Perspective

My daughter’s school hosts VIP day, previously Grandparents’ Day renamed to include a wider range of Very Important People.  No previous generation folk of our clan were available, so my daughter invited me.  Upon arrival I received a card she wrote.  It stated she was glad I attended and, “Now we can finally spend some time together.”  This sentence took me by surprise because, as far as I can tell, we spend A LOT of time together.  Being that she is only in 2^nd grade and I have spent the last thirteen years primarily in the occupation of homemaking and child rearing I thought I was around pretty much most all the time.  I was immediately struck by the pertinence of her perspective.

Three entries from dictionary.com define perspective for my thoughts today.  I am not writing about art or dimensional drawing.
1.  the state of one’s ideas, the facts known to one, etc. in having a meaningful interrelationship
2.  the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship
3.  a mental view of prospect

Perspective is how things look from one’s point of seeing.  My young daughter perhaps sees that her time with me is often shared because she is the third child and we regularly travel as a pack.  I see that the majority of my time is spent with kids in general.  I see that including her in cooking and baking or grocery shopping helps us find time together and get essential tasks done.  She might see that as work, not quality time.  What the deal is with our different perspective regarding reading together at bedtime or watching a movie, just the two of us, I don’t know.

That’s really what is on my mind right now.  I don’t, can’t, will never really know her perspective because I am not her.  She is not me.  We are not each other.  People can certainly endeavor to be respectful of other’s mental view of things and to try to see our own perspective as one of the options, but we all walk in our own shoes. 

Perspective was on my mind this morning as I chaperoned a school trip to see a play about Harriet Tubman and The Underground Railroad.  Beautiful seven-year-old faces stared toward the stage, some white and some brown, some rapt and some dozy.  I chatted with a few kids on the bus ride before the show.  Two were incredulous people had ever been slaves, as if it was news to them.  That made me smile, not because I think they should be ignorant of history, but because they thought the whole idea stupid.  One girl remarked, “Those people must have been crazy because everybody should treat everybody the same nice way.”  Blue, brown, green, and in-between eyes all watched together the staged story woven of injustice and bravery.  I wondered how it looked through each set of eyes.        

I welcome differing perspective so that I learn many ways of seeing.