Curating Our Living Museums
On dinosaurs and pressed flower art and asking what your inner child needs today.
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Last week we took a family trip to Washington DC and the surrounding area. My son, Orion, had been excited about going to the Natural History Museum for weeks, telling our neighbors and all his teachers at summer camp about our plans "to see the dinosaur bones." He is a four-year-old kid who loves dinosaurs, and as someone who also loved dinosaurs as a kid, I have been enjoying the phase even if his interests lean a little more T. rex and mine leaned a little more Maiasaura, meaning the duck-billed herbivore named good mother because scientists believe they showed social behavior and tended their young based on nesting remains. Currently, my son ranks his favorite dinosaurs in this order: Tyrannosaurus rex, Pteranodon, and Mosasaurus, probably largely thanks to the marketing collateral of Jurassic World including an early reader book with trivia that is a current favorite. My son's fascination with giant prehistoric carnivores notwithstanding, it has been delightful to revisit my love of dinosaurs through his eyes.
We went to the Hall of Fossils in the Natural History Museum first thing, and Orion was buzzing, running from one exhibit to the next. He was intrigued by the enormous dinosaur fossils arranged in dynamic positions, particularly the tableau of a Tyrannosaurus attacking a Triceratops, but he was most interested in the interactive activities that speckled the exhibits, particularly anything resembling a game.
"Are there more games?" he would ask repeatedly, skipping from one hands-on activity to the next, as my husband and I trailed behind him, trying to bring his attention back to the exhibits or the paleontologists actively unearthing fossils in the glass-walled lab using microscopes (the coolest part, if you ask me). He would look for a couple of moments, then bounce along.
When I was a child, the first thing I can ever remember wanting to be was a geologist. I had a book of rocks that I pored over for hours—sedimentary, metamorphic, igneous—and inherited a collection of rocks and crystals from a family member. I was fascinated by the idea of the earth transforming over time, by a scientist's ability to track that change by studying the messages left in layers of stone, by the ways heat and pressure and time could create something beautiful, unique, and treasured while still holding traces of its origin. Next, I wanted to be a paleontologist, which is also my son's current professed career direction. Finally, I wanted to be an archaeologist, studying the remains of ancient civilizations. I decided I wanted to be a writer around age 9, and that is all I have ever wanted to be since.
For a long time I considered these career desires as cute and a bit eccentric, but it strikes me now that they were not quite as unrelated to writing as I might have thought: science is the construction of narrative, making the natural processes around us intelligible to human understanding, and those fields in particular are interested with making sense of the past. I, too, seek to make sense of the past. My son has been watching the PBS show Walking With the Dinosaurs, which pairs the work of paleontologists in the field with vignettes of computer-animated dinosaurs, attempting to unravel the mysteries of the excavated dinosaurs' lives and deaths. While this particular combination is catnip to me, the show is striking both in its pathos—the father dinosaur leading his adolescents to safety and dying in the process, the young male-female pair who spend a tender moment grooming one another—and what seems to me the wildness of speculation, the distinct human cast of the dinosaur's narratives. There is both so much and so little we can know from fossilized remains.
It seems impossible not to project our own desires and fears, social ideals and ills, onto long-dead creatures, like how I was drawn as a child to the story of the Maiasaura tending her young and perishing beside the nest. Of course even educational TV shows need a hook, but perhaps the enduring allure of dinoaurs is that we know so little about them definitively. They become a blank slate for our individual and cultural dreams, fantasies, and fears—for example, much of the Natural History Museum's dinosaur exhibit seemed interpreted through the lens of climate anxiety. Dinosaurs tell us more about ourselves than themselves, like the quote attributed to Anais Nin: "We see things not as they are, but as we are."1
As making sense of the past appears to be one of my primary objectives as a writer, I spend a lot of time digging through the layers of my own life. Lately, this has included revisiting the things that thrilled and obsessed me as a child. I view this as inner child work, or the psychological practice of revisiting who we were as children, identifying what we might have needed (physically as well as emotionally, mentally, or spiritually), and what we received or perhaps did not receive in response to those needs. Psychologists suggest we all have an inner child, available to us no matter our age, and by attuning to that inner self we can understand and heal what we may not have received when we were young. The point here isn't necessarily to blame our parents for what we feel they did or didn't do—most parents are doing the best they can with the resources and knowledge they have available to them at the time. But no matter our childhood, we can learn to meet our own needs as adults, and we can find ways to source the safety, comfort, or joy we needed as a child.
