I went upstairs to check on my daughter when work was done. Her room was a mess. Pens. Pencils. Crayons. Books. Papers. Clothes. Yet, in this mess she had found two old ball paddles (those paddles with the rubber band tied to a rubber ball that you try and hit as many times as you can). She had cut the rubber band off the paddle and the ball. She was coloring them both. When she saw me, she jumped up excited, explained what she was doing, showed me her work, then quickly forgot I was there and got back to the task at hand.
She was turning them into ping-pong paddles. Next, she was going to make table. How? No idea. We will see (she came down during the writing of this and she used an old plastic tub and wrote ping-pong on it. Delighting in her own ingenuity to be able to use the tub as a table and storage container).
Here is a glimpse of my counter-intuitive parenting (at least from the world I have been subjected to. For others this may be the norm. If it is, in my humble opinion, good on you) approach: why clean up? When a room is cleaner it is a race to make it messy. Or worse, a hesitancy to create and do projects, coloring, art, whatever, for fear of getting in trouble for making a mess.
I ask her (as a standard question), “Is your room messy because you don’t want to clean it, or is it messy so you can be creative in it?” To be honest, it is one of those things, at first, that sounds kind of deep, and creative, a stroke of verbal genius. In truth, no idea what it really means. Its words strung together that do not really have a beginning, a middle, or an end.
She understands the spirit of it. She says, “be creative”. Then, one can assume, her mind thinks, “I’m either cleaning or creating”. She starts creating. Sitting in the middle of a dumpster fire of a room, I resist the part of me that wants to clean. The part that has been told it creates responsibility in a child. That to grow up and be responsible, they need chores and things to do. To maintain order, etc., etc., etc. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Maybe its selfish. Battling to clean. Battling for order. Battling, because someone somewhere once said that is what “we’re supposed to do as parents”. Honestly, that just does not sound fun. Instead, I smile proudly, because I to, given the choice, would say, “be creative”.
Posted. Not Perfect.
A Vegan Father navigating a non-vegan world.
A Better Father 