This is a reminder to Future Me. This is a reminder to pay attention. This is a reminder to stay on your toes, because you'll never really know My Future Kids. This is a reminder to not get cocky. This is a reminder that My Future Kids will change faster than you can keep up with. This is a reminder to remember. Remember the person you were a few years ago? Keep that vague sense of embarrassment in mind when you bring up the person Child was a few years ago. Remember that Child cannot fix the mistake they made a year ago. Remember that Child is a new person now. Remember that they may or may not have learned from their mistakes and who they were then does not always dictate who they are now.
What I'm saying, Future Me, is that the goldfish incident when they were five does not determine their ability to take care of pets forever more. No matter how recently it feels to you, it happened much longer ago for them.
I have a theory about time in the context of one's life. Maybe we shouldn't think of it as an absolute length but rather as a fraction. Every year seems to go by a little faster, just as every years becomes a slightly smaller fraction of my life as I add more years.
I have another theory. Time we experience is inversely proportional to how much we are doing. As a corollary, time retrospectively is proportional to how much we do.
Maybe it's a combination of these. The point is that however much time you think has passed, Future Me, is not the same amount of time that some else thinks has passed. The point is that if you don't pay attention, My Future Kids will reinvent themselves three times before you think anything has happened.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Good Enough
What will I tell My Future Kids to make them happy and healthy and successful? Do they even get to be all three? At some level, I don't think they do, I don't think that anyone does, but maybe I'm wrong. Do I tell them that they're pretty? Will that make them more or less confident about their looks?
Whenever Parents compliment me, I assume them to be insincere and filling out a parental role in which they tell me things that are supposed to make me feel good. They do not. I either feel indifferent or I take the compliment as a sort of sneaky insult. Like a sort of congratulations for finally being mediocre at something you've been bad at for so long. I think that at some level this comes from my own judgments of the things I've done. If I feel that I have done something completely unremarkable or even the expected thing to do, and Parents praise me for it, then they have just sneaky-insulted everything I've done prior to that.
Should I compliment everything My Future Kids do? Only the things I consider worthy or praise? I want to be supportive, but I also want to be a trusted purveyor of opinions. Is it necessary to sacrifice one for the other? What if I complimented everything that was above-average? What does that even mean? My Future Kids should be held to a higher standard! How do I express to My Future Kids that good at something they really need to step up their game? Does having kids make you automatically love everything they do?
I hear they you're not supposed to tell your kids that they're smart. You're supposed to tell them that they worked hard. I don't know if that's the best way to do it though. I can see why calling them smart is bad. Everything is easy in elementary school. It's SO EASY to just be smart and get away with it, but for most of us it doesn't last, though it does last longer for some than for others. But praising hard work? Who works hard in elementary school? Maybe I don't remember it well enough, but I remember exactly one hard thing from elementary school, and I figured out long division the next day when Father explained it to me. I had friends who worked hard. They did a little better than I did. Is that enough? Why should My Future Kids work hard if they can work smart? How do you teach that? How do you encourage that? Maybe working hard should come first, and working smart can develop later? My hard-working friends still work hard and I still don't work very hard or very smart, but I guess I'm still smart enough that I'm okay but not so smart that I can completely get away with it, and I've always had trouble with classes that seemed useless or that I simply did not like.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference between what should be said and what isn't relevant. I should call My Future Kids beautiful because everyone is beautiful in their own way, but if everyone is beautiful, then why do we even need to say it? To remind them, I suppose.
Perhaps I should operate on the assumption that My Future Kids slash everyone has a very limited memory space and if I want them to know something I must repeat it often to keep them from forgetting. That sounds like good life advice that I will not follow, but maybe I will keep it in mind.
I don't want my praise to My Future Kids to be meaningless to them, but I don't really understand how to be both supportive and also not a blind complimentobot for My Future Kids. Maybe I'll figure it out when the time comes and the problem will unravel itself before me. Or maybe that's what Child 1 is for.
Whenever Parents compliment me, I assume them to be insincere and filling out a parental role in which they tell me things that are supposed to make me feel good. They do not. I either feel indifferent or I take the compliment as a sort of sneaky insult. Like a sort of congratulations for finally being mediocre at something you've been bad at for so long. I think that at some level this comes from my own judgments of the things I've done. If I feel that I have done something completely unremarkable or even the expected thing to do, and Parents praise me for it, then they have just sneaky-insulted everything I've done prior to that.
Should I compliment everything My Future Kids do? Only the things I consider worthy or praise? I want to be supportive, but I also want to be a trusted purveyor of opinions. Is it necessary to sacrifice one for the other? What if I complimented everything that was above-average? What does that even mean? My Future Kids should be held to a higher standard! How do I express to My Future Kids that good at something they really need to step up their game? Does having kids make you automatically love everything they do?
I hear they you're not supposed to tell your kids that they're smart. You're supposed to tell them that they worked hard. I don't know if that's the best way to do it though. I can see why calling them smart is bad. Everything is easy in elementary school. It's SO EASY to just be smart and get away with it, but for most of us it doesn't last, though it does last longer for some than for others. But praising hard work? Who works hard in elementary school? Maybe I don't remember it well enough, but I remember exactly one hard thing from elementary school, and I figured out long division the next day when Father explained it to me. I had friends who worked hard. They did a little better than I did. Is that enough? Why should My Future Kids work hard if they can work smart? How do you teach that? How do you encourage that? Maybe working hard should come first, and working smart can develop later? My hard-working friends still work hard and I still don't work very hard or very smart, but I guess I'm still smart enough that I'm okay but not so smart that I can completely get away with it, and I've always had trouble with classes that seemed useless or that I simply did not like.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference between what should be said and what isn't relevant. I should call My Future Kids beautiful because everyone is beautiful in their own way, but if everyone is beautiful, then why do we even need to say it? To remind them, I suppose.
Perhaps I should operate on the assumption that My Future Kids slash everyone has a very limited memory space and if I want them to know something I must repeat it often to keep them from forgetting. That sounds like good life advice that I will not follow, but maybe I will keep it in mind.
I don't want my praise to My Future Kids to be meaningless to them, but I don't really understand how to be both supportive and also not a blind complimentobot for My Future Kids. Maybe I'll figure it out when the time comes and the problem will unravel itself before me. Or maybe that's what Child 1 is for.
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