I am fascinated with our relationship to structures from physical buildings to mental constructs and how they inform our trust (and identity). I’m pulling together personal stories that touch on the topic and was thinking about the trust between parents and children.
When our kids were little we often gave experiences as gifts for birthdays. A trip to the movies, a special overnight, roller skating…
An experience we gave to our good friend Rowan for his 8th birthday could have burned our relationship had he been not so well behaved.
We invited Rowan to our house to bake whatever he wanted. He chose to bake a cake. Cake baking is a fairly easy yet structured process, and it’s clear where the kids need adult help and supervision, and where they can be trusted to be on their own.
Sometimes trust and assumptions overlap. I assumed the decorations placed by me in front of the children were appropriate consumables. We had an extensive variety of sprinkles and other decorations, at least 20 in our set.
Being a busy working mother I was adept at multi-tasking. I went to do laundry after I “set them up”.
Imagine my surprise when I came up from the basement to check on their progress and found Rowan had decorated the entire top of the cake with cayenne pepper. Somehow the pepper had gotten mixed in with the sprinkle bottles. Rowan being um, abnormal in his consumption of sweets hadn’t tasted any of the bounty sitting in front of him; even though his fingers were covered in frosting. Had he placed his fingers into his mouth or rubbed his eyes, not only would I have lost his trust forever; he probably would never been allowed over again either.
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Another Rowan story- His mother, Leska, and I were waiting for our children to come out of their classrooms at the end of the day. This was a treat for me because I was usually working. Anyway, as the children were departing each was bringing out small sculptures they had made in art. Leska trusting her children’s good sense about clutter turned to me and said “Thankfully my kids never bring home stuff like this”. A half second later Rowan appears with a monolith cityscape twice his size. Tee hee.