened corner where hangs a print of Josephine Klerk’s beautiful artwork “When the only world was you and me…”.
Ordinarily, I would reach for my phone, open my Kindle app, and slide under our heavy comforter to block any light from reaching my babe as I read*. Good non-fiction winds down my brain like nothing else, facts and suppositions gradually slowing the rapid-fire stream of thoughts that typically accompany nighttime wakefulness. But I’m trying to eliminate screen usage during hours meant for sleeping, so—last week I laid in the dark and let thoughts flow.
For the sake of disclosure, most nights when I lie awake for hours the topic most on my mind is death. That night in particular, I found myself thinking of inheritance.
Through millennia inheritance has been linked to tangible items with financial value (family heirlooms, land, financial accumulation), meant to be passed on from parent to child—or, if your higher education involved immersion in biology, heritable traits. The sort of inheritance which has been on my mind doesn’t fall into either of those categories. Rather, I've been thinking of the intangible wealth of being we (wittingly or unwittingly) gift to our children for them to carry long after we’ve physically passed from their lives. Our potential "boxes of darkness", as it were.
The Very Best of Everything
There's a common thread stretching through many conversations around mothering. "I want to give my children better than what I received." "I want to do it differently with my kids." Conversations both online and offline are gravitating towards what it takes to break cycles of trauma infused into family lines, towards setting our little ones up to thrive with care that we perhaps didn't experience (or that we did receive but found neglectful of certain core needs).
A big part of this conversation involves looking backwards, assessing our own childhood family structures to better understand what to modify now that WE are the architects of OUR children’s home. A little reflection goes a long way in identifying what not to do…especially when tracing the wounds laid deep into our own physiology by a parent. Instinctively we understand that to act in certain ways is to pass along to our children an inheritance of pain, and we don’t want to do it.
There’s a checklist that goes along with this kind of reflection. I am convinced we all have one, even if we don't consciously admit it to ourselves. The items on the list are different for each one of us, but they’re there.
Some of us don't want to yell at our children. Some of us don't want to utilize punishments or focus on control over healthy development. We don't want to feed our kids toxic dyes or seed oils. We don't want to isolate, scold, repress, or squash self-expression. We don't want to force our children to give hugs to relatives they barely know. We don't want to treat our kids the way our friends treat their children, or speak to our kids how that woman in the grocery store checkout spoke to hers, and we DEFINITELY don't want to do what our parents did.
We would never.
I'm not going to pretend I don't have my own list (I certainly do). But I'm also curious about what would happen if, rather than orienting ourselves around what we never want to do to our children, we took an honest look at the humans we already ARE.
The Things We'll Never Do
The idea that children learn from what you do, not what you say, is so deeply entrenched in platitude that it seems many of us barely think twice when we hear it spoken.
Well of course they only do what they see us do.
Well of course our words have to line up with our actions.
And then we do the exact opposite of what we want for our children.
We ask them to listen well, while we multi-task as a matter of habit, including when they are speaking to us.
We ask them to cultivate patience and flexibility, while we rush through schedules and fall into irritation or self-demolishment if our plans don’t pan our.
We ask them to sleep, while we vocally diminish the value of taking time to rest as adults, or while we only engage in rest as a last resort when exhausted.
We ask them to contain their emotions, while we indulge in detachment or in emotionally manipulative behavior.
We ask them to enjoy being out-of-doors, while we center our lives around being inside.
We ask them to minimize technology, while we spend vast quantities of time oriented around our cell phones, computers, and televisions.
We ask them to make wise decisions with money and with their futures, while we bind our own futures through myriad forms of financial and relational debt.
We ask them to move more, while we settle on the park bench or sink onto the couch.
We ask them to eat meals and stay hydrated, while we say we forgot to have lunch, neglect to drink, and stay too busy to sit down and eat.
We ask them to set boundaries and hold against peer pressure, while we allow ourselves to be shaped by others until our own desires and convictions are unrecognizable.
We deprive ourselves of the most basic care, body and soul.
We expect them to grow into adults who do better.
We forget that the inheritance they receive from us is the one we lived.
The Children Are Listening
To be very clear, not one word of this is meant as accusation. Everything in that list above is something that I am addressing for myself, and not in any romanticized way. The work it takes to repattern personal habit is often the work that is most confronting, most annoying, and most mundane. And this bit of writing, this letter to you? This is my own reflection on the work I’m in the thick of doing.
The beautiful thing about children is that they see you. They REALLY see you. Not the person you want to be, or the person you hope people think you are, but the person you ARE. They track exactly where your words part from your actions. And they track it even when they don’t realize what they saw.
It’s this inheritance that lingers with me in the nighttime hours. It’s this inheritance that comes to mind when I wish I saw something different in the children in my care, and then realize that I can’t ask of them what I am not actively embodying.
Our children can only receive from us what we already have. Are we giving our children an internalized inheritance that will serve them well, or are we handing them boxes of our own darkness? Are we giving them memories of us lost in meaningless rush, wallowing in stress and powerlessness, sapped of life force, full of irritability and impatience? Or are we giving them memories of us thriving, full of vitality and in touch with the principles that guard life in its richest expression?
The things we desire them to be able to access within themselves, the things we want them to remember when faced with difficult choices or with life decisions that will affect them all the way to their own old age...we might yearn to gift those things to them. But if we don't choose to cultivate some form of what we want to give within ourselves, we're actually just gambling on the desire that our children might eventually find their way to it on their own.
We already understand this intuitively, but it’s easy to let the truth of it blur. So many aspects of modern life as we know it fly in the face of cultivating the kind of wellbeing we want to gift to our children. But there are no shortcuts, no cheat codes to avoid the work. We cannot teach our children without first beginning to embody what we desire them to have.
If you want your children to access calm
become a mother who accesses calm.
If you want your children to access health
become a mother who lives healthfully.
If you wish for your children to see beauty
become a mother who sees beauty.
If you wish for your children to access wealth
become a mother who possesses wealth**.
If you wish for your children to access community
become a mother who invests in community***.
If you want your children to access fidelity
become a mother who chooses faithfulness.
If you want your children to eat well
become a mother who eats well.
If you want your children to move freely
become a mother who freely moves.
If you want your children to access boundaries
become a mother who keeps boundaries.
If you want your children to access joy
become a mother who expresses joy.
If you want your children to access truth
become a mother who speaks and lives truthfully.
If you want your children to live in the real world
set aside whatever it is that pulls you from your sacred animal body—
whether it be your phone, a lingering trauma, unnecessarily long days of work,
endless internal comparisons to imaginary ideals or far-off people—
inhabit your body
inhabit your days
become a mother who lives in the real world first.
With love,
Jan
I would love to hear from you in the comments. Does this idea of cultivating an “intangible” inheritance resonate with you? What sort of inheritance do you as a mother yearn to leave with your children?
This resonated deeply with me, Jan. Thank you for sharing. So often I try to craft this image of a perfect childhood to give to my son, but he sees past the illusion. He knows not what I try to project, but what actually is. You’ve inspired me to *be*.