My 10 Year Old Soul Was a Mennonite

Last weekend during my weekly trip to the local Mennonite farm where we buy a portion of our groceries I expressed some of my holiday frustrations to the lady of the house. We have been giving business to this family for almost 4 years and I have developed a pretty comfortable rapport with the farmer's wife during our frequent visits. I told Miss Arlene how ever since I became a parent, I feel as though I have very little support for my critical view of the 'gifting' practices in the mainstream culture. I told her how every year as my kid's birthday and Christmas approach, I agonize over how to handle these occasions without betraying my instincts and without upsetting people in my extended family. In my desperation for some guidance I blurted out,

"How in the world do you handle this stuff?!"

It was a silly question to have asked, as I already knew the answer.

"We don't", she said.

"I know.....", I replied feeling defeated.

We chatted a while longer and she described the way her family handled birthdays and Christmases when she was growing up, and how she and her family handle these occasions with their kids now. She told me how thankful she is that her parents raised her the way they did and she agreed with my observation that mainstream American culture is literally obsessed with 'stuff.' She sympathized with my situation and suggested that I pray for God to bring me clarity on these matters. Today I feel that God has shown me what I needed to see so that I might begin to face the holidays with a more peaceful and happier spirit.

We Are Not Born This Way

I believe that the average human is born with a natural inclination towards order and logic. Consider the cognition of the 3 year old who is constantly asking his parents, “Why?” His brain is not even fully developed, but already he is trying to make sense of things. He is setting up rudimentary experiments to try to establish cause and effect. He is problem-solving. He wants to understand the underlying mechanisms that make things work and perhaps even more so, he wants to understand the reasons why we do all the things we do.

I, myself am no master of logic and reason. I freely admit that I have many habits and behaviors that do not make sense. For instance, I am my own worst enemy when it comes to shopping for clothes. I seem to suffer from the delusion that I can never have too many articles of clothing. I continue on in this delusion well beyond the point of having run out of closet and drawer space to house them all, then I become frustrated and angry at my inability to keep my clothing organized and I exclaim angrily, “I never have enough closet space! If this house just had normal closets, this wouldn’t be a problem!”

During these moments of frustration I try to rationalize that the problem is not having enough space. But the real problem is that I have far more clothing than I can adequately house and manage. And yet I keep buying more clothing. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would a person do this to themselves? Why would a person first create a problem, become frustrated by the problem, continue to feed the problem and then purposefully misunderstand the cause of the problem? I think I figured out why we do this. We do this so that we can continue to shop and buy more stuff without arousing cognitive dissonance. We do this so we can continue to shop-

Because we really like to shop. We like the colors, the lights and the display features in all the stores. We like the pictures of happy families playing in the leaves while wearing all the latest fall fashions. We get a warm feeling inside when we see these things as we walk the aisles of shopping malls, department stores and outlets. These things are comforting and familiar. These things are sentimental to us. These are not habits and ideas we are born with, these are things we are taught.

Nobody is born thinking that they must wear a certain kind of clothing, drive a certain kind of car, have a certain kind of furniture and live in a certain kind of house. Nobody is born thinking that they must have all of these things in measures that exceed what is actually necessary and practical. Nobody is born believing that our culture’s consumptive patterns make any sense at all. Our attitudes and our relationships with these things are developed and reinforced by our culture.

As an adult I believe that I alone, am responsible for my own attitudes, actions and behaviors. But I also believe that when we are children, our family’s habits and the larger culture play a critical role in lending either clarity or confusion to the way we understand and relate to the world. The child relies on his parents and other adults in his life to facilitate his natural inclination towards ordering, sorting and making sense of the world around him. But in many ways I think we (parents and adults) lend much more confusion than we do clarity to our children’s quest for making sense of things. I think one of the most obvious ways we do this is in the way we celebrate birthdays and holidays.

How does our culture celebrate every child's birthday? We say,

"Happy Birthday! This is the day you were born! Your birth marks a very special day in our lives. We decided to show our love for you on this day by giving you a bunch of new stuff!"

And how does our culture teach children to celebrate every Christmas Day? We say,

"Merry Christmas! Today is the day Jesus was born. We express the profundity of our gratitude for this day by giving you a bunch of new stuff! And maybe we also donate to a charity or two, volunteer a couple hours somewhere or give to a local homeless shelter. But we definitely can't celebrate Christmas properly unless we give you some more stuff."

I think that the way our culture approaches children's birthdays and Christmases plants seeds of confusion in our children's hearts and minds about the value and meaning of 'stuff'. We teach them not to invest their emotions in 'stuff', but then we mark every meaningful occasion by giving them more stuff. We teach them not to lie, but then we teach them to believe elaborate fairy tales about a fake Santa Claus (whom wouldn't you know it, brings them more stuff). We teach them to "Be good for goodness' sake" but then we dangle the promise of birthday and Christmas gifts above their heads in an attempt to manipulate their behavior all throughout the year. And then we teach them that we are liars because we end up giving them the stuff regardless of their behavior.

