As Ocean grew up I naturally had expectations for him, but more important to me than whether he lived up to them was that he be able to listen to himself well enough to know when my expectations were in alignment with his destiny and when they were not. The last thing I wanted to do was to tyrannize him with my own fears and unfulfilled wishes. What mattered was not whether he disappointed me, but that he not betray his own soul.
Eventually we moved back to California, and several of my books about healing ourselves and healing our world became bestsellers giving us some measure of financial security. The press took to calling me things like “the rebel without a cone” and “the prophet of nonprofit.”
Meanwhile, my father, on account of his diabetes and high blood pressure, was beginning to make major changes in his diet. Gradually he gave up eating ice cream or any other form of sugar, and he greatly decreased his intake of meat. As a result, his health improved dramatically. He liked reminding me that he was “not a card-carrying vegetarian,” but he was beginning to have far more respect for the lifestyle choices I had made and the work I was doing.
A year or so after my grand-twins were born, my parents, now in their mid-eighties, came to visit us and stayed for a few days. They saw our three-generation household living together in ways that they were not accustomed to. They watched as we all shared in the joys and challenges of caring for the babies, and saw how we sought to respond to the little ones’ special needs with patience and kindness.
The babies, who had been born extremely prematurely, had spent nearly the first two months of their lives in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, and they had come home from the hospital fragile and terrified of life. Babies born that early are often exceedingly touch-averse. We had been warned by doctors that they might never respond normally to human contact. Our response was to hold the little ones in continuous skin-to-skin contact with us virtually twenty-four hours a day, even allowing them to sleep on our bodies at night. My parents — who were products of a time when beliefs prevailed like “Spare the rod and you’ll spoil the child” and “Don’t pick up babies or you’ll spoil them” — saw how we provided the babies with endless opportunities for physical connection. And they observed the results — the twins were growing into joyful, curious little guys who loved being cuddled.
Article comments
1 - gette
Very interesting! I had no idea he was related to the ice cream family!