For me, one of the great gifts of motherhood is also its greatest challenge, which is that children (ours and others'!) are the perfect mirrors for all of our dreams as well as our fears, challenges, and growth edges. Children can be a shortcut to growth, if we are willing to accept the invitation, because they will find every little trigger and button and push it, repeatedly, until we pay attention. This is a bit of a truism in conscious parenting circles, but it bears repeating.2 The patterns our children reflect to us are the ones we are being invited to take a closer look at in ourselves—which isn't ever easy or comfortable, and can often feel like a high-stakes emotional tangle. This is amplified a lot in the online discussions of "breaking generational cycles," which is both beautiful and empowering and, in my opinion, can also create its own kind of binary, all-or-nothing thinking. When we strive for an idealized performance of intensive mothering (a la Sharon Hays, see more here), we can still paint ourselves into a corner even when we constantly validate feelings and try to understand the communication beneath the behavior and monitor our own responses (often borne out of decades or even generations of nervous system patterning)—because no matter how hard we try, no matter how many parenting books and strategies we employ, we can’t claim full control over the outcome of our children's lives and development.
Each generation will break some cycles and inevitably perpetuate others or create new ones to be addressed by the next generation. Even this suggestion can reignite my own perfectionism, my own fears of "messing up" my children inadvertently. I'm not even five years into motherhood, and there are choices I wish I could change, patterns I wish I could back and address sooner. Someday, my son will be doing his own inner child work and while I hope I have provided him a strong, secure base, there are inevitably things I have already gotten wrong, ways I have been misattuned to his needs or misunderstood who he is and how best to help him grow into the most authentic version of himself.
For example, just as my son was more focused on the interactive games at the Natural History Museum than the dinosaurs he had talked about for weeks, my husband and I realized we needed to adjust our expectations for what he would get out of the trip. Frankly, we hadn't expected to get much museum viewing done with a four-and-a-half-year-old, and the fact that he seemed so excited about the museums in the first place was a bit of a surprise. When he didn't interact with the exhibits in the way we wanted or desired, I started to get frustrated or even spiral a bit. I felt anxious about his sometimes slightly obsessive draw to games and screens. Perhaps it was because I had allowed him to have screen time before two?
Next, there was a lunchtime melt down that ended in a power struggle over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and involved my son running away from me across a crowded cafeteria, igniting my anxiety about his selective eating and reactionary tendency toward digging in his heels over small things. I racked my brain: which parenting script did the internet experts think I was supposed to use here, exactly? What was the right way to handle this, again? How was I unwittingly perpetuating this pattern and what kind of inner work should I do to help unravel it, later? My mind spun and I felt a familiar clenching in my stomach, freezing up as I debated between leaving my daughter alone in the double stroller on the other side of the maze of chairs and tables and sprinting after my son, or trusting that he would turn around and come back. In the end, I chose to wait and watch, and he stopped on the other side of a column beneath the megalodon and then peered around to make sure I was still there. I was, and I invited him back to the table, and after about thirty seconds he came back and we tried again.
But I realized the real reason Orion didn't want to be at lunch was because on the way out to watch the 4th of July parade passing in front of the museum, he had seen a T. rex model in the gift shop that he desperately wanted, and I had said we might come back and look at it later. He had fixated on that comment, and not even a procession of horses, his favorite non-extinct animal, could distract him fully from the potential of the T. rex. After the parade, which included a popsicle treat, I knew he was over-hungry, over-sugared, and over-stimulated, not to mention over-tired after our late arrival the night before, and we prioritized lunch. But he didn't want lunch, and he certainly didn't want the overpriced peanut butter and jelly sandwich that even I had to admit had an excess of grape jelly: he wanted the T. rex.
