Safe, Secure, Independent
Our back yard wasn't huge and it wasn't tiny either. If you were moving it with the push mower it was too big. If you were weeding it, it was way too big. In reality it was average for the track houses in our neighborhood.
We kids weren't allowed to play with the neighbor kids at their houses. If they wanted to come to our house, they were welcome. There wasn't much to attract them to our house. Little things like we had a black and white TV and theirs was a color TV; our home was not clean, we had no toys, we didn't wear stylish clothes-in short we had nothing of interest. We ate coon, possum, deer, fish and wild goat meat for dinner more often than we had chicken or hamburger.
You always seem to want what you don't have-the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. So not having ALL the stuff and not being able to play with 'their' stuff and watching the commercials about all the stuff I'd never get to have-well, I grew up covetous. Maybe because my parents couldn't provide us with our wants they felt it best to just keep us away from neighborly influences. I don't think that worked all that well. It didn't keep us from wanting what they couldn't or wouldn't provide for us. It didn't keep us from wanting social interaction.
I wonder now if some of that forced isolation didn't help feed into my feelings of being a loner. At least I felt that way-all through my public school years and into adulthood. I have revisited those thoughts and feelings and I'm not sure that my parent's choices in behalf of their children was the cause of my feelings of isolation. In fact I don't believe that I felt isolated. I liked my independent time and thoughts. I always have. As much as I hated my kids going back to school in the fall-I loved my quiet moments during the day.
The Savior taught by example the importance and value of meditation and pondering. I have done a LOT of that while hand-washing dishes, vacuuming, painting walls, weeding in the yard, etc. I attribute the ability to meditate and thus to find and know myself, to that isolation from the other kids. Because of my own innate need to be accepted (and as a child the willingness to do what everyone else was doing just to fit in) I would have been harmed more from a lot of social interaction as opposed to the harm from the lack of development of social skills. I still feel a bit backwards in my social behavior but really I wouldn't trade my spiritual depth for anything. I believe my spiritual depth was born of meditation which lead to knowing myself which lead to the both accepting the realism of the scriptures and applying them when I read them. Seriously-through reading the New Testament at age 14 and later the D&C, I feel I understand and know my Savior in a very personal way.
We kids weren't allowed to play with the neighbor kids at their houses. If they wanted to come to our house, they were welcome. There wasn't much to attract them to our house. Little things like we had a black and white TV and theirs was a color TV; our home was not clean, we had no toys, we didn't wear stylish clothes-in short we had nothing of interest. We ate coon, possum, deer, fish and wild goat meat for dinner more often than we had chicken or hamburger.
You always seem to want what you don't have-the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. So not having ALL the stuff and not being able to play with 'their' stuff and watching the commercials about all the stuff I'd never get to have-well, I grew up covetous. Maybe because my parents couldn't provide us with our wants they felt it best to just keep us away from neighborly influences. I don't think that worked all that well. It didn't keep us from wanting what they couldn't or wouldn't provide for us. It didn't keep us from wanting social interaction.
I wonder now if some of that forced isolation didn't help feed into my feelings of being a loner. At least I felt that way-all through my public school years and into adulthood. I have revisited those thoughts and feelings and I'm not sure that my parent's choices in behalf of their children was the cause of my feelings of isolation. In fact I don't believe that I felt isolated. I liked my independent time and thoughts. I always have. As much as I hated my kids going back to school in the fall-I loved my quiet moments during the day.
The Savior taught by example the importance and value of meditation and pondering. I have done a LOT of that while hand-washing dishes, vacuuming, painting walls, weeding in the yard, etc. I attribute the ability to meditate and thus to find and know myself, to that isolation from the other kids. Because of my own innate need to be accepted (and as a child the willingness to do what everyone else was doing just to fit in) I would have been harmed more from a lot of social interaction as opposed to the harm from the lack of development of social skills. I still feel a bit backwards in my social behavior but really I wouldn't trade my spiritual depth for anything. I believe my spiritual depth was born of meditation which lead to knowing myself which lead to the both accepting the realism of the scriptures and applying them when I read them. Seriously-through reading the New Testament at age 14 and later the D&C, I feel I understand and know my Savior in a very personal way.
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