As adults, it our responsibility to help our kids make sense of the world. Why then, do we actively obfuscate the value and meaning of 'stuff' by teaching our kids to expect more and more of it every year for their birthdays and at Christmas?

If you are thinking, "That's not what we're doing. There is nothing wrong with getting my kids gifts for their birthday and on Christmas", then I challenge you to ask yourself the following questions:

How would your kids react if they didn't get some new stuff for their birthday or on Christmas morning? How emotionally devastated would they be? Would you be willing to try a birthday without gifts? How about a Christmas without presents under the tree? Why or why not? Would this cause your kids to believe that you didn't care about them as much as you used to? All because you didn't make sure they got some new stuff on a certain day of the year? Am I the only one who sees a serious problem here?

Kids aren't born wanting more stuff, we teach them to want it. We teach our kids not only to want stuff, but to expect stuff for these and other occasions, thereby rendering them virtually unable to imagine a birthday, Christmas or holiday that doesn't involve them getting some new stuff!

We teach our kids that it makes sense to go out and buy new stuff even though there's nothing wrong with our old stuff. We teach our kids that if we didn't get them as much stuff this year as we got them last year or if we weren't able to get them any stuff at all, it's because something went wrong (presumably with finances) and we'll get them some other stuff later. We teach our kids that they need so much stuff in order to be happy-

And then we wonder why our kids don't appreciate what they have, why they don't take good care of their belongings, why they cannot keep their bedrooms organized and why we ourselves, never seem to learn that adding more stuff to our lives does not add value or meaning.

Why do we this to ourselves? Why do we do this to our kids?! Why do we embrace and encourage a culture that obscures the meaning of things in our minds when we are kids, and then spend a large portion of our adult years struggling to put all of this stuff BACK into perspective? Doesn't it seem like we're doing this all backwards?
 
Following a Childhood Intuition to an Adult Reality

If you are starting to think that I've 'gone off the deep end' or that I am turning into some kind of religious extremist, you should note that my first notions that our stuff was causing the biggest problems in our lives began taking shape when I was just just 10 years old. These ideas were not based on any religious convictions or any particular ideology. I was just an average kid trying to make sense of the world.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have been internally at war with many aspects of mainstream American culture. Like most people do, I embraced the culture and its practices but I often did so grudgingly. Maybe my initial wariness of popular culture was born merely from a natural obstinance? Maybe I've always had a natural tendency towards being contrary? I think a lot of people who know me have good reason to believe this is true and I don't think I could disagree with them. But maybe my contrariness as a kid was evidence that I was onto something that I didn't fully understand yet-

At any rate, as a kid I knew that I didn’t have much of a choice about whether or not to ‘go along’ with what everyone else was doing. So I partook of mainstream culture like most people do and even came to enjoy and take comfort in many of its practices. I did all this despite the often nagging feeling that we were constructing important pieces of the framework all wrong-

In particular, I noticed pretty early in life that adults become really frustrated and angry when they cannot find something they are looking for. I think there is something innately frustrating about not being able to find something when we need it but I noticed that in many of the cases I observed, the adult was complaining about having too much stuff and saying things like, “I can never find anything when I need it! There’s just too much stuff in here, I can't keep up with it!”

If they weren’t complaining about having too much stuff, they were complaining about not having enough space for their stuff or they were angrily accusing someone else (a child or a spouse) of moving their stuff. Sound familiar? Yeah, me too…

Initially I was inclined to feel sorry for these frustrated adults. That is, until I realized that it was never very long before these same adults turned right around and bought even more stuff. Stuff that they already had, stuff that they didn’t need. Stuff that was obviously weighing them down and making them unhappy- And yet they didn’t seem to notice that buying more stuff was the problem.

Okay, so obviously I didn’t learn enough from these childhood observations because as I mentioned, I struggle with compulsive clothing-shopping as an adult. This is because our stuff isn't just a physical burden. Stuff can be conditioned and transposed into very complex emotional and psychological burdens. Case-in-point: Compulsive-shopping. 

Stuff takes up space, right? Primarily, our stuff takes up space in our homes. It clutters our living space and adds layers of complication to the seemingly never-ending task of keeping our homes organized and functional. But the worst thing about ‘stuff’ that I learned as a kid was not related to the space it takes up in our homes, but rather the space it takes up in our hearts and our minds. Once I became school-aged, I discovered an even more troubling way that our stuff makes us unhappy.

