*
Listen to the Children
My nephew
is 3
and
his mother is Greek.
My nephew
is
Greek.
My mother
is
not.
She lives
in
Ohio.
And she doesn't know what
my peaceful,
placid,
artistic brother -
her son -
and father to my Greek nephew
is going to do
about his strongwilled,
mother-loving
son,
who is more Greek than American.
My mother's fear
is that my brother
and sister-
in-law
will decide
that the best place to be
is Greece.
Greece was built
for my nephew,
and
my nephew built
for Greece.
(photo by Makropoulos)
But it is likely
our families
will partake in
a miserable,
soul destroying
tug-of-war
over where
my brother, his wife, & their son
who is Greek
will live,
over how
that threesome
should negotiate
two mothers on two
continents.
So my nephew will be
a very unhappy boy
in a very unhappy family
in the
United States of America.
* *
I really believe
that our children
at the instant they step
screamingly into
life on earth,
know
what they need
to be the best
they can be.
The quality of their scream
echos
the urgency with which
their needs need
to be met.
Listen to their screams;
listen
to the patterns of their early
inclinations
and follow them;
do not ask them
to follow you.
If you do,
you'll have disaster
or
you'll have life as we now know it.
* * *
Our children are
our evolution; they
are our better selves --
If we listen
to them closely
at the instant of their births,
we will hear
the nature
of the evolutionary step
that we are challeneged
to accomplish in this lifetime.
Our children are our guides.
Many of us are dumb and deaf
to their demands
and we instead force the child
into our demands,
because the challenge of arising
to the nature of their
call
is so massive,
so far
outside who we are at that moment
when we first meet them.
A parent's job
is to guide
the child,
using the rudder provided
by our collective ethical history of life on earth,
but
a parent's job
is also to yield
to the powerful calling
of his/her young:
to take all the steps necessary
to make the child
the person she or he
was born to be.
That's a huge responsibility,
and it is
responsibility
at its utmost.
4.
listen to the children!!
even if they say:
I am Greek,
and you
are Turkish.
Move to Greece,
and learn to love
the Greeks.
You Can!
Love Them!!
And in loving them,
you will find
the salvation that you need:
Listen to the Children!!!
1 comment:
Old baggage, old antipathies, drag us down today. I hope your brother and his wife make a good, strong choice for their son's future.
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