On Gratitude and Entitlement
Oh, treasure hunting, gratitude practices, pretending to take "picture memories" with our minds while miming the use of an imaginary camera.... We have tried it all, with an astounding lack of success. We were lighting the candles on Friday nights for years for Shabbat, and after we were done we'd try to go around the circle and each talk about a treasured memory from the week. One of my sons really resisted it. "There is NO TREASURE IN MY LIFE" he once yelled at me. The struggle for love continues in the face of great odds, as bell hooks says in her beautiful book All About Love.
Sometimes gratitude practices irritate me no end. In my own personal bible describing the misogyny of everyday life, titled Hysterical, Elissa Bassist describes the ridiculous gratitude women are asked to perform, with medical professionals, with men, and also everyone else all the time:
When I was sick, I socialized exclusively with doctors, pharmacists, employers, and deliverymen - and I wanted something from all of them. At each medical appointment, I wanted an actual diagnosis and a prognosis and a strategy and a cure and alleviation and also each doctor's unconditional love. But I didn't say that. I said, "Thank you." Because if I did speak, I spoke in "the good female patient voice": the pleasant and accepting and grateful voice, the voice that wasn't too assertive or too blunt or too cold, the voice that didn't ask too many questions or follow up too frequently, and especially the apologetic voice. With every doctor I was just so sorry. I apologized for my unshaved legs [even though leg shaving was invented by Gillette to sell razors to women while men were at war]. . . I apologized for crying and for bothering and for confounding. I may as well have set apology reminders on my phone.
This is my struggle with gratitude. It stems so deeply from all of the existing intersectional bullshit. Not to mention mindfulness! Who knew my mind was so filled with the banal: "why don’t we have any bananas and where is the ice scraper for the car and why don’t I ever empty receipts out of my wallet." All this jumbled together in the food processor of my brain alongside an existential fear of loss, death and trying not to think about how mad I still am at the ex-girlfriend who never emptied the compost bucket. And no, colleague I haven’t seen in a while, I’m not pregnant but the night is young! All this to say, like my children, like everyone, I find mindfulness and gratitude practices really challenging.
Gabriela Montero is a creative innovator in that most unlikely of forms, classical music. She gets audiences to sing her parts of songs and then plays them back in what has been called a form of “embodied creativity” or what Natalie Hodges has called a transcendent kind of muscle memory (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUqhPoA5bIY). For me, it’s these things that sometimes make me grateful to be alive. All the pieces of artfulness in the universe. Not just art itself, but the sainted tree, the person playing the violin in a pumpkin costume for reasons unknown, or hearing my son eat in the backseat of a car, crunch crunch crunch. Who says this is not the sounds of the universe says Ann Lamott. And I agree.
Teaching gratitude to children strikes me as a loooooot harder than I thought it would be. Some of the books on gratitude seem really boring to children. "I don’t like it, there’s too much joy in there," said one of my kids, and I knew what he meant. It’s overwhelming, what the young folx call "toxic positivity," or what my good friend and colleague Sammi King calls the “tyranny of cheerfulness.” We hate gratitude and we need it, or at least some sort of uplift. As Maria Popova reminds us, optimism without critical thinking is naiveté, and despair without hope is cynicism. What a struggle life can be. Gratitude and optimism really do require such a delicate balance, especially with the state of our world these days.
Dr. Becky Kennedy is a psychologist whose work has become so popular, it makes me simultaneously grateful and annoyed. Why is she such a skilled parent? And why do I need her advice so badly? And she reminds us that one of the ways to keeps our kids from being entitled is to let them experience all the hard emotions: boredom, discomfort, delayed gratification. That getting everything we want and getting it now leads us to existential feelings of emptiness - of a lack of meaning, of entitlement and also a lack of practice in feeling bad and knowing that those feelings will both end and come again. I don’t want to recommend books that honour gratitude by committing the sin of the tyranny of cheerfulness. Despair is systemically meted out, it is meted out by injustice, by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. And yet, that does not mean that small joys are without meaning. What a confusing both/and. In the spirit of great art and meaning, in the spirit of books that take joy from small moments, here are three child-approved books on gratitude.
I Wish You More
by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld
This is my favourite book on gratitude. My absolute favourite. I have told the story before of trying to force my cautious son onto his scooter. "Come on come on go go!" I kept saying, until he said to me “mummy I wish you pause.” I couldn’t at first figure out what he meant and he said it came from a book. When I asked him what the title was he said simply “I Wish You More.” He might as well have added "I really wish you more mummy, it sure seems like you need it." When the book arrived I had no idea if it would contain the famous line, but it did, it did! And so many others besides. I have mentioned this book before, and it is so special. It walks so skillfully that fine line between wishing for ease and gratitude for our children but also knowing that struggle is so much a part of life: “I wish you more ups than downs. I wish you more tippy-toes than deep”, more “umbrella than rain.” This book is also so anti-capitalist at its core, it wishes for more “treasures than pockets” and for more “will than hill”. It wishes for more “hugs than ughs” and other forms of community connection, including “more we than me”. I wish you more wonders of the world than the chance to enjoy them, more “snowflakes than tongue, more “woo-hoo! Than WHOA.” And also the chance to rest: “more pause than fast-forward,” my son’s line that led me to this book. "Pause mummy, pause" he said. "Isn’t the rain so beautiful?"
