Parenting Like Columbus

Today, my four year old son asked me, “Mom, remember when you and dad killed all those Indians?” As I sifted through our recent conversations, trying to figure out what the heck he was talking about, I realized that this past Columbus Day I sat down with my kids and explained a bit about what really happened when Columbus “discovered” the Americas. I truly love nurturing cynicism in my children, however, I also have never killed any Indians, so I may need a new didactic strategy.

We parents are, by nature, hypocrites. It is impossible to raise a child without teaching them the very best morals that we know, though our own morals may or may not come close to measuring up. Likewise, we teach our children to aim as high as they can reach with their lives, while we silently or not so silently endure the thousand little indignities and compromises that make possible our success in society.  We smile outwardly and chafe inwardly. We don’t trample the herds of courtesy deficient strangers that we encounter. Why? To create from our mediocre lives a springboard into a successful life for our children. To live any other way would set them on a path to become the outcasts of society, fringe-dwellers, existing in elderly parent’s basements. Those unfortunates reproduce with the least physically desirable mates available, who only tolerate this because their own paths have taken a turn from stucco boxes filled with princes in shining armor to the swamps of society where frog kissing is the last act of desperate fallen princesses. No such future for my children! They will skim the top of the intellectual, moral, and genetically blessed gene pool to reproduce and make me super grandbabies. Then we will conquer the world together.

Or not.

Isn’t that the same basic ideology that led Columbus to our world, and started all the Indian killing in the first place? How can I possibly hope to can I fulfill my tiny selfish dream of making the world a better place through my conscientious, honest, and loving childrearing, when I myself am no better than the worst of my ancestors?

And this is parenting: we must ensure that our children don’t violate whatever moral code we follow, whether it is spiritually or naturally based. For every answer we carefully provide to our children’s questions, unanswerable questions swarm about us, lurking in our children’s minds and defeating us with the shadows of their presence.  So we hide things from them, we provide so many corrections to their uninhibitedness that finally, one day, they learn to bow their heads and assume the mantle of maturity. Even as I claim this is not the kind of parent I want to be, I see that it is who I am to my own children. So I secretly route for them, hoping they listen to me enough to stay alive and healthy, but ignore me enough to become the people that they were born to be, before I got involved with raising them. We are all Columbus, all of us who are parents, and our children’s spirits are the welcoming natives. Each one of us must decide if history needs to repeat itself.