the beauty of the ordinary

Saturday night. White wine (Oyster Bay) and Grace’s OLPC. Whit is in bed after a delightful mother-son afternoon that only included one pee-your-pants incident.

Have been thinking a lot lately about how I think about my children, and am a little worried that I’m not spending enough time building them up. For whatever reasons the past couple of days have led to encounters with people talking about their own children’s exceptional skills at X or Y. I was really struck by the fact that generally, overall, I really think Grace and Whit are ordinary. And let me be clear: this is a great thing. I’ve written before about my steadfast, probably stubborn overcorrection to overscheduling of children – basically Grace and Whit go to school, and that is it. Grace gets one activity a week (in the fall, soccer, in the winter, skating, Saturday mornings both). Whit gets naps and lots of time banging a hammer on his wooden toolbench. I truly, honestly believe that this is the best thing for them. Unstructured time, just plain play.

I don’t think I would describe either Grace or Whit as exceptional on any dimension. And you know what? I don’t think I aspire to that. I think I aspire to raise happy, well-adjusted children who can entertain themselves and who can be who they are. I don’t want to impose a vision of their identities on them, and I don’t want to overprogram them, and I don’t want to already talk about what they are good or bad at. When I think back to my own childhood, I don’t remember thinking I was particularly good at anything or really special in any way. I was just normal, and regular, and what a treat that was!!

But I do have guilt when I hear these other parents talk about their early readers or their child’s particularly impressive physical coordination or early language acquisition. I simply don’t speak of Whit and Grace in those terms. Maybe I should? Am I dooming them to a life of mediocrity by refusing to extol virtues that I don’t really see? Don’t get me wrong: I love my children dearly, and because of that I think they are both downright terrific. I guess I feel like to focus on their exceptional promise and prowess at X or Y is to saddle them with both expectation and limits (if you are already good at X, doesn’t that mean you will by definition focus less on Y?).

I need to spend some more time thinking about this. I tussle with thinking somehow I’m letting Grace and Whit down by not being more flowery in my praise of them, and yet at the same time I keep bumping into my fundamental instincts that point in another direction.