Belonging

The other day, my little Lucy wanted to play with our globe. I pointed out fun places, like where Daddy went on his mission (Spain) and where we live. But then she looked up at me and said, "Where am I at?" I said, well you live where we do. And she looked at me again and said, "But where am I at?" So I pointed on the globe and said, "This is where Lucy is." She put her stubby little finger on the spot and grinned and for the rest of the day, she kept dragging the globe up to me and asking, "Where is Lucy?" I would show her and she would say, "Yep, there's Lucy!" It was such a pointed reminder to me of how important it is for little children to feel like they belong--that they know their place in the world. That they matter.

This summer, we attended a large family reunion on my husband's side of the family. His mother is the youngest of 13 children and there were hundreds of people there. We all had name tags that said our name, plus which child of the 13 we were descended from. My 7 year old, Emma, walked into the building and saw all of the people and you could tell it was a little overwhelming for her. A few minutes later, she looked down at her name tag and smiled and said confidently, "I belong to Nadine." And she was fine. She knew who she belonged with and who belonged with her. Her source of belonging was her family.

As children get older, this sense of belonging can become more complicated, as they see both the positive and negative aspects of belonging to a group (or family :)). About a week ago, we finished listening to dramatized scriptures and my 9 year old son Ethan asked,"Why are the boys always the bad ones?" I explained that there were surely bad women during that time, too, we just don't know about them because they weren't written about in the scriptures. He reiterated, "But why are the boys always the bad ones?" And he went on to talk about how the boys were always the ones to get in trouble at school and how there were more men than women in prison. And what he wanted to know is "Why?" What he didn't ask, but I knew he was thinking was, Am I going to end up doing bad things because I am a boy? I told him that I really didn't believe that there were more "bad" boys than girls, but that boys are often more outspoken and violent in their responses and that gets them in more trouble (long answer condensed). It made it even more clear to me how important it is that boys have upstanding examples of their gender. Unlike many of those young men in prison, Ethan is blessed because he has his father to look up to--someone who mirrors every quality of a good man. And he will be able to see that we can all choose how we will behave and who we will be both because of the groups we belong to, and sometimes, in spite of them.