Set The Kids (and Everyone Else) Free

"Backmask: The instinctive tendency to see someone as you knew them in their youth, a burned-in image of grass-stained knees, graffitied backpacks or handfuls of birthday cake superimposed on an adult with a degree, an illusion formed when someone opens the door to your emotional darkroom while the memory is still developing." - John Koenig, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Dear Rose Woman community,

First THANK YOU for choosing Rosebud for your holiday gifting- our team has been wrapping and packing nonstop this week! We will continue 30% sitewide through Monday.  Personally, I recommend drenching your skin in our 5 star Anoint Nourishing Body Oil.

Now, onward to the topic for the week, freeing people from our prior conceptions of them...

One Thanksgiving, two of our younger kids, the inseparable ones, a little over a year apart, came home from college and told the rest of the assembled family that "we were keeping them small in our minds". They felt that we weren't seeing them as they were now, as he people they had become.  

Was it true? Had we frozen them in our perception? Always our little babies? Was she perpetually the girl with the Lucille Ball humor, he forever the high-pitched 12-year-old declaring his independence? We looked around the house and indeed, there were photo reminders everywhere of who they once were: the new grad, the ballerina, the choirboy. But they had gone on with becoming since they had left home….they had their own struggles, their curiosities and joys, their relationships, their heartbreaks, their oddities.

How was there space in us to see them as they were today, when we were seeing them through the prism of the past. So, we took the pictures down. The only family photos up now are the current ones, the ones taken in the last year.

And it’s not just the kids: we noticed that we could also freeze our parents in time, and our friends. 

When people rarely see each other gather, there’s a temptation to reminisce and drop into nostalgia, which can be fun... but nostalgia has a suboptimal side: sometimes it keeps people from seeing each other as they are right now, for who they have become.

Nostalgia can lock us into old dynamics and into past identities, and leave little room for change. And, it’s usually based on incomplete or falsely recorded stories to begin with. So, what would it be like to meet your family and friends with fresh eyes? If you were meeting a stranger, you wouldn’t backmask* them, would you? 

And it goes for ourselves too. Sometimes we become so certain of our identity, or so full of the past, that we no longer have room to surprise ourselves.

We are of an age now where some of us have lived in the same houses for decades. I have a couple of friends like this. Going to visit them is like going into a museum of their past. One is famous neurosurgeon who dwells daily amidst acrylic framed snapshots of his now-adult sons, fathers themselves, but somehow also twinning, red-faced six year olds, grinning through missing front teeth; his own trophies and awards filling shelves; faded books and 1990s Francophilia, all fleur-de-lys prints and stylized wheat shafts. There isn’t a single shelf-space left for something new to land. 

A woman I know, only 5 years older than me, lives with her kids’ 20 year old Lego sculptures and scrawled Mother's Day cards from 1992 still on the bulletin board. Her focus is on the past, on her former glory, not on the future, and she has maybe 30 years to go. Her identity is getting more frozen in time, her life increasingly a prison of preferences. It begs the question: how much of our attention is in the past, the present or on the future?

How many of the songs in your current rotation are new this year? How many of the artists? Genres? How many new friends or acquaintances have you spent time with?
What new topics skills or practices have you learned or deepened?  

I mean here's the core question: how do we not just copy-paste yesterday into today, and today into tomorrow?  How do we stay curious, keep growing, nurture the desires, and as I said last week, head for the flowers?

Let's see if we can meet people as they are now, our children, our relations, friends- and our own selves.

Be free, be happy. Love,

XO,

Christine and the Rosebud Team

Christine Marie Mason

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Host The Rose Woman Podcast on Love and Liberation