Keeping Childhood

Last week a blog post transformed my heart. This week, I needed the transformation.

I was scanning my email last Thursday while scarfing a bite for lunch, knowing my nephews and niece were coming and that I hadn’t yet loaded my dishwasher or put away the Duplos bedecking my carpet. In my scramble, I stumbled upon my cousin Jessica’s blog post almost by accident. Almost. When something moves you that much, it’s rarely really accidental. In the five minutes it took to digest Jessica’s article, God turned my heart from keeping house to keeping kids; and in the five days since I read it, I’ve recognized how deeply children—all children—need that turning.

Living in a Sacred Space. The title itself subdued me. I perused Jessica’s account of the unthinkable: the death in 9/11 of a man from her hometown, Sugar City, Idaho, “Where Nothing Ever Happens. Including Bad Things!”

Like Raymond. Where the Merc and the local Canada Post represent the community social network. Where there are only three Events: Christmas, July First, and Zones. Where there are no strangers, only second cousins thrice removed. Where the Expressions reports quilt raffles, high school football scores, and real estate sales as our only front-page news . . . except, of course, when Kraft Canada comes and Raymond is on TV. Then the whole town shuts down. All thirty-seven hundred of us don red, stampede the rodeo grounds, and abandon our lives to watch a couple of celebrities try to rope calves and race barrels. But once the TV cameras have pulled out of town, what’s left are the kids riding scooters down Broadway, the youth biking from basketball practice to Burger Baron, and the stay-at-home moms who still send homemade cupcakes to elementary school classes for birthday treats.

Jessica juxtaposes this small-town utopia with intrusive and ugly realities. A neighbor’s death in 9/11. A lock-down drill in her nine-year-old’s school. My thoughts race: my kids have lock-down drills. Even in Raymond. And this week, the school announced a revolution: no more parents wandering unchecked through the halls of RES. No grown-ups period without office-issued visitor ID. Doors locked at every entrance save the office after 8:25. A safety initiative. “So some grown-up can’t just come to school and shoot you,” my husband explained to my sons.

So standard procedure in schools across the continent has finally penetrated Raymond. So what? My stomach wrenches as my head computes: so perhaps there really is no such thing as Never-Never Land, not even in Raymond. Perhaps Corrie ten Boom had it dead right when she attested, “There are. . . no places that are safer than other places” (The Hiding Place). And if my children rely on teachers and administrators to lock-out the dangers at school, for what do my children rely on me when they tumble back home to my care?

Jessica sketches her vision:

Around each of my children - and the whole world they inhabit - is the beautiful bright dome of Childhood. That's the world of coloring and swinging and learning and songs, and so, so much laughter . It's a sacred place, and so I feel incredibly blessed to live - most of the time - inside that dome, too. My entire life is better and more beautiful and funnier, and viewed from much closer-up because of these two small people in my care.

But their dome is a fragile one, and it's part of my job as Mama to keep it in place for as long as I can, to keep them safe and carefree and joyful, to keep our life a place of magic and caterpillars and bubble-blowing and refuge. It's the only way the world stands a chance, after all. Those sacred spheres inhabited by children.

Yes, Jessica.

The administrators and the teachers lock my children’s doors at school. They keep my children safe from maniacs and guns. But I lock the doors on my children’s sacred childhood. I do not just keep a house; I keep the laughter, self-worth, trust, security and innocence of every child who enters it. Most compellingly, I keep my children and all children who enter my home safe from me. I lock the doors on my grouchiness, my bad hair days, my insecurities, my fear. I lock the doors on my compulsions for quiet and clean. I lock the doors on my rising voice and rising temper. I lock the doors on my frustrations and I keep their childhood. I keep eyes to see their sorrows and their triumphs as they see them: not as passing insignificance, but as all-important—as my kindergartner expressed when I told him, in attempt at reassurance, that his pooping his pants at school was not a big problem. “It is a big problem to me,” he wept. I keep ears to hear that weeping—ears to listen to their tattling, their prattling, their prayers. I keep lips to kiss their owies. I keep fingers to tickle their tummies. I keep shoulders for them to lean and cry on and arms to encircle them in love.

Small trust, such locking and keeping? Maybe. Or maybe it's more like Scrooge answered that query, delivered by Christmas Past's Ghost, referencing the modest sum Fezziwig spent to supply a staff Christmas party:

‘A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.’

‘It isn’t that,’ said Scrooge, heated by the remark. . . . ‘It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then. The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.’ (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 53-54)

Fezziwig’s power is mine for my children, for all children who enter my influence’s sphere. I can render their childhood happy or unhappy, light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. My power lies in words and looks, in locking and in keeping; and I want to keep their childhoods as Fezziwig kept Christmas.

My niece and two nephews arrived before I loaded the dishwasher or picked up the Duplos. I didn’t care. They constructed MegaBlock jails, and I gave them obsolete vehicle keys to lock them. When they got tired, they cuddled near me on the couch. My niece snuggled right inside my lap. My own sons hovered over my shoulder atop the couch, and we read Franklin and The Thunderstorm and Franklin Goes to School. I fed them crackers and grapes and carrots. They fed me plastic pizza.

They live in little Raymond where nothing ever happens but where teachers now lock doors in case it does. But more importantly, they live within the clasp of my arms, within the sphere of my love. Father, help me lock my worries and my weakness. Help me keep their laughter. Help me keep their trust. Help me keep the fragile, sacred spaces of their childhood.