The Traditional Family

[porphyry]

 I always suspected that Malkhos and I were born too late.

Every night, I read Madeline four of her favorite books before she goes to bed.  One is called Bludbird's Nest.  The story is fairly simple:  the narrative begins in autumn and chronicles a mother bird working on her project of building a nest for the spring.  As the pages are turned and the story is told about how she builds the nest, brown yarn, strand by strand, takes the shape of a nest.  The last page of the story features a pop-up nest with four baby bluebirds in it.

This is where Madeline gets confused.  "Where is the daddy bird?"  she asks, and I must admit, the first time she asked me this question, she took me by surprise.  "I don't know," I said.  "Maybe off looking for more worms."

But Madeline didn't accept this.  "No, it's that one right there!" she said, pointing to the largest of the baby birds.

"Is it?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. "And that's the Grammy bird, and the Papa bird, and the Andrew bird!"

"That's right," I said.

Later, Malkhos said to me, "May God make sure that the Department of Family Services never knows that we're telling her that a family has both a mother and a father in it." 

"Of course not," I said.  "It might be actionable."

Comments

[filialucis]

What bizarre times we live in.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Yes, conventional or traditional is now bad. I just don't get it.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

In Austria "vollständige Familie" [complete family] and "unvollständige Familie" [incomplete family] are still quite common, if not totally pc terms.

[leopold-paula-b.livejournal.com]

PS: I forgot to say that I love the idea of Monsieur and Grand-mère in the nest with Andrew. :-)

PPS: And I am glad that I was raised by my dad and my mum, but in my humble opinion an "incomplete" family (apart from just being reality) can be a good solution sometimes. That's maybe why the expression is really inappropriate or at least not helpful.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I can understand that in some cases, but on American children the situation is often offered as an ideal. it started out with the idea of not offending children from single-parent families, but it has grown entirely out of hand.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel my children have grown up in this very old-fashioned, insulated world, protected by this stable, unchanging environment we've settled on.

Madeline is very keen on my mother and father although she plays coy with my dad. It's this little game they have; he asks her for a hug and she plays hard to get. Unless, of course, she wants something, like candy. Then she freely gives her love. :-)

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Clever gal, that! She will get along just fine in this oh so modern world, I gather;=)

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I find myself relying more and more on the classic Little Golden books.

I remember once reading a scathing indictment of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which, if I may say, were nothing like that horrid television series), a standard series for all girls when I was growing up. The critic mostly talked about how awful the mother's attitude in that series was towards Indians, and the fact was, Caroline Ingalls hated Indians--she was afraid of them and thought they were heathen savages. What the critic failed to note, however, was that this attitude was a common pioneer attitude, fueled by expansionist politicians who wanted this land settled. She certainly wasn't unique in that way. Am I defending that attitude? No, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to judge one century's attitudes by the standards of another. The critic also failed to note that the father in that series, Charles Ingalls, never failed to defend the Indians as having admirable traits, such as their knowledge of the land, their hunting skills, their ability to survive in ways different from their own ways. This critic thought no one should read those books; I still maintain our children can learn much about late nineteenth century pioneers from reading them, and I further fail to see how this might make our children racists. Children become racists if their parents are, period.

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Having grown up with lovely swedish Elsa Beskow stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Beskow (I had to rewrite "The Children of The Forest", though, as I didn´t approve of the ending) accompanied by german horrorstories like: "Struwwelpeter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter (given us kids by our german grans, who saw no harm in telling tiny kids that their little fingertips will be cut off, if they refuse to have their nails cut by the necessary scissors) makes me feel not only extremely old but also completely incongruous with "modern child culture".
I wonder whom of us took the greater harm, in the end; the ones growing up now or kids like us, who had storybook childhoods climbing trees and the whole bit?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I must be getting old because I think we had it better. Nostalgia for the past and all that. :-)

Modern child culture is strange, and that's why we feel so out of place sometimes.