Parenting Principles Final Project

Baby Vows

Dear Baby,

We keep running into people who sigh dramatically and warn us about how hard and different our lives will be, as if every good thing we now know will be ruined by your arrival. Every once in a while, we run into someone who tells us that we are in for the best adventure of our lives. We like this. We don’t expect raising you to be easy – in fact, this should be hard work. We want to work hard to make a good life for you, and in the process, we want to become better people. We will sometimes be exhausted. We will sometimes make choices that don’t seem to make sense. We will sometimes run out of patience. But we vow to do our very best to grow all of us into better people, to learn more about love and compassion and passion and sacrifice. We can’t wait to meet you. Here are some of the things we are thinking as you wait inside the womb.

Our job is to help you find yourself, to help you become the best self you can be. Finding and becoming your self is of course a life long adventure, and yet, some seem to be further down the road than others. Our job is expose you to as many different things as possible and hope that we figure out the things that you love sooner rather than later.

But sometimes we may encourage you to keep at certain things for a little while even if you don’t like them, because we know that sometimes you don’t realize you love something until after you’ve mastered the basics. For example, we’re probably going to make you learn a musical instrument or two.

We’re going to make sure you know how to read and write so that you can understand what others are saying, and so that you have a voice that others can understand and relate to.

We’d love to teach you the fundamentals of both logic and poetry, so that you can make sense of the senseless and see patterns in the random.

There may be some times where learning one thing that you’re not thrilled about will be a pre-requisite to learning something else you might love. If you want to learn physics, you have to do math.

I hope we don’t talk down to you too much. Even as we meet and learn about our friends’ kids, we see them as people – people who are full of learning and personality and hope and desire. We want you to be who you are without us telling you who you should be, because you are the only one who knows the answer to that riddle. When you are really little, and then again when you are big enough to be making choices without us, we may occasionally try to tell you what is right for you. We will sometimes be right, and sometimes be wrong. But here is the secret – every generation has the responsibility of walking one step further than their parents did. We want you to be better than we are at life, love, art, work. We want you to surpass us, and we’ll try to remain proud when we realize this has happened.

We want you to love your body. The one that will be born in a few short weeks, with its flailing limbs and lack of coordination – that body is going to grow into one of the things you should be most proud of. Not because of silly advertising standards of beauty or physical traits that may be recognizable as superior to others, but because the body you get is a celebration of your soul. It is the place where you can feel safest and most loved. So no matter what you look like to others, we want you to look like love to yourself. Invite yourself to always feel good about your body, and others will see it. Respect your body, and others will respect you. You are undeniably beautiful. You are absolutely imperfect. Allow yourself this, and your life will be a better celebration. We don’t want you to have any shame about sexuality. We will give you everything we can to help you feel proud of your body and own your sexuality. After all, it is yours, not ours, and we want you to have lots of fun with it. Remember to be generous of others while always respecting yourself. Know that it is okay to sometimes feel scared, but never to feel threatened. And, masturbate a lot. This will help you to teach others about your body and help you to own your pleasure. Also - we strongly recommend you sleep with someone before you get married to them. You can find out a lot about someone by what kind of lover they are. But hey, it’s up to you. It’s your life. And anyway, you can always get divorced. We won’t judge you.

Speaking of bodies: Loving and respecting your body means being healthy. And that means eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. So we’ll try to grow as much as we can. And you can learn about that too and grow your favorites.

When you get a little older, you might want to experiment with drugs or alcohol. I say go for it. We certainly did. We trust you. We trust that you will experiment in safe ways, and we will help you get the best scientifically backed information on these subjects so you can make your own informed decisions.

Wherever you go, you’re going to take your head with you. So we want it to be a place you really like being in. Your head should be a place where you can think whatever you want. We definitely don’t want it to be a place where you feel guilt or you beat yourself up. We’re not going to raise you to believe in a God that’s always snooping in on your thoughts and making you feel crappy. But if you want to believe in stuff like that when you grow up, you totally can. We won’t stop loving you or anything. (Though we’ll probably have interesting conversations!)