I learned that 'stuff' isn’t just stuff. I learned that stuff has meaning! I learned that stuff can somehow communicate telepathically with other people, telling them what kind of people we are and in what capacity they should like and/or associate with us. In conclusion: Stuff is totally magical!

I will never forget the moment when I first became aware that the clothing I wore to school had the power to make me ‘cool’ or ‘uncool’, popular or unpopular. I instinctively thought this was absurd but the proof for this notion was everywhere. As I looked around my school I could see that it did not matter how mean, obnoxious or uninteresting a person was. If they had the ‘right’ clothes or the 'right' toys/accessories, the other kids seemed to like them more. And we all like to be liked…

As I tried desperately to figure out which were the ‘right' accessories to have and which fashion would win me the most peer approval, I began to wonder,

“Who decides which things are 'cool' anyway?”

“Where do people get these ideas in the first place?”

“Why do we have to care about any of this?”

It didn't take long for the answer to these questions to become clear to me. I realized that perhaps the single source for these ideas is television. Whichever child-predatory company pays the most money to make the flashiest commercial for their product, wins the child's desire. The child takes his desire to his parents and pesters or tries to guilt the parents into buying the thing. If the parents don't give in right away, they often decide to file the idea away as a good birthday or Christmas gift-

I was 11 years old when I decided that if I ever had kids, I would raise them without television. This is also when I began to understand the appeal of homeschooling.

I imagined that if kids' brains and bedrooms were not filled full of all the 'stuff' they learned of through television commercials or peer comparison in public schools, and if parents and families didn't use every birthday and Christmas as an excuse to buy kids all of this stuff, kids would never miss it!

I began to imagine a world where kids had never heard of or seen such things as ‘hot’ clothing brands and the 'coolest toy.' A world where kids didn’t nag their parents with, “I just have to have this” and “I really need that” when in reality they already had far more than they could ever use. A world where every Christmas and birthday didn’t involve kids drafting a long list of “I want's.” I imagined a world where kids were not measuring 'this year's stuff' against 'last year's stuff' or the stuff a friend or sibling received. A world where kids could just be kids instead of constantly comparing their stuff to someone else's stuff in order to determine how they should feel about themselves. I imagined a world where all of our stuff would just disappear and we wouldn't have to think about it anymore. I decided that this was my utopia.
 
This was not a world where we would hide our kids away from everything and never let them experience life. It was a world where we did not actively fill our kids' hearts and minds full of desire and expectation for senseless 'stuff.' A world where people (including kids) had to work for what they had. I decided that this world would look something like the show, "Little House on the Prairie" ......

I thought to myself,

"Yeah....But that would be really hard. Probably too hard for most of us, including me. That could never work."

I challenged my own argument pointing out,

"It's true that it would be hard. But maybe the only reason it seems so hard for us to imagine is because we are so accustomed to all of this 'stuff' in the first place."

(I totally used the word 'accustomed' back then. I'm sure I have these ideas written down in a lost notebook somewhere, but I digress...)

When I was 11 years old, I started thinking that if kids were raised drastically differently from the way mainstream culture prescribes us to do, they'd probably be a lot less confused and unhappy in life. At 11 years old, I didn't know exactly what all this would entail or how I would ever go about it if I had it to do myself but I knew that it would look a lot different than what most people do. Even back then as I reluctantly resigned myself to doing what everyone else did, in my thoughts I was unknowingly building the foundation for the kind of upbringing I would one day want for my kid.

It has taken me a very, very, VERY long time to become comfortable enough in my unique perspective of the world to be able to step totally outside of cultural norms without shame or insecurity. Until recently I have done so only nervously, always very anxious about what other people must be thinking of me. Today I am profoundly thankful to God for what He started to show me when I was a kid, and for giving me the courage and confidence to do what I believe is right for my own kid today, even if it looks a lot different than what other people do.

I believe that God began working these threads in me as early as He did for a reason. I believe He knew that it would take me a very long time to understand what he was trying to show me. I believe He made me a mother when He did in order to force my childhood intuition to meet back up with my adult self so that I could start putting these pieces together. I believe that God has always been trying to show me my unique path towards becoming my best self and I believe He must have known that this (becoming a wife and mother) was the only way to bring peace and integrity to my fractured soul. You can all think that I'm totally crazy for believing this but I am telling you, I have no choice but to believe it. This is the way it happened.

Please know that this blog entry represents my path and my truth. It is not meant to be prescriptive for anybody else and it is not meant to undercut or insult anyone else's way of doing things. I have seen plenty of really great, loving families raise kids into really great adults while still participating in some, most or all of mainstream cultural practices and I do not believe that there is one right way for every family. I believe there are many right ways for many different families and that God speaks to us all a little differently. I pray that God will continue to speak to your family and mine and continue to shed light upon our unique paths to Him.

Thanks for reading ♥