Exhortations to a Young Mother

This week has been a tough week for inspiration. I was getting to the point of thinking that I would fail to post this week. This lack of inspirations reminds of that idea about how to eat an elephant; one bite at a time. The problem is still that the elephant is so big it is difficult to find a good place to start. It now occurs to me not that I am not the only person perplexed this week.

My wife and I placed a phone call to my niece to wish her a happy birthday. She turned 30 today and has an infant child. In our conversation she related that the state of the world and the country has induced many anxieties for her. She is worried about things that might happen and wonders how those things might affect her.

More important for her is that she wonders what kind of world she brought her child into. How does she teach her child to survive in a world that she feels has definitely gone wrong? How does a young mother who is encountering enough difficulty figuring out how to raise a child impart lessons to that child without teaching the child to adopt the ugliness of the world around them?

The meat of the conversation began on the topic of trump and his followers. She is having difficulty understanding why his followers believe anything he says. She wanted advice on how she can figure out how this sort of thing happens. As we meandered in our discussion and explored different subjects I was able to arrive at what I consider is the gist of this matter; that is, simply, some people do not like to think on their own.

I advised that she should understand that the world around us all can be an ugly, brutal, unforgiving place to live. I told her that she should indeed be aware that the world can hurt him and her and everybody else. My advice to her was to decide whether she wants to focus on protecting herself from all the possible pains the world can inflict or to focus on deciding what life she wants for herself and her family and pursuing that life.

I told her is that if she wants to raise a flourishing child in a mad world she has to model being a good person to her child. I told her make sure her child learns to read and learns to love reading. I told she can protect her child from danger without sheltering the child from the hurts we all must endure as humans. I told her to live her life as a decent human being driven by her own curiosity and will.

In talking to my niece I realize that it is easy to ignore the elephant. My concern is petty; I wasn’t sure what to write. Her concern is in understanding how her choices will affect the world and her child for the next 20 or so years. To sum it up, our choice is to either continue to fear the world or start taking bites of the elephant wherever we can.