Blog & Updates of Julie North

“Because I SAID so!”

That sentence is so small that you’d never imagine the kind of impact crater it leaves. It’s also hard to fathom just how much can be gained by eliminating it from your parenting language.

One of the first things I ever remember the Other Side telling me was that I was born into a World where people had forgotten how to “think”. That was a child’s interpretation of the information given to me at the time. Today I would translate it differently. It’s really about a society of people who were no longer taught how to think. They are mostly taught to follow. They are also taught not to feel, and though the two are often intermingled, the “feeling teachings” are a story for another day.

As a teenager I worked as a server in a family-style restaurant. I loved my job and as part of making sure that I was taking care of my customers needs before they even knew they needed something, I paid very close attention to them. Having the benefit of seeing their energy was indeed a boon to my success at this endeavor…but more than that, I learned how parental interactions with their children REALLY shape the minds and hearts of those children. I was sometimes incredibly touched…and sometimes incredibly sad. Thank Heaven for the constant commentary I get from the Other Side explaining the nature of such events and how they might turn out. Otherwise I might have cried myself to sleep every night or resigned myself to never having children of my own.      Thank Heaven.

I myself had amazing parents but being the fourth of five children, and my younger sister being so close to me in age, I wasn’t really paying attention to these same interactions as they were happening. I had constant commentary back then too….but mostly it was about explaining the actions of adults to me. I rarely recall explanations about other children. Children, it seems, do often need much explanation, as they generally have not yet succumbed to the false behaviors that adults have adapted to for survival. At least most of them hadn’t. With children…what you see is truly where they are.  They don’t yet know to laugh as a cover up for some other emotion, nor will they laugh at a joke that they don’t see as funny just to please you. They haven’t mastered smiling through pain and sorrow…so they weep. They have no polite and mild-mannered way to express their distress in moments of complete and total meltdown at the loss of a possession. Nor have they any concept or care of the judgments being doled out upon them and their parents as they emote their angst at having to go in yet another store at the mall. They throw themselves in the floor and let it all out! They are also constantly attempting to interpret this new home called Earth and everything in it. They did not come downloaded with physics principals on airplanes and flying. They do not have manuals on WHY people act the way they do. (Heck, WE STILL don’t have manuals for that!). They don’t know why the grass is green or why it itches, how an ant can carry a giant moth, why your hair color is different every month, where people go when they leave the house. or why they leave at all. They don’t come pre-programmed with concepts of money and value, a sense of linear time, an awareness that out of sight is not “gone forever”, or the intricacies of why Mommy might be crying…even at a funeral. So they ASK. How does it work? Why does it work? Will it always work? Can I make it work? Do you do it that way? Does everyone do it that way? Why do I need to do it that way? Will I always have to do it this way? Why? Why? Why?

Why, indeed. How this question is typically answered IS the tool that shapes the person.

“Because I SAID so!”

A perfect retort if you’re trying to raise a person to be blindly obedient, mindlessly dutiful and completely incompetent in the skills of seeing CHOICES and POTENTIALS.

A complete and total cop-out from the action of rearing a free-thinking human that can accept possibilities and allow others to be something other than mirror images of those around them.

And so it was, that by the time I was 17 I had witnessed enough stifling and hushing of this natural process that I vowed to never use that term when and if I ever had children. Ever. I was determined. Fast forward twelve years and three children later and you would find that I was fighting hard to keep my vow…even if I cursed it’s very concept under my breath as I answered yet another “why?” to every answer that I gave.  I was tired. I was stressed out. I was often at a loss for the answer to “why?”. As part of my decision to raise children who can think, I made it a habit to give as many possible answers to every question as I could think of..or muster up…usually ending with the wide sweeping…”or it could be something we’ve never even thought of!  Who knows! What do YOU think?”. This became my standard way of both serving the needs of a child’s desire to explore everything AND give me a minute to come up with enough energy to withstand the next round of interrogation. And that’s generally what it felt like. But it MATTERED! It really, really mattered. At least to me. I never wanted to watch the light in them dim like I had watched in those children back in the restaurant who were crushed, frustrated and unbearably LOST when they didn’t get something to feed the burning questions in their little minds. I didn’t want to feel in my children the heartache that I’d felt in those other children, when they get the brush-off by someone who is the closest thing to Wikipedia that they yet know. I wanted to FEED my children, not starve them. I wanted to broaden their minds, not squish them into a neat and tidy little box of thinking that was really only serving to give me five more minutes of quiet. If I’d wanted quiet, well, I guess I should have chosen something other than parenting. I didn’t….and so I answered questions…and questions to those questions…and more questions still.

