Why do you act like that?
When you are the parent of a three-year-old, you spend a lot of time asking essentially-rhetorical questions like “Why the fuck do you act like this?” Me, frustrated intellectual without a home that I am, tend to overanalyze the potential answers.
So, just trust this jump, having someone else comb your hair, especially when it is a rat’s nest and preschool starts in twenty minutes, isn’t the most pleasant experience in the world. Liv has never really relished it. But, lately, she responds as though she is an enemy combatant being “questioned” in the shadow prison of a US “ally.”
I’ve decided that kids of Livvie’s age have reached the point when they begin to question the essential nature of things. Up to this point, she relied on her parents to tell her what a thing's essential nature is. Thus, combing the hair was necessarily uncomfortable, but that being the ordained (by mom and dad) nature of the thing, her protests were minimal.
But now she has assumed enough agency to begin figuring out the essential nature of things on her own, and her assumptions are. Naturally, not always in accordance with mom and dad’s. Thus she can question whether, for example, hair combing must really be uncomfortable. And, as a result of questioning whether the discomfort is essential, she can rebel against it. Because, damnit, combing her shouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.
The thing is, explaining it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with at 9:05 when I’m dropping her off at 9:30.
It has me thinking about the nature of such resistance, though.
Those things we believe to be essential, inevitable or necessary, we don’t resist. There is an innate disinclination towards exercises in futility. In fact, once your brain tells you something is essential, must by definition exist, there is nothing to fight against. You’d as soon rage against the sky being blue, water being wet, or death being final.
It is this that I think most gums up the works of religious discourse. There is no perceived need to resist the doctrines one has decided, or been told and accepted, are essentially true. And there must be a comfort in that, being in a place where resistance is from outward appearances futile, but from within beyond question, mere folly. Once not only the conception of God/the universe/everything has been accepted, but also the rhetorical/conceptual framing that accompanies that acceptance, the idea of resisting, of questioning, is Quixotic.
This isn’t to be simplistic, to say that accepting a truth is childish and the resistance a sign of maturity. In the case of Liv and combing hair, she will likely, one would hope, eventually accept the discomfort of combing long hair as necessary to hair combing. But it is to point out that this relationship, for each individual, to what is worthy of question and what is not is worthy of consideration.
Because this is how we create our personal store of knowledge, of wisdom – deciding what questions to ask, what battles to fight.
And so I let Liv, for the most part, rage on, and do my best to teach her how to make good choices, and hope that the lessons, in the teaching, rub off on me.
So, just trust this jump, having someone else comb your hair, especially when it is a rat’s nest and preschool starts in twenty minutes, isn’t the most pleasant experience in the world. Liv has never really relished it. But, lately, she responds as though she is an enemy combatant being “questioned” in the shadow prison of a US “ally.”
I’ve decided that kids of Livvie’s age have reached the point when they begin to question the essential nature of things. Up to this point, she relied on her parents to tell her what a thing's essential nature is. Thus, combing the hair was necessarily uncomfortable, but that being the ordained (by mom and dad) nature of the thing, her protests were minimal.
But now she has assumed enough agency to begin figuring out the essential nature of things on her own, and her assumptions are. Naturally, not always in accordance with mom and dad’s. Thus she can question whether, for example, hair combing must really be uncomfortable. And, as a result of questioning whether the discomfort is essential, she can rebel against it. Because, damnit, combing her shouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.
The thing is, explaining it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with at 9:05 when I’m dropping her off at 9:30.
It has me thinking about the nature of such resistance, though.
Those things we believe to be essential, inevitable or necessary, we don’t resist. There is an innate disinclination towards exercises in futility. In fact, once your brain tells you something is essential, must by definition exist, there is nothing to fight against. You’d as soon rage against the sky being blue, water being wet, or death being final.
It is this that I think most gums up the works of religious discourse. There is no perceived need to resist the doctrines one has decided, or been told and accepted, are essentially true. And there must be a comfort in that, being in a place where resistance is from outward appearances futile, but from within beyond question, mere folly. Once not only the conception of God/the universe/everything has been accepted, but also the rhetorical/conceptual framing that accompanies that acceptance, the idea of resisting, of questioning, is Quixotic.
This isn’t to be simplistic, to say that accepting a truth is childish and the resistance a sign of maturity. In the case of Liv and combing hair, she will likely, one would hope, eventually accept the discomfort of combing long hair as necessary to hair combing. But it is to point out that this relationship, for each individual, to what is worthy of question and what is not is worthy of consideration.
Because this is how we create our personal store of knowledge, of wisdom – deciding what questions to ask, what battles to fight.
And so I let Liv, for the most part, rage on, and do my best to teach her how to make good choices, and hope that the lessons, in the teaching, rub off on me.
posted by JJisafool at 10:55 PM
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