Becoming Mommy: The Importance of Getting Dirty

A healthy diet of leaves and dirt

For those of you who haven't been paying close attention, let me state for the record that I am a decidedly old-fashioned kind of mom. I believe in the old style of parenting. No prenatal classes or any of that jazzy crap for us. No Baby Gym to help us celebrate our child's mediocre (and inevitable) achievements as though they've just won the Nobel Prize in Physics. No hand sanitiser in the nursery, no wildly expensive organic baby food for our little man, no sterilising every little thing he may happen to lay his hands on. I am often agitated when visitors keep telling me what Ricky is doing or where he is going, as though I am not watching. "He's going toward the coffee table!" Yeah, and? "What if he bumps his head?" Then he bumps his head and he feels a little pain, or not, and learns to be more careful. Life happens. Sure, I don't intend leaving power tools or a barrel of scorpions or a set of newly sharpened Shogun knives lying around where Ricky can get to them, but I refuse to envelop my home in bubble wrap for fear that my child may actually experience a little of what we call living. If a parent chooses to wrap their own child in cotton wool and hide them away from the world for fear it may actually impact them in some way, that is their prerogative; but I am the parent who can't remember the last time I sterilised a bottle or sippy cup, and I let my son roll around on the floor with the cat. He enjoys the freedom, and that makes me happy. Don't mistake my relaxed attitude for neglect, though. I have taken every precaution to latch cupboards that may house anything detrimental to the well-being of my little explorer, and I keep an ever-watchful eye on the goings-on in my home. I just believe in getting dirty.

As I type this, Ricky is sucking on my shoe. What can I say, he's fascinated by feet. Nom. But it's not as though I spend my days trekking my pumps through concentrated cultures of diphtheria and small pox, so I see no grand problem here. If I am honest, I believe that this modern culture of overly protective parenting has only spawned a generation of people as brittle and fragile as hard plastic. Children who get ill at the drop of a hat, teenagers who cannot, if their lives depended on it, fight their own battles. A culture of incompetence. I believe in learning through experience, and so I allow Ricky to experience.

And now that the months have turned warmer and the trees are green once more, what better place to learn about the world than our own back yard? Despite the fact that my little man is half Lebanese and, as a result, practically immune to sunlight, he still gets a good slathering of SPF50 before we head out. Call me overly cautious, but the last thing I need is my Celtic genes hitting out and us ending up with a sweet lobster baby! But once we are outside, the world is his oyster. Even though he's barely on it, I spread Ricky's playmat as a sort of home base, if you will, and he sets off around the garden, crawling in the dirt and shoving leaves in his mouth as I diligently pluck mushrooms from the lawn so he doesn't get his hands on them. By the end he is filthy! And I encourage it. Getting dirty is so important, not only for the obvious health benefits, but for psychological and developmental purposes, too. I want my child to learn that it is perfectly acceptable to be entirely imperfect. I want my child to learn to have fun without worrying about appearances - to lose themselves in wild abandon, to relish life. A child raised by a parent who won't allow them the opportunity to explore and get dirty learns only to seek control in every situation, to seek perfection in themselves and others. And is inevitably let down when that same perfection eludes them. That is not what I want for my son.

And so Ricky roams the garden in search of fairies or a higher purpose or, most likely, a bit of fun in the sun. And I join him. Isn't it grand to be young and carefree?