Big Kids

I teach yoga in a studio that uses the Jivamukti Focus of the Month as a theme guide.  This past month, every class I taught had something to do with Gopal, the child incarnation of Krisna.  Simultaneously, I began reading Neil Gaiman for the first time since high school.  I'm currently main-lining The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  The narrator explains the vulnerability and fear children experience.  They're small.  Adults are bossy.  I remember that feeling completely.  Adults can be so freaking arbitrary.

In some ways, that memory of being at adult's mercy is plain and clear.  In other ways, that sense feels a bit distant.  I'm trying to pull that knowledge closer, mostly to be an adult who listens to children.  Among the lessons Gopal and Gaiman are offering me are that children are Divine.  Thankfully, I'm around a community who largely agrees.  Years ago a friend said to me: "Prejudice against children is the last acceptable prejudice."  I paused, and then thought of my grandparent's neighbor who had said to me, "Children should be seen, not heard," or how many adults don't feel that children are owed explanations for their decisions.

Of course, this is all written within reason.  I'm not a parent, & I acknowledge that there are plenty of moments when debate with a little one is ill-advised.  However, this past summer I spent a week with my husband's cousin, his wife, and their daughter.  Both adults explained why she had to come up from the beach when she did.  They told her why they wanted her to eat the food they offered.  She listened.  She's a quick one, but most kids are capable of getting simple, clear communication.  Because they were reasonable with her, she's reasonable with them.  She didn't think her parents were simply mean or arbitrary.  They afforded her the respect of explanation.

I know plenty of adults who don't want to explain their reasoning nor actions to other adults, let alone kids.  And these same people often are frustrated when communication breaks down or problems arise.  It's frustrating to be in the midst of muddiness when you're grown, and have recourse.  But when you're little?  Trying to figure out the world?  Everybody is big?  Way worse.

Two children in Ocean at the End of the Lane tried to make sense of adults: "Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either.  Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing.  Inside, they look just like they always have.  Like they did when they were your age.  The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups.  Not one, in the whole wide world."  The narrator, "wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations."  Adults are just that.  Divine, holy children in bigger bodies, bumbling along.