The funny thing is, while trying be a gift to my children and the World as a whole, I found that I was really gifting myself! Make no mistake, I had fabulous parents. I suspect though, that by the time I was born, the fourth of five girls, my Mother had decided that most things were a phase that a child would grow out of. For this reason, I was allowed many things that I’m told, were not afforded my older siblings. I asked “why” a lot…but most of the time, it was answered by my Guides before the question ever came out of my mouth. So in my Mother’s defense, she never really had a chance to be a part of this issue one way or the other. The Guides would often tell me to do what she was telling me…but they usually corrected her reasoning for me. I don’t think my Mother knew that until I was in my 30′s. This must have been an act of compassion from the Other Side for both my Mother and myself, as it prevented many an argument, I’m sure. But I digress.

I found that I, like most people, tended to tell my children the same sort of things I was told. Normal everyday things. “Clean up your room”, “Make your bed.”, “Come inside., “Stop doing that.”, “Apologize!”, and so forth. This, like every sentence that a parent utters, begs for a “why?” from the child. Hmm. Clearly, I wasn’t counting on THAT many “Why’s”. And so the unwinding of even the smallest acts began. “Why clean your room and make your bed? Because….um, it looks better.” I felt relieved. Relief didn’t last. “Why does it look better?”, they would ask. “Because an unmade bed makes the room look messy and if someone comes over and sees all your toys all over, your room will look bad”.  ”Why does THAT look bad?…and who ever sees our rooms anyway? You won’t let anyone upstairs.” My mind would begin to scramble in an attempt to find a reason good enough to enlist room cleanliness. The children kept speaking, “We will be playing with them soon anyway so why clean the toys up?” Children are Masters of the Obvious. They generally speak the truth…at the most inopportune time. “Inopportune” being defined as any time it doesn’t fit neatly into our wishes, of course. My children were right. I didn’t allow people upstairs just in case a room wasn’t perfect. No one. Ever. Yet I still felt this deep seeded need for a made bed and a tidy room. What I learned was that I had a program running that said those bedrooms had to look a certain way. If they didn’t, someone might think that I was lazy or that I didn’t care. They might judge my children as hellions who didn’t mind. That was IT! They might JUDGE! And so it was that parenting became a way for me to clearly see every little “how-to-be-accepted-by-the-masses” program that I had. Since I didn’t want to be raising children whose actions were determined simply by the approval of others, but more for the approval of themselves, I had to start looking very deeply into my own structure. The children, of course, were more than fond of this process…as it meant they had permission to argue their case. I had to start digging deeply into myself for the reasoning behind my actions and expectations of them.

