week of 1/7/04
 
 
 

Our children aren’t really ours
By Dawn Gilchrist-Young

In the film “Grand Canyon,” Kevin Cline’s character speaks to his friend (played by Danny Glover) of wanting to take his 15-year-old son to the Grand Canyon to show him there is more to life than Los Angeles traffic and the L.A. Lakers. Glover’s character responds, “Man, you done missed that boat. Maybe when he was 13 ... but he won’t want to go with you now.”

They do go, however, and in the last scenes of the movie, we see on their faces the dawning of a new perspective. It is this perspective that my husband and I have tried to give our daughter, and it was these lines from the film that came back to me this year as our daughter, for the first time, told us she didn’t want to come with us on our traditional after-Christmas camping trip to Cumberland Island. We insisted, and she came anyway.

Nonetheless, as I sit here atop the East Coast’s highest natural sand dunes, with more dunes leading down to the beach in front of me and the Atlantic stretching beyond that, my external horizon is cloudless, though over my internal horizon hovers the small dark cloud of my daughter’s changing outlook. I see her below me now, entertaining herself with creations in the sand. We knew — when we insisted that she come just one more time — that she would enjoy herself here. And I know that in the past few days she has enjoyed herself here with her grandfather, her father, and me. She has loved seeing wild horses, armadillos, and porpoises, and she has loved looking for wright whales and shark’s teeth, though less successfully. But she has also said, more than once, that she would rather be home.

We began bringing her here when she was still a baby because we loved the island so much. And we’ve continued to bring her here because its minimalist beauty is an antidote for the excesses of Christmas — at least for us. Because we see holiday celebrations as lovely and fun, but transitory and insubstantial, we keep trying to give her the gift that we believe is lasting — wilderness landscapes where change has a perceptible rhythm, and where we remember how to live, if only for a few days, within that rhythm. What I must begin to come to terms with on this trip is that our gift of wilderness may no longer be a gift she wants.

As a child, when I or my siblings balked at chores, going to church, or Bible study, the verse most often quoted to us was Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” It is a good verse, and like most religious texts, it lends itself to numerous interpretations. The one I prefer tells me that if a parent attends to and nurtures a child’s real nature, then that child will grow up to follow its own path. Or, as a wise friend told me, “The less you force your interests on your daughter, the more she will become who she was meant to be.” And as I see her grow more interested in the features that distinguish a Prada from a Gucci handbag, and less interested in the features that distinguish a red from a pin oak, I realize that her chosen path may turn out to be quite different from those that her father and I have led her down.

As I finish this, she naps in the tent after an 8-mile bike ride to the southern-most point on the island. When she sleeps, I still see in her face a resemblance to the 3-year-old we brought here so long ago, and I think of Aristotle’s belief that no matter how much a “subject” changes, its inner core or essence remains the same. I hear her stir in her sleeping bag, and I wonder if she’s dreaming. Maybe she dreams of the wild stallion and three mares we saw earlier on the beach. Or maybe she dreams of her cats and books at home. Or maybe she dreams of Chanel’s new spring collection. Whatever she dreams, perhaps what we have given her here will remain a part of the woman she eventually becomes.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches at WCU and in the after-school program in Swain County. She can be reached at playboat@aol.com)