Possession

After last week's post, a friend wrote about his relationship with his children, and I started remembering The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

I wrote about people who view their children as possessions who reflect on them. That can lead to tyranny and harshness, with very little sympathy for the growing pains of gaining maturity. I think many people have rejected that model, though not necessarily without a good substitute.

I see another example of that in parents who want the school systems to validate that their child is superior, often without considering what the needs of other children might be. This can help turn gifted programs into an effective resource drain, and makes me feel weird about my own time in gifted programs, many years ago.

Because in this case their child is elevated and praised, it may be easier to feel good about this, even at the expense of children with fewer advantages. After all, they're not yours.

Allow me to throw in this quote from James Baldwin, which I am thinking about more and more"

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

My friend wrote about a respect for his children combined with a sense of responsibility to them. That is appropriate, and I would say it should be natural, though there are other, less positive things that can also be very natural.

What I want to do, then, is review what Lewis said about the first person possessive adjective (or determiner) "my":

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so...We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun — the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog”, “my servant”, “my wife”, “my father”, “my master” and “my country”, to “my God”. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots”, the “my” of ownership… we have taught men to say “my God” in a sense not really very different from “my boots”, meaning “the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services…”

“We teach them not to notice the different sense of the possessive pronoun .. . Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.”

Certainly, if you haven't read the book, I recommend that; I am a big fan of C.S. Lewis in general.

Specific to the topic of dominator culture -- and this goes beyond parenting -- think about what "my" means.

He does write about jealousy over "my time", and how easily people can be put out that way.

This is also an area where it is easy to go wrong in the other direction, not setting boundaries and always putting the demands of others first. That is not healthy, but neither is it healthy to always choose selfishness and to always be focused on you.

It is worth thinking about what is "yours" and what that means. It doesn't have to be children: my family, my friends, my neighbors, my ward, my coworkers.  

Ideally, you like and enjoy them, though that is not always the case. You should care about them. You can probably not control them, and that is as it should be, even if there are circumstances that will make that very frustrating.

It doesn't take much to show you that you are not in complete control of your time. There are things that you can dictate, and things that you can't.

You have control over the choices you make, but not entirely over the choices with which you are presented. 

Speaking of frustrating...

Coming up against the reality that there is so much outside of your control (and there are people who fight that one a lot), the choice to do what you can to make things better is even more important. 

You can choose to respect and to love and to guide.

You can choose to recognize the ways in which you can be an influence for good, or not, and act accordingly.

Personally, my big memory of growing up (and every punishment) was feeling that I was not understood, which made it all seem very unfair. 

It would have meant so much to me if I had believed that my father was even interested in understanding my point of view.  He was very much a "My way or the highway" parent, so why would he care why I did what I did or what I was going for?

As we say, I turned out okay, but I can picture something that would have been better.

 

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