Talking To Chop About War

The other day I was driving in the car with Chop (7). We passed a monk wearing saffron robes, and he asked about him. As I was trying to describe what a monk was, I ended up talking about the peace walk, and why monks were walking for peace: war. I said some words describing war. We got out of the car, and were about to go inside. Chop said, I think I’m having some tears about the people dying in the war. I hugged him and he let himself cry.

Yes, I said. It’s so special to feel the sadness that war is happening. It’s so special to be alive to feel that.

“Maybe your devastation is the miracle.” is a line from my therapist I think over and over, and it arose for me in this moment too.

It was such a bright realization moment, which was partly because my child is older now, so it feels like a more appropriate time, but it also feels like a recognition of a different place I am in.

Because earlier I would have been lamenting the war and the horror of the way we are as he was crying about the war. So mad that he had to experience that. And that’s a perfectly legit response, I think. (All responses seem “legit” to the incoherence of war.) But in that moment I felt the specialness of him being able to experience, to contact, his feeling of sadness about something so sad. And I felt the specialness of being able to be with him, to hold him while he felt it, to say, yes, it’s special to be alive to feel this, because it’s getting to experience your love for other people, for this earth. I was able to not miss the moment, all the layers of aliveness in it. Because the loss of innocence in that experience is accompanied by more intimacy with life, with more nuanced colors in the rainbow of human emotions.

In that moment I was able to not be confused that my job as his parent is to keep that sadness at bay, or avoid the truth of war. This is new in part because he is getting older, and also in part because of how I see my role in his life. If I stay stuck in a version of being with him as his parent that was appropriate when he as 2 or 3, or a newborn, it leaves us both frustrated. I find it ever-humbling to keep up to date with this trajectory! But the way I keep up with it is only through feeling into the strata of presence in my own body, next to his body.

And what that reveals right now is that my role can only be to manage his circumstances a certain amount. Increasingly less. To not get stuck in that codependent very precarious impossible place where I try to prevent him from experiencing life. Life includes war, at this point in human experience, and to prevent him from feeling the sorrow of knowing that, is to prevent him from intimacy with life. I’m not initiating a bunch of conversations about violence and war with him, but if a description of war arises because I’m talking about a peace walk, at this point in his life I’m going to include it.

So many miracles occur in this conversation — the main one being he could notice what he felt, tell me, and express it through crying. Another one was that after I said a few things, and he was done crying, he was ready to move on. For a moment I was lingering, still talking, and we walked in the house and he moved upstairs. I noticed that he was done, that was all that was going to sink in. So I let it go. I followed his lead in this way. I noticed his wisdom in feeling it fully, and then not lingering. The emotional wisdom of children!

As Trevor Hall says: In and through the body, all along!

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In other news, we planted the starts that emerged from the seeds we planted two weeks ago. Honestly I felt they were too small to move but tried it anyway cause we had the time last weekend. This quality of “it’s not quite right and I have to let it go” is such a feature of parenting. I used to lament it, as if parenting was somehow a problematic intervention on the way life “should“ be, more often lately I see how it expands me to have to let it go, to get to let it go, whatever my idea was about how it needed to be.

It feels like a significant thing in the new phase of parenting that this is the first time I’ve planted things really in all these years of parenting, first time it’s felt like something I could take on. Bogs (3.5) helped me plant, while Chop played in the sand box. We’ll see what happens, if these plants can make it through my variable attention over the summer!