As K-Kitten gets older, and I get older, I keep wondering about what this next generation is going to hold for her and her children as they come. I walk outside and get in the car, drive down the street to buy gasoline that costs more than a gallon of milk, just to go to the store to buy a gallon of milk. You turn on the news and all you see is strife and suffering. Natural disasters have become bigger and more devastating. What does this leave for the future? What kind of values should I instill in my daughter when I worry myself if she’ll have a future to hope for?
The world has become such a dismal place, wherever you turn there’s poverty and starvation. Even in our meager household, we have some nice things, but we are far from well-off. Discrimination against gays, against people of different backgrounds, or gender, or politics. How do you ward your child from all the hate in the world while teaching them that it exists and it isn’t going away? How do you teach a child in a world of hate, to refrain from hating?
It’s not just other people now that hate, it’s instilled in our culture (in America) that we have to hate something. Hate our bodies, our hair, our weaknesses, other’s success, your own success or failures. Since my daughter and myself are women in this world, it particularly strikes me that women have so many things that they’re trying to break free from and often it is other women helping to hold them down. When we try to do what we think is right as mothers, we are told we are wrong. When we decide to birth at home or in a hospital, we are told that we are being unsafe and asking for trouble.
How do you teach someone to trust themselves and each other when this is how the world works?
I’m trying to make way for this next generation with my one child. I’m overwhelmed with the job ahead of me. I can only hope that she grows to love herself and her accomplishments, understand and listen to other sides of the coin, and be happy with the choices she makes for her own life. One day, I hope that her children and her children’s children live in a better world. A world that these new generations will be tasked to create, it is our task to make way for this generation, to enable them to accomplish big things, to help remove the roadblocks that our generation has faced, to help turn the tables.
Love, Trust, Understanding.
Maybe a heaping of pride and determination wouldn’t hurt.