I felt like I was walking a fine line: I didn't want to encourage an attitude of entitlement, but I had witnessed his visceral excitement about the T. rex model and buying him something special from the Smithsonian gift shop was an easy yes. Digging deeper, what was it about his fixation on the model that was bothering me so much? When I was a child, when I saw things I deeply wanted and asked for them, the answer was often no. This was logical—my father was a public school teacher who started a Ph.D. program part-time soon after I was born, and my mom had a small craft business and stayed home with us. I'm sure money was tight in those early years, and I imagine the things I wanted didn't always seem urgent to my parents, just like the things my son is drawn to don't always make sense to me. However, somewhere along the way, I learned to stop asking for what I wanted, a pattern that rippled out into many areas of my life, because I didn't want to be disappointed. My son has no qualms asking for what he wants, which is a trait I want to nurture while also tempering with relational skills and the ability to handle disappointment. One of my inner child wounds—I don't get what I really want when I ask for it—was being activated by my son, inviting me to look closer. Besides, the T. rex model was a reflection of my own childhood in another way: I had a very similar model of a brontosaurus when I was a child that was a prized possession. Was there a way that, as an adult, I could fulfill that need for myself and shift the pattern?
My point here is that at first, I found myself frozen by the idealized version of parenting I was trying to embody, the scripts and appropriate boundaries and emotional validation, trying to handle the situation in the "correct" way. All of that can be good and helpful and sometimes we need to say a thing before we can embody it fully, but when I dug a little deeper after the fact, I saw the larger invitation. I imagine this like a museum exhibit, similar to the tableau of the T. rex and Triceratops in mortal combat, except perhaps the scene is “Little Beth Asks for a Toy.” I step up and look at the tableau with curiosity: what story is being told here? What might be here to analyze or investigate? If we rearrange the scene a little differently, what might be revealed? What interpretive scripts have been written, and on what assumptions, beliefs, worldviews, or contexts, and how might they be written a little differently? What does adult Beth know that little Beth didn’t? How might this change the narrative?
After the cafeteria dustup, we went back for the T. rex model. Shortly after, Orion fell asleep in the stroller with the package in his lap, and as my husband pushed the double stroller loaded with sleeping children, I wandered through the rock and gem section slowly, reading the signs at my leisure, thinking about what treasures are to be found when we dig deep, the beauty contained in the dark places. There is so much richness to be explored when we return to the things that interested us when we were young, interests we had forgotten, hobbies we had let drop, fascinations that still thrill when we revisit them decades later. Often, when I think about the things I loved as a child, I realize they hold the essence or core of the things I still love: stories and art and writing, for one, but also my sizable rock and crystal collection, or the fact that now instead of making little potions in the backyard, I make tinctures and flower essences. I watch my son and imagine how the things he loves now, the contagious excitement he showed at each of those games and the single-minded focus with which he dedicated nearly an hour to constructing a solar system at the Air and Space Museum, might spiral out into the adult version of him. How can I nurture this enthusiasm while giving him boundaries and containment to keep him safe? That is the biggest task and challenge of parenting, after all.
The other side to inner child work is the joy that is available to us as well. Kids are such a beautiful invitation to do inner child work because they amplify our wounds, yes, but they also amplify the joy. When I need a reminder to enjoy the food I'm eating, I watch my daughter delight in the textures and flavors on her plate. When I need a reminder to be more playful and less precious about my art practices, I watch my son create half a dozen drawings, each one perfect and beautiful to him. He isn't worried about whether his art is marketable or whether his creativity will slow or dry up or change forms or what that means about him as an artist: he simply creates, abundantly, and he is proud of each creation.
This weekend, I went over to a friend's house to craft with pressed flowers, which is something I loved to do as a child but hadn't even thought about doing for years. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and when we moved to Michigan when I was almost 9, the abundance of green growing things felt like a small miracle: acorns that contained entire oak trees, maple spinners helicoptering across the lawn, trillium and roses in our backyard. We lived on a wedge-shaped lot at the end of a cul-de-sac and shared a wooded lot with our neighbor that we called The Forest, because as a child it felt endless, but I'm sure in retrospect it wasn't much more than a small stand of trees. I spent endless hours playing fairy games, making potions, dreaming up elaborate imaginary worlds, and collected wildflowers.
I don't know where I got the idea to press the flowers in the first place, but I sandwiched them on tracing paper between the leaves of the biggest volumes of our encyclopedia set, resisting checking them until they had fully dried. Then, I arranged them in little designs on card stock and laminated them with contact paper, making gift cards and book marks. I found it deeply satisfying to harvest the flowers, prepare them painstakingly, and then make art out of them. It was also frustrating at times, the delicacy and unpredictability of the process, how some took longer to dry than others I ruined in my impatience, or dried a little different than I expected. Perhaps it was my imprecise drying technique but the colors were often a bit more muted or yellowed than I wanted, or oxidized brown beneath the contact paper. But when the flowers turned out well, it was thrilling, as if I had discovered a treasure.
