New rules

Some children are forbidden to play games involving guns. I wonder if any of them join the military when they grow up. (SDASM Archives)

A few years ago, I realized that I didn’t actually have to eat the broken potato chip fragments at the bottom of the bag, any more than I was required to eat the cereal dust at the bottom of the cereal box.

What I look for in a potato chip is that moment when it breaks in your mouth (bonus points if it’s a folded-over one). The already broken, greasy fragments are merely a calorie-delivery mechanism, but calories aren’t exactly hard to come by in America in the twenty-first century. I can get them from a more rewarding source.

My father was aghast when he learned about this development in my life. Raised by a mother who came of age in the depression, he found it wasteful. How had he, who painstakingly scraped every last morsel of peanut butter out of the jar, contributed such a princess to the world?

Well, the truth is that my dad and I aren’t all that different. I actually scrape the peanut butter out of the jar, too, and I’m committed to keeping the thermostat as low as possible. I was well into adulthood before I realized that it was permissible to take a bath in more than three inches of water, so indoctrinated was I into his frugal, conservationist ways.

But our values are not a perfect match, and that’s the way things go. As Dylan sang at the tender age of twenty-two, “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” Parents try to instill their values into their children, but if they make the mistake of including independent thought as one of those values, their offspring will inevitably make choices that are different from the ones they, themselves, would have made.

That may cause conflict, but no one is necessarily bad or wrong. The world keeps changing, so the decision-making criteria that made sense twenty or fifty years ago may not make sense now. And the values and behavioral standards that might have made sense to offer to a ten-year-old version of you might not fit the adult version. It’s an important part of our growth and development to reevaluate the rules and standards we grew up with and see which ones still apply.

For example, “You get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit” makes a lot of sense when you’re handing out popsicles to twenty-five kids at a school party. There’s not a ton of room for individuality in public education, and it’s a useful skill for a child to, say, adapt to grape flavor when orange was preferred.

But the same maxim is much less useful when you are negotiating an employment contract, dealing with a dishonest employee, or trying to advocate for yourself in a health crisis. In each case, the conveniently compliant child you used to be has to make way for an assertive adult who isn’t afraid of a confrontation if it yields the desired result. Sometimes pitching a fit is just the thing.

It takes courage to break the rules you were once taught, even if the ones who taught you are long gone. Even trickier, sometimes, is the insight to realize that there is even a rule in the first place, a vestigial directive you might not be consciously aware you’re still following. You can find them by looking for things in your life that aren’t working exactly the way you want them to, which requires overcoming still more old rules like “Put on a happy face,” or “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” There may be some layers of excavation necessary to find and seal the cracks in your foundation.

Unearthing your old rules and revisiting the values you were taught is the work of a lifetime. It may feel like a betrayal of those who loved you and guided you, but ultimately they wanted you to be safe and prosperous. What it takes for you to be safe and prosperous now isn’t anything they could have predicted; what’s more, you might not even want to be safe and prosperous so much as free and joyful. You’re the one who gets to decide now.