Tell your children that when you are 17, you do stupid stuff :)

Lately - since a friend introduced J. to them - my children are experiencing a Beatles kick. We were driving somewhere listening to them and my children asked questions about the singers. I told them about my past obsession with the Beatles and that I was a fan in the true sense of the word of being fanatic. I explained how important my home town Hamburg, Germany was in their early history and how Obladi-Oblada was the first pop music I consciously remember. I told them about traveling to England with 17 to see a lot of relevant places and how I almost got run over while taking a picture to the entrance to Strawberry fields. I also told them that I waited a whole week for Paul McCartney in soho square park in front if the MPL building and that in retrospect I think that was rather stupid and I could have done something much better with that time, like visiting some more museums or take the train to Oxford like my friends did. "But then again, one does a lot of stupid stuff with seventeen, it just seems to be that way." I said and my 9 year old replied: "Thank you for telling me that. I will try to remember that and not do stupid things when I am seventeen, good that I know that."

And right there it struck me that it is really important to share with your children and to be honest about your life and your past. I do not think that this will have any impact on the stupidities my children will do when they are seventeen, but I do think that showing children that parents a) had a life before them and b) made mistakes and learned from them, is important for relating to each other. Sometimes we ask so much of our children and forget our own childhood, how unfair life seemed at times, how misunderstood we felt or how we just had to make our own mistakes. When I tell stories of my own past, I do not gloss over and I try not to exaggerate, though logically there are some things that I leave out, because they are not age appropriate or because I do not want to taint their relationship to certain people. I loved to hear stories from my grandmother when she was young. The beautiful thing about listening to that kind of personal oral history is how close it is to your life through relationship, yet how removed it seems because things have changed so dramatically in just a few generations.

The frame work in which this is related to our children plays a vital part in the effectiveness, because we all know the nagging parent that in a confrontation brings up the typical "and I walked 5 miles to school in the snow and without shoes" and usually just gets an eye-rolling. It is a whole other story when you are hanging out with your kids in the evening with the lights dim and the books are read and it is almost time for kisses and lights out. This is the perfect time to talk about things that happened that day, about highs and lows of everybody and maybe there is a story that touches upon some topic that comes up. My mother and her siblings actually had to walk very far on very cold days through deep snow, not dressed very warm and sometimes somebody could not attend school, because there where just not enough pairs of shoes for everybody. Once my great uncle had to whittle wooden shoes for my mother and since he was a man of ideas and not execution, they were not smooth enough, my mother got a splinter, then blood poisoning and almost died. If I bring this up after reading Harry Potter 7 and how cold they kids are in the tent, my kids would probably open to it and could reference it somehow. If I bring this up when I angry because my seven year old strangely enough and yet again misplaced all her shoes, it will just come over as annoying or threatening and probably just be ignored - I always imagine it sounding like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons: 'wha hwah wha bla wha...". I prefer to talk about my past in a humorous way anyway. When I was eight though, I was not able to see the fun in trudging through deep mud in the middle of the night while shivering in my nightgown and being guided by a flashlight that was just bright enough to highlight all the scary spiders in the outhouse, but in retrospect I do think it is quite hilarious.

Anyway, it is wonderful to have connections between my past and my children's present and stories are a good way to express these connections and to live them out. Returning to the Beatles, I enjoy tremendously when we break out in song together and can have fun that way. I have this very old and taped poster of the Beatles in 1965, my birth year, and I had it matted and framed when I attended university. Since then it has been kicking around in basements and attics and now it gets another round of display in my older daughter's room and I think that is just awesome. And just maybe it will make her smile when she is reminded of how silly her mother was when she was 17.