My friend had a much more elaborate and refined set-up: a real flower press, a little wooden set of drawers filled with color-coded petals and greenery, metallic watercolors, paint brushes, Mod Podge. The petals in the drawers were vibrant, exquisite, varied. I felt like a kid again, the excitement of an abundance of carefully prepared flowers, the art supplies, the freedom to do whatever I wanted. My friend was working on a mandala, and that felt easy and accessible so I decided to do the same, and we chatted about as her son slept and my daughter crawled around the floor, stress-testing their baby proofing.
Almost immediately I made some mistakes: my watercolor wash turned out a bit darker than I intended, and I placed the purple flower for the center of the mandala so that it was tilted to the side and not quite centered on the page. When I began layering flowers around it, the cant became more and more obvious, and the pattern I had started meant I had to find five identical blossoms, which, despite the wealth of flowers, became a bit of a challenge and at times I had to substitute in one that was similar but a little different. I felt a little frustrated that I hadn't started the pattern correctly—that I hadn't been just a little more patient with that first placement, or perhaps experimented with the watercolors before starting the wash, or hadn't counted exactly how many large pink blossoms there were before starting a pattern that necessitated five of them—but in the end, I was pleased with the effect, with the lushness of the colors, the layering of the petals. There is a feeling of abundance, of richness. It is not perfect, and there might be things I would choose to do differently if I were to start over, considering what I had learned in the process, but in the end I was pleased with the work I had done. More importantly, I had a blast, time slipping by in that fluid way I loved as a child.
Here we come to another scene in the museum of my childhood, one of little Beth pressing flowers alone in her room. I often played alone, crafting, sewing, writing, and playing imaginary games in imaginary worlds I made up. I felt just a bit odd, eccentric, out there. It likely never would have occurred to me to work on my pressed flower art with a friend, for example. Here, the narrative is the one that I like weird things, or no one shares my interests. But maybe I just hadn't found my people yet, constrained as we are so often in childhood by geography and school district and the social mask of what we feel is acceptable by the broader culture. I watch my son claim his interests boldly and passionately—for example, he told everyone he met in Washington D.C. and Virginia that he was getting a pitcher plant (carnivorous plants being another recent interest)—and hope he never loses that shamelessness and authenticity. I can reclaim a bit of my own authenticity by watching him and by writing this newsletter, offering up the things that excite and interest me. This time around, emboldened to be a bit more authentic, I might find my people, like a friend who talks about astrology and motherhood while we play with flowers.
Orion, my husband, and I worked on the T. rex model together as soon as we got back to our home in Florida, and now it is proudly displayed on Orion's dresser next to an assortment of other dinosaur crafts and treasures, which he calls his "museum." As a child, I also built museums in my room. Perhaps we are all living museums, curating our own versions of what is valuable and significant, what deserves to be preserved and displayed, what narratives we want to construct about the material reality of our lives. Like paleontologists trying to extrapolate how a dinosaur lived and died or curators designing exhibits at a museum, we are constantly co-creating the stories we tell about our lives. Which exhibits in your museum are due for an update?
Writing Prompts:
What inner child stories or patterns are you still looping? Hint: look at the kids in your life, or where you're currently experiencing conflict or challenge. Usually life brings us the exact curriculum we need to shift the patterns we are ready to shift. Write about these stories or patterns for a bit: where do you think they might have come from? Be gentle with yourself if this is tender territory (it likely is), and ask for support if you need it.
What does your inner child need today? Remember that pleasure, joy, and play can be just as healing as digging deep into the wounds of what we did not receive.
Imagine your life as a museum. How might you theme the floors or wings? What might you name some of the exhibits? What might the captions or interpretive text say? Then get curious: what might be here to analyze or investigate? Could you rearrange this scene? What interpretive scripts have been written, and on what assumptions, and how might they be written a little differently? What does the adult version of you know that the little version didn’t? How might this change the narrative?
For context, it appears that while this quote did appear via Anais Nin she was quoting the Talmud, and other writers have also had this quote attributed to them.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of conscious parenting or you’d like to learn more, The Conscious Parent is a starting point.