Geborgenheit

After I posted on Wednesday, I rallied. I opened the blinds. I got dressed in one of my nicer outfits. I went out to lunch (Thai food) and took a slow walk through the city with my camera. I found a set of stairs leading from the Old Town down to the Matte (the neighborhood along the river which flooded in April '05) that I have somehow never seen before; it's a covered set of wooden stairs layered in graffiti. It has become my new photography project, getting on the camera what I saw when I turned the corner for the first time and was hit with a riot of color. I walked along the river and avoided a rainshower. I drank a latte and read a book.

Thank you everybody who commented. Phantom pretty much hit the nail on the head when she commented that those of us who grew up with "less than ideal childhoods" are hyper-vigilant and critical about our own parenting behavior in ways that other parents probably aren't. I'm always on the watch for the first step down the road that is going to turn me into my mother. That I know in my honest moments I'm doing just fine is beside the point; the shadow of my childhood hangs like cobwebs in the high corners of the room. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood - and I have a dearth of childhood memories, so the fact that this one stands out really says something - is of my mother standing in the kitchen screaming in my face because I ate a piece of cheese she wanted to put on hamburgers that night. I might have been 12; twenty-five years later it is one of the clearest images of my childhood. The thought of Small Boy remembering something like that so perfectly so many years from now terrifies me. In my honest moments, I'm not worried about it; he has already had such a different childhood than I did. In my honest moments, I think he will think of me with wild affection. But we all know how irrational our own childhoods make us. As Carlos Ruis Zafon put it in The Shadow of the Wind, "One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are too deep."

There's a German term Geborgenheit; it translates as security. But it's not like airport security or national security - that would be Sicherheit . I've only ever seen Geborgenheit used in parenting books - perhaps it has a wider usage I'm not familiar with - and it's used in the sense of "the most important thing a parent can do is give your child a sense of security." Geborgenheit makes me think of being in a warm sturdy cabin with a fire going and a cup of cocao, curled up under a blanket with a good book and loving arms around me. In my honest moments, I know that R and I have built a life for Small Boy that is grounded in Geborgenheit and that a little bit of yelling now and then will never change that. I also know that my childhood lacked anything resembling Geborgenheit and that is why it's so easy to throw me off balance. In my honest moments I know that I am not my mother; that I never will be. I know I'm a good parent, and I know my son's affection for me is limitless. I know yelling at him doesn't undo in reality or in his mind the childhood we've built for him. In my honest moments I see our home as a place of Geborgenheit.

But sometimes the wounds of the heart are too deep.