Reverb11’s December 2nd prompt is a neat one to me, since I am pregnant. I imagine my answer would be different if I were not, and probably more different still if my child were born already, or a teenager, or an adult already.
December 2: My Children Will Do it Differently
If you could choose one thing that your children will do or experience in a different way than you have, what would it be and why?
Photo (c) NCinDC via Flickr
I like the knowledge that, assuming we continue to live in Washington, DC – or if we ever relocate, it’s to another great city – my child(ren) will grow up surrounded by diversity of people and ideas. It’s not that I think that growing up as I did, in small, mostly white, Midwestern towns, is bad at all, I don’t. But I know that when, at 28, I came to Washington DC, and walked through neighborhoods of row houses, corner markets, parks, saw city buses and bicycle commuters, and homeless people, heard the sounds of different dialects of Spanish and other languages being spoken around me… I felt like I’d come to a place at once wildly different and somehow also very familiar. It took me a while to figure out why it was familiar. Then I realized: Sesame Street. Though I’d grown up in small towns, from my earliest memory I’d also been at home in a television world that very much resembled neighborhoods in my new city home. I love that my child(ren) will grow up experiencing the rhythms of this city. And one day, when they move to a farm and rave about the peace and open spaces, or to a small town with wide, quiet streets and lawns that need mown and watered, I will smile and love that they’ve discovered their own sense of place. Because isn’t that how it goes?
Woah Baby! 