Several times a week Miss 5 chooses some stories and hops on my bed for our (little, variable, frequent but not regular) story, sing-song and prayer time. A few nights ago the books we landed with were Noah’s Ark and a Collection of Fairy Tales.
As a starting-out-mum, I used to be so deliberate about the things I taught, the things I allowed them to watch and read. In the moments where I read those book titles I was stuck with guilt over the lack of purposefulness in my current parenting… so I decided to have a stab at being purposeful.
I remembered how when Mr 19 was in kindy I was on roster there one day listening to how the teacher was going to handle the weeks focus on fairy tales. I wasn’t there to spy, I just happened to be on roster, but it turned out to be a happy accident that I was there.
Sometime before that, I’d had a conversation with my oldest brother (another of my life heroes) about kids/parenting/kids books/imagination etc. He was a parent of longer experience than me so I wanted to know what he thought. He’s said that kids don’t really separate fact and fantasy till they’re around 8 so to just be careful and clear about the difference, and maybe wait on some of the stories I didn’t want them to miss, just till they were a bit older.
Back to that day in Kindy… I might’ve been a tad uptight that our lovely little Christian school was focussing on fairy tales with 4 year olds when I was choosing to wait till a later age for them… so my interest was piqued when Mrs Munro began with the kids at mat time that day.
She opened a book (don’t remember which) and began to read “Once upon a time…”
And stopped.
And asked the kids a question.
She said:
“And what do we know when we hear the words “once upon a time”?
And the kids all chorused “THAT IT’S NOT TRUE, IT’S IMAGINATION!”
And then she said:
“And what do we know when we hear the words “And they all lived happily ever after”?
And the kids all chorused “THAT THE STORY IS FINISHED”.
The teacher went on to explain that the beginning and the end of stories act like brackets… they hold the story.
Maaaan I was so impressed. I learned lots of things that day.
One being perhaps to relax a bit. And to see that there are some really great ways of handling things I was concerned about. And I learned a great way of explaining fairy tales to our own brood.
So that night on the bed with Miss 5 I was all set to be a purposeful parent and explain Mrs Munro’s parenthesis – when Miss 5 herself pipped me at the post.
I laid my hand flat on the fairy tale book and asked her “what do you know about this book?” and she said “That it’s not true”. I laid my hand flat on Noah’s Ark and asked her “And what do you know about this story?” And she said “It’s from the Bible!”
Me: “And what is the Bible?”
Her: “It’s True! It’s God’s book!”
And somehow then we starting singing one of our regular night time songs… “The best book to read is the Bible, The best book to read is the Bible, If you read it every day, It will help you on your way, ooooooohhhhh, the best book to read is the Bible”.
A two minute exchange that walked me back over many many years of parenting… style… learning… thought… application… change.
We hear over and over that more is caught than taught.
There were those few moments at the start of this where I felt guilty for not being so purposeful, but by the end, I realised at least some of those purposes have become a part of my living breathing flesh to the point where I don’t need to think it or choose it… it just already is.
I don’t have to think about my eye colour. Brown is just it.
I don’t have to think about my toenail colour. Blue and purple are just it.
It was one of those beautiful popping moments when what turned out to be unnecessary guilt acted as a flag to consider something, act on it, and then see it disappear in a proverbial puff of smoke.
Nice.
I didn’t have to think hard about throwing away some recent DVD’s I found unsuitable. I don’t have to consider hard about which books to buy and which to leave on the shelf. I don’t have to think hard about how to teach her of God throughout my day because God is IN my day.
There is definitely a time for purposefulness. Oh yes. But even better is when that purposefulness has transitioned into Life.