Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded a recycling program for a town of 30,000. A few years after that, I joined the board of an activist environmental organization. Of my own accord, I took up a letter-writing campaign against the injustices suffered by indigenous peoples around the world and the destruction of their traditional lands.
Over the years, I’ve written about environmental struggles and worked to promote activities like bird and whale watching that encourage conservation of habitat. At home, I used energy and resources carefully, adjusting my lifestyle at every turn to leave as small an ecological footprint as possible. When kids came along, I talked to them about climate change, taught them how to recycle and raged against the environmentally destructive ways of our materialist culture.
You can — as the saying goes — imagine my horror when, at the age of 12, my daughter suddenly took to cosmetics, leg razors, 20-minute showers and hair dryers like teenagers take to malls. Shopping became a hobby. She dismissed my efforts to educate her about the wastefulness of her ways.
“Oh, Darc,” she’d wave me away, as if I was just too old to understand the things that really matter in life. She resisted by teasing. In my presence, she’d explain to friends how she couldn’t shower properly because I thought the polar bears would go extinct as a result.
Things got serious. When I pressed for shorter showers, she fought me. There was shouting and tears for months. One day at the 15-minute mark of her shower, I went to the basement and turned off the water. She stormed out of the washroom wrapped in a towel, demanding to know what had happened to her hot water.
One day, hours after she’d left for school, I walked by her closed bedroom door. It was alarmingly hot to the touch. I opened the door to a waft of heat to find her thermostat set at 30°C. That was the day I decided I’d failed both as a parent and as an environmentalist. If at such a critical point in the history of this planet we cannot teach our own children how to take care of it, what hope can we possibly have for its future?
Then came that ray of hope from the most unlikely of sources: Christmas. This year, my daughter gave me a desk calendar. It was an olive branch, an invitation to dialogue. Each day offers an environmentally friendly tip. March 6 reads, “Start your day with a power shower… a short five-minute shower.” With the calendar came a note in my daughter’s hand, promising that she’d read every entry with me.
Since then, every few days I tear a particularly appropriate sheet from the calendar, draw a red heart around the tip and leave it on my daughter’s pillow. Nothing has given me hope for her, for her generation or for the Earth more than this little practice she introduced into our relationship.
Photo Credit
“Chance of showers” jurvetson @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
Recent Darcy Rhyno Articles:
- Kindness Goes Viral
- The Children Are Dying
- Mother Canada Could Die
- A Mother of a Monument
- The Detox Myth: How Celebrity Culture Sells Us What We Don’t Need
As a former teenage girl I can say with confidence that your daughter would have rebelled against anything you were saying. It’s the teacher and not the subject we resist when it comes to our parents.
It sounds like your daughter mellowed early, which is a lovely reflection on your parenting 🙂
Thanks for the response Sarah
I also teach graduate courses on popular culture and youth so intellectually what you say rings true. Resistance, rebellion is part of growing up. I did lots of it myself. As a parent, it’s very difficult to live through what you know intellectually to be a passing phase I suppose because the stakes are so high. By the way, my daugher informed us yesterday on her 15th birthday that she’s now a partial vegetarian. Although she’s not given much thought to her new ethical stance, it’s another sign of change.