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Our
children arent really ours
By
Dawn Gilchrist-Young
In
the film Grand Canyon, Kevin Clines 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. Glovers character responds,
Man, you done missed that boat. Maybe when he was 13 ... but
he wont 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 didnt 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 Coasts 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 daughters 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 sharks 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 weve 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 childs
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 Aristotles 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 shes
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 Chanels 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) |