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Tales from the Steppes


2004-09-16

9:04 a.m.
The souls of men and women, impassioned all

The YM is going to the zoo today with his preschool class. In preparation for hte trip, his teacher had the kids draw pictures of different animals. Most of the kids drew a pretty stadard pallette - tigers, lions, giraffes, elephants, bears, etc. But not my son. No, YM drew a naked mole rat. I begin to suspect I may have given birth to a performance artist. Or a mime.

It is incredibly quiet at work today. No Planning Board meeting because of Rosh Hashanah. And more than half of the office has apparently converted. I have the MM with me, as school is out as well. He was going to hang out at home with EM for part of the day, but she foiled my plans by going to a friends house last night and won't be back until later today. Curses.

Religious holidays are always interesting in my house because we are completely secular. My children have no grounding in any religion. My own beliefs are personal and not easily communicated to children. I suspect they would be found less than comforting. Our conversations on the subject have been more along the lines of "Some people believe X and some people believe Y, but nobody really knows."

As far as I know, the SU doesn't actually have any religious beliefs at all. Seems kind of odd to me, but he has other things he thinks about. We attended a Unitarian Church briefly but I think he only went because I felt it was important for the kids to have a community that provided positive reinforcement.

So now when a holiday comes up, the kids ask me if we celebrate it and why not. My stance has been to tell them we will celebrate any holiday they want to but they need to do some of the research and preparation for it. But I don't think this really works. Take Yom Kippur. Would a child willingly celebrate this holiday? While adults might understand the need to reflect and atone, chances are real good a child would take a pass on it.

So I need a new way to handle the question of god. I don't want to raise the mongols in any particular religious tradition, because I can't say that I believe in any one of them. I remember sitting in church (I was raised Episcopalian) and thinking that some of the stories in the Bible were close to the Heinlein I was reading at home. Who is to say which is real? I suppose I could do a comparative religions thing and teach them about many religions and let them make their own choice, but somehow that seems rather souless. I have no good answers and feel like I am not completely fulfilling my job as a parent.

I know none of the above goes to anything anyone is thinking or feeling right now. It seems fairly pointless to write this ephemera. But think of it this way - if we all keep writing, the Blue Duke will have lots of reading to do while recovering.

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