I wanted to raise children who knew what society thought was right. I also wanted them to know that there were other options. All had consequences. Some we’d like, and some we didn’t. Either way though, it was a CHOICE. If they asked me why they had to do something, and I didn’t have a reasonable reason…well, that rule was abandoned until I came up with a reasonable reason…and most of the time, that reasonable reason never appeared. I freed myself from countless activities and stresses that I wasn’t even aware were effecting me, while allowing my children a broader playing field for thought. More importantly, I learned how to speak what was really going on inside of me. A lesson I first remember encountering when I was about 5 years old, in reversal. I was often found walking the split-rail fence in our yard. My Mother would say to me “Get off of there Julie before you fall and split your head open!”. Before I could retort, my Guides would say “You’re not going to crack your head open….but you’re making her nervous about it, so get down”. And I would get down. Without that commentary, I would have surely said “No I’m NOT!”, attempting to continue my tight-rope dare-devil antics on a less than stable fence. Because walking that fence was not more important to me than her stress level, even though she was wrong about the fall, I relented and moved on to some less nerve-wracking activity. This was my childhood. Mother telling me to do something or not do something, and the Guides clarifying what was really going on. Clarity about the REAL reason for doing something made ALL the difference to me. It made a difference to my children too. It’s hard to make a decision when you don’t understand the dynamics. This meant that I chose to honor every why question. Sometimes the answer to the “why?” had to be “Ask me after we get home”, or “We can discuss it later”, since sometimes the timing was less than ideal for me. Sometimes I delayed the answer by simply telling them the truth. “I’m super tired of answering questions right now and I’d really just like to watch this show. Can you ask me later?”. I just had to train myself to actually follow through and get back to them. They also had to learn that if it really mattered to them, they had to come back to me later. Because it mattered to all of us, it usually got answered. Truth. Amazing what can happen when you speak it. “I don’t know” is a truth too. Making up excuses or settling for the easiest answer is a disservice to everyone. I didn’t want to contribute to that. ” I don’t know” had to be followed by a listing of every possible way we could think of in order to find the answer.

I always saw parenting as the biggest contribution I could possibly make to both the Soul of that child who chose me, as well as to the World in which we all would live. Yes, we had rules. We just didn’t have ones that made no sense to any of us simply because that was the way it had always been done. We learned to adapt things as life changed. We learned to question everything, feel everything and be truthful about it. My children learned that they don’t have to share every toy and that sometimes their friends will understand, and sometimes they won’t…but they had choices too and we honored them. When you learn to honor yourself, you learn to honor others. When you allow yourself choices, you can grasp someone else has choices too. They learned that the World they lived in was very confining for most people and I still field questions about why a person would do this or that. I’m still answering questions because they’re still allowed to ask! They’ve grown up some and they understand now that out in the World of “Because I said so” there are many people who perceive a question as disrespectful or argumentative. This is the sad reality of teaching people that the only acceptable thing to do is adhere to whatever you’ve said and accept it as the one and only truth. The World out there has learned to shrug it’s shoulders in sadness and never once utter a “why?”. For most of those people, the question of “why” doesn’t even cross their minds anymore. That was hushed long ago. Their lives have become a series of trying to deal with what the “rule makers” have dished out to them. They follow without questions, and expect the same of everyone else. For better or for worse, and it’s usually for the better, my children were not taught to follow. They were taught to be a part of the guidelines we lived. They choose their rules based on understanding those rules…whatever they were. We didn’t get to make every rule….so we examined all the why’s that someone else made those rules for. It was the best we could do, being that it was a rule based World, and we were the minority…for now.

The concept of doing what you were told simply because and adult told you to do it is foreign to them. They were not taught to automatically respect and adult. They were taught to respect everyone.…and that respect had NOTHING to do with how well they followed orders.

I’ve often questioned myself about the way I raised these children. They are often at such odds with the way in which the majority of the World operates. They question, debate and keeping digging. I watch them struggle inside and out. I watch adults struggle with the thinking processes that my children often demonstrate in context to something that adult has said. I feel empathy for all of them. The adult often feels that they’re being attacked and ridiculed when all my child is doing is opening up the conversation to understand WHY. When you are not taught to question, you are also not taught how to answer questions. And if you haven’t asked those questions, digging deeply into yourself to dissect your philosophy about the “Right” way…my children are bound to ask you about it. They are paying attention.  They wish to understand more possibilities. They think. They feel. They believe that paying attention to you enough to be able to dig into the conversation with you IS respectful….or were you really just talking to yourself? I’ve wondered if I’ve made it impossible for my children to find a life and relationship that fulfills their needs because when you question everything…you’re bound to find the weak spots. For all the trouble free-thinking seems to bring to them, I’m truly not sorry for the way they were raised. I know it’s tough but it’s worth it. I know they’re not the only ones. I have faith that somewhere out there they will find other free-thinkers they can become a tribe with, supporting the right to choices and differences. I revel in the fantastical hope that they will be part of the solution to this world of unhappy following.     I pray.

The World taught them how to follow, and I taught them how to question and choose.

Now at least they have a choice in that too.