Innocence

My children are the closest I will ever come to true purity.  They are innocence and passion and kindness.  They lack guile.  They lack cynicism.  They know no other way to act than authentically.

It’s the gift granted to us all at the moment of our birth.  Before we become tarnished by the world.

I remember the panic I felt when I first saw this purity in my daughter’s eyes.  My heart started to pound, my head started to spin.  For at that moment I knew that purity and innocence like that is a feather in the winds of this world.

How was I ever going to allow her to keep that innocence?

It wasn’t a mere task of parenting.  It was THE task of parenting.  At that moment I knew that helping that little girl stay true to herself was the most important thing I could ever do.  And to fail would be a tragedy.

It would be a tragedy to lose that for the world.

And yet I looked around and I looked at all of the obstacles and I started to see the enormity of the task ahead of me.  I doubted whether I could do it.

And so I think I convinced myself that perhaps this wasn’t my task after all.  I told myself that this world was her birthright and that she was meant to live in it.  I told myself that to shield her from that world would be to stifle her light.

And I still believe there is truth in that.

But these days I look around, and I’m starting to wonder if the only way to keep that light lit is to shield it more than I realized was necessary.

It’s easy to get caught up by what is.  It’s easy to accept culture as modernity and modernity as progress.  It’s easy to think that old-fashioned was abandoned for a reason.  It’s easy to think that values change in the directions they should.

But what if we step back?  What if we look at what our world is teaching our daughters.

That their worth is in their appearance and their appearance is judged by the amount of skin shown.

That beauty is a collection of body parts judged by their parts to equal a sum.

That it’s important to win and to be the best and the brightest and the fastest and the strongest.  And that to be less is to fail your gender and yourself.

That to nurture and to care and to support are great side gigs, but you can’t let them overshadow the self and your goals.

That productivity is second to appearance in determining worth.

That to save their bodies for marriage is an impossibility – beyond the limits of their self-control.  And that their reproductive abilities are a liability rather than an asset.  That they should make themselves like men in every way possible, including by sterilizing their bodies.  Except of course for the few months in their lives in which they wish to conceive.

That contraception trumps conception.  That their bodies are meant to be tamed and regulated.

And finally that values don’t matter any more. Because values won’t make you money.  And they surely won’t get you to the White House.  Values are ideals we teach to little kids to make our playgrounds easier to manage.  They surely aren’t road maps to how adults are to live their lives.

I think of all of this, and I flash back to that first moment when I looked into her eyes, and I realized that panic was right.  It was a guide.  It was a light.

Our children do need to be protected.  They need to be shielded from it all until they are well old and wise enough to wade through it safely.

To protect our children from modern culture isn’t sheltering them.  It isn’t naive or old fashioned.

It’s giving them the best they need to create legs strong enough to walk and wings sure enough to fly.  It’s letting purity and innocence mature and age.

It’s the only chance any of us have.