A Very Cheesy Post About My Parenting Philosophy

Happy Monday after Mothers' Day, loves!

Self portrait of me as a Mom. Acrylic, 2021.

You aren’t allowed, in polite society, to declare that you have a philosophy about just anything. No one cares about your philosophy on time (for example, ahem), or even worse, art, or rain. And if you clear your throat in a group and announce, “Well MY PHILOSOPHY ON…” you will immediately become the enemy of a good portion of the room, and deservedly so, you pompous piece of shit. Keep your dumb ass ideas about life to yourself; we’re busy making small talk here!!!! (JK I don’t make small talk, only brief deep talk.)

But parenting you are allowed to have a philosophy about, for some reason and so allow me to indulge you in mine!

“I would love to live in the moment, but all I can think about is what life is going to be like for my kid when she’s my age,” a friend of mine wrote to me yesterday after reading my column about the speciousness of presence and the chaos of time. His way of handling that worry is to try to make the Earth a more habitable place for his daughter. A very noble goal, and one that will benefit everyone’s child if he succeeds. In our own ways, I think most parents want to do some version of that. We say we “want to give our kids a better life,” and we don’t exactly know what we mean by that, which is why we aren’t too to hard on ourselves when we fail, but as we peer in on them asleep in their beds that’s the thing we all hold in our throats as we catch our breath, a worry so big we can’t name it: what will the world do to our babies?

What will the future be for our children, and how can we, in this moment, as we turn off their nightlight and pull up their covers, and go around our house tidying up, do to try to get them ready for it? To protect them from it? Whatever it may be?

There are a million different approaches, some strategic, some tactical, some mystical, some most denial-based. Mine is pretty simple, and I have no idea if it will work, but I’ll share anyway, even though it’s so cheesy and so cringy.

I try to love my children so intensely that my love builds up like snow on a snowball, surrounding them as they move through life, a layer of marshmallow against their skin, a hazmat suit of fluff and light, of kisses and songs and my fingers through their curls, so that when the future comes bearing down on them, with its laser guns and asteroids and boiling oceans and heartbreak and maybe aliens and off-worlds and petty arguments and illnesses, my love is thick like vaseline along their skin, a protection against water, fire, earth, wind, against teeth tearing and metal cleaving, so that it wraps them up and keeps them safe even from the torment of their own minds, which will try just like climate change and capitalism to kill them, and so I carefully implant memories so filled with love inside the tangle of their nueronic selves that even when they launch the most awful auto-immune attack against themselves my love is there, a knot along the synaptic highway, shielding them from any sorrow, implanted so deeply that even after I am gone and can’t be called on the phone or snuggled with in bed, the love I foisted on them and layered on them so much that they thought they maybe couldn’t bear the weight of it is still there, in their cells, in the margins of their books and the songs on the radio and the smell of rain and the smell of farts, a second skin, invisible but impenetrable, no matter what the future holds.

I do this by: singing to them in the car. Telling them every single day that no one has ever been more loved in the history of the world. I do this by apologizing when I am wrong or mean. By surprising them with treats and putting their heads against my heart when they are stressed. I do this by listening to their stories and asking questions and telling them stories about their birth and their babyhood. I do this by answering their questions even when they are about zombies and time portals.

My parenting philosophy is that the only thing I can do to protect my children from whatever horrors the future holds is to give them a sense of security so strong that they can summon the strength to face any problem. Even after I’m gone.

I have no idea what the world will bring them. All I can do is try to make sure that as they face space war and famine and heartbreak, my voice is in their head whispering I love yous and reminding them to look inside to summon the strength to face the onslaught of this brief life.

Keep going, little loves, keep going.