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Indoor Mom Braves the Elements

Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 4:30 PM

(In our ongoing effort to provide you with a variety of content here at Faith and Family Live, we feature occasional guest posts from bloggers who have something unique to share. Today, we have a guest-post from Catholic mom blogger Mary Ellen Barrett who shares her struggle with being an “outdoor” mom.)

I am not a particularly outdoorsy type of person.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I merely tolerate the outdoors as a means to an end, the end usually being a well air conditioned or heated restaurant. I don’t much care for picnics and I would rather be tossed off a bridge than go camping.

I do these things because I want my children to love God’s creation and to experience its beauty and perfection in every setting possible rather than just on the Discovery channel ... which is where I prefer to experience nature.

In my defense, I was unlikely to turn out any differently. I was raised by a woman who considers nature a vast conspiracy to muck up your nice shoes or drop things on your head. Mom’s idea of roughing it is a three star hotel and being any more than forty miles from Lord and Taylor. (Sorry Mom, but it’s true.)

There is nothing wrong with this. It takes all kinds to make a world and Mom and I would definitely be considered the indoor kind.

So I head outdoors my kids. I stretch myself in this way which makes me oh-so uncomfortable and I’ve managed to fake it pretty well for the last few years.

I frequently pack the van with journals, water bottles, and backpacks and take all of them on nature hikes and to game farms. I have let myself be licked by llamas and goats and I have stuck my hand into the sting ray tank at the aquarium. I have inspected bugs in bug boxes and raised tadpoles to frogs. I have taken charge of Rosie the hamster and I have stood still for deer and moose in Maine. I have encouraged chipmunks to come closer and baited my fair share of fishing poles.

I haven’t enjoyed much of it, but I do love the pleasure my children get from it all.

God has created this beautiful universe for us to enjoy and enjoy it we should. In getting the children up and away from the screens, I can instill in them a love of the world around them and an awareness of the responsibility we share in being good stewards. I can protect them from the current New Agey thinking that the only thing wrong with the planet is the people who occupy it and give them instead a sense of the awesomeness of earth, its resources, and God’s generosity in bequeathing all of this beauty to us.

So I get my shoes dirty and the humidity screws up my hair. And we won’t even speak of the incident at the reptile museum.

I will tell you, though, that my children love being outside. They love discovering things they have never seen and seeing the familiar all around them. The older ones are knowledgeable beyond me now and they have begun to teach me more than I can teach them. 

That’s totally worth some frizzy hair.

—Mary Ellen Barrett is a columnist for The Long Island Catholic and begins all nature walks from her home in Lindenhurst, NY that she shares with an outdoorsy husband and eight children. She blogs about their lives and adventures at Tales From the Bonny Blue House

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