"I wish all this for you, because you are everything I could wish for . . . and more."
I will never, ever forget the day he told me about the pause. And also, like so much of life, my reflections and wonder at the pause and his incorporating of it are not always welcome. "Wow! Wow! "I said in what was clearly experienced as the tyranny of cheerfulness. "I can’t believe you are teaching me how to pause!" But my over-zealous excitement was challenging to enjoy, it was too much, too big, too contrived: "mummy, if you say that again, I'll have to tell you I hate you" he said clearly. And so the struggle continues! I wish you more “hugs, than ughs” as the book would say. Or, as my eldest son said recently, "well, hope springs eternal.”
Sometimes You Fly
by Katherine Applegate, illustrated by Jennifer Black Reinhardt
I remember holding my precious little baby, holding him and never wanting anything to intrude. But life is not life without struggle and change. Receiving challenging feedback on my parenting that was oh so true, I struggled to hear it, to integrate it, not to fall to pieces. “I wish you wouldn’t yell at me because I want you to be happy with me all the time” said my youngest son. Oh, me too, me too. We of course wish we would never ever ever fail our children. We wish that so much! But it’s not possible, and it is all in the repair. I always say to my students, discomfort is where the learning takes place. Eavesdropping on the same students, I heard one say to another “I wish Shoshana wouldn’t say discomfort so cheerfully.” Yes, yes, fair. As I myself have had a lot of uncomfortable lessons to learn recently, I really feel what that student was saying. Sometimes You Fly is such a beautiful celebration of this notion that mistakes are the core of learning. It centers that all the growth takes places before the skill is mastered. It also one of those books hat include kids of colour, mixed race families, and fat kids and skinny kids without commentary. I love that kind of ordinary feminist book. Where it’s all just there from the outset, without a whole lot of handwaving. The stages also strike me as so right on. The first page features a harassed parent making the cake while the flour falls on the baby and it wails, the kitchen is a disaster. And a toddler fearing the pool, “before the seas, before the grow, before the friend, before the know.” Fear, loneliness, grief and struggle to learn are such a part of gratitude. Why don’t we pay more attention to these.
I myself found the love of my life at 39, and I am so grateful to each and every bad relationship I was in because they led me to her. I wouldn’t have understood what we have without them, and that gratitude, for what we are making together with a lot of help of all kinds, is crucial, it is crucial, to the both of us. This is not to say I advise falling in love with all the wrong people for approximately 20 years (my particular specialty), and it is also to say that to me, struggle is central to gratitude. It is ok to struggle and to long to make meaning from that struggle in appreciating what it brought to us. Better said in the words of Sometimes You Fly, which make me cry.
Each recipe we undertake
can rise or fall,
can burn or bake.
But when we break
we learn to mend.
When breezes blow
we learn to bend.
These breezes do not blow evenly, they bring more salt to some shores. And that struggle for change is our shared struggle. In the gratitude for what we have, I feel there are the seeds of understanding of how to fight for more for all.
Remember then
with every try,
sometimes you fail,
sometimes you fly.
Layla’s Happiness
by Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie, illustrated by Ashleigh Corrin
This book reminds me quite a lot of another book I love about gratitude, which I wrote about here.
I assume I’m not the only parent who feels like my kids are so materialistic and that it's my fault. Here to hep is Layla, who takes pleasure in all things big and small, really celebrating Black joy. As she says, “Layla means “night beauty,” and I love the night. Layla loves many things about the night, including the full moon, which to her “sits in the sky like a wish flower’s sister. If I could reach the moon, I’d blow on it and wish to play the trumpet well, without ever having to practice.” Amen, Layla. Only, in my lesbian case, it would be to play the Indigo Girls on the ukulele. Layla really practices what therapist after therapist has tried to tell me, try and really take in the joy of small moments: eating spaghetti without a fork, purple plums, my mom when she reads me poetry.” Happiness for Layla is planting a seed and watching it grow, or giving all the trees names or “hearing Juan’s parents laugh after they dance salsa under the magnolia tree.” Layla is so wise. She is, she is! She reminds me so much of how wise children are. One of my sons is obsessed with the ridiculous nature of capitalism. "We trade paper with pictures on it for trees!" He says this constantly at the same time as he asks for more Pokémon cards. He also likes to say: "I want to punch money in the face!" Though he has a different way of going about it, he is full of a deep wisdom. A wisdom that comes from not being fully governed yet by the rules of the grownup world, and continuing to be outraged by them. Rage on, celebrate on, children. Tell us how to be better, how to live better, how to find joy in the things that matter most, purple plums and naming trees and the red tree I saw last fall, glowing that much more radiant in the fading light.
Gratitude is hard, it’s hard! I suggested that sitting with my son was my treasure and he said to me, “sometimes I’d like to turn your volume down on your personal radio. Can’t you just learn to like things quietly!” No, it seems I never can. And in celebration of all the things that make life joyful, including these true, true words spoken by my youngest son, let us listen to the sounds of the universe together (peacefully).
Or as Layla would say, “That’s what I think. Do you think so too?”
Until soon,