Speaking of interesting conversations, we hope we have a lot of them. Let’s encourage respectful disagreement. We hate it when people just say, “let’s agree to disagree” so they can avoid having an argument. Let’s talk politics. Let’s talk religion. Let’s talk about our beliefs, especially when we disagree, and we’ll all know that no matter how much we disagree, we’ll always love you. A good way to foster this is for your parents to model it. So we’ll try to have lively and spirited conversations at the dinner table and you can see that disagreements between people who love each other very much is a totally normal thing.

The most important thing we can give you is a good example. And by doing the things we love in life, you will learn to do the things you love in life. Sometimes we’re warned that our crazy lives as artists will be killed or dampened by the responsibilities of parenthood. But we think it’s of utmost importance to show you that being a parent does not mean the end of your dreams. How sad it would be if you grew up thinking, “my parents used to love making art and music, but then they had to give it up in order to have me.” Luckily, we have lots of friends who are artist-parents who are counter-examples to this sad myth. So we vow to keep doing the things we love – making poems, making art, making music, and seeing the world through a lens of inspiration. We know you’ll get to grow up inspired to do what you really love by watching the people who love you the most do what they really love. Sometimes, we think that this is the biggest gift we get to give you, because you are yourself a piece of art, a lifetime art project that we started out of love and you will finish however you see fit.

We don’t know what kind of person you’re going to be, or what kind of personality you’ll have. And of course much of a baby’s personality is set by their genetics at birth. However, we do not believe that being an asshole is part of that built-in personality. We believe that –with the exception of psychopaths and sociopaths who have something physically wrong with their brains – assholes are made, not born. This is a long winded way of saying that we believe that babies are born morally good, or at least neutral. (Chaotic neutral, perhaps.) Baby, we believe that you are a good person. You desire to learn the rules of good behavior so that you can be kind to others, and not annoying. No one wants to be annoying. We will help you learn those rules. It may take a couple of years before you get the hang of them. We’ll try to be patient.

With regard to learning social and moral rules, it’s important that you can trust us. If we tell you that a certain action will have a certain consequence, and then that action doesn’t have that consequence, you’ll learn not to trust us. So we must try to be diligent about sticking to what we say and not saying things that aren’t true or that we won’t follow through with. Sometimes, you will be super pissed at us for this, for example, when no means no, or when we tell you that if you can’t behave we will leave the place that you most want to hang out and act crazy in. But we really want you to trust us, so we’re going to stick to our guns, as much as we can.

A lot of what we’re saying here could be said to any kid in any era. But there are also some things that we need to talk about that are unique to the age that you’re living in. Okay, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we… we kind of screwed up the planet. Sorry about that. There’s global warming and pollution and, well, we’ve just been living in ways that weren’t really sustainable and ended up making things a lot worse for your generation and the ones to come. I know, it sucks. So part of your life is going to have to involve adapting to that. We’ll try to work towards building a sustainable life here on a local level.

This last thing, it is one of the most important things, and it relates to everything else we’ve said. It is hard to say it, but hard in a way that reminds us of truth. We want you to fail. See, who says that to their kid? But please, for the love of God, fail. This is how you will learn, how you will grow, how you will surpass the parts of yourself that feel stuck and look boring. We want you to fail because you have the power to be more than the poet that always writes the same poem, more than the studio musician that plays the same riff perfectly every time. We want you to fail so that you see yourself in the bright light of possibility instead of the soft light of comfort. We want you to fail so that you can see that failure should never diminish your self worth or self love – it should challenge you to do better, to always reach for something a little beyond where you are now. We know that the most extraordinary people we have met embrace failure, and we wish for your life to be extraordinary. And here is the deal, kid. We know that despite all our best efforts, we are going to fail you too. Let’s be unapologetic. Let’s learn together. Let’s fail and get better and fail again until we know for sure that failure is the best teacher we’ve got and the only way we can be sure not to get stuck. This is our life, the most stunning and most terrifying parts of it. We can’t wait to share it with you.

Jennifer Borges Foster & David Mitsuo Nixon

September 2012