Passing on an "ethics of permission," from coast to coast
How can we convey our values, without centering compliance or conformity?
Last week, I interviewed the Rev. Molly Bolton about, among other things, an “ethic of queerness,” rooted in the notion of permission vs. control. A door opened in my own heart as we explored what this meant to both of us.
Like Molly, I was born and raised in a conservative region: northern Utah. The majority of the population there belongs to the Mormon Church, and identify as Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Yet I come from an agnostic, liberal family.
My parents’ approach to conveying our own values – nature, restful solitude, interdependence and respect for others’ autonomy – was often more “show” than “tell.” These values were most clearly conveyed on our trips to the Utah desert, where the vibe was much more about “letting the soft animal of the body love what it loves,” as Mary Oliver says, than about getting down on our knees to profess our goodness.
Below, I offer some thoughts about how my husband and I are passing on our own “ethics of permission,” at home and while traveling, inspired by these long-ago desert trips. If you, too, are figuring out how to create new value systems and traditions that do not center organized religion, heteronormativity, or other systems of power predicated on the “One Right Way” to do things – I’d love to hear more from you in the comments.
Where the pavement meets the sand
It is summer in the late 90s, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah. A hot, dry wind whips through Weber Canyon as my brother and I load our sleeping bags into the back of my dad’s beat-up red pickup. Our destination is southeastern Utah, where we’ll camp overnight for free on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, known around here as “BLM.” We’ll sleep tonight on the lip of a slickrock canyon, maybe, or a dry creek bed winding its way through a rust-red valley dotted with juniper and pinyon pine. We’ll wake up with cheeks smeared in orange dust.
My dad’s mind is an atlas. He knows the way by heart to these hidden oases. He’s kitted out in old Wrangler jeans that still bear the circular imprint of the tins of chew he used to stuff inside the back pockets, back when he was on the rodeo circuit. A lit cigarette bobs up and down under his enormous brown mustache, as he sings along to Marty Robbins and Neil Young on the radio: Heading out to where the pavement hits the sand…
In Salt Lake, we add another car to our caravan: the one other non-Mormon family we know. Two kids, and a single mom whom my dad has known since college. In Utah in the 90s, there are really only three kinds of people – the Mormons, the meth-heads, and everyone else. Those of us who are Everyone Else often opt to band together like this for warmth and strength. It’s a good thing they’re cool as hell. Karen, the eldest of the two girls and a year older than me, even has a pager now. People page her on it. What fifteen year old could be this important? Us three younger kids observe her closely, to learn her secrets.
Their dusty gray Jeep angles out behind ours as we pull out again onto the highway. Karen’s with me in my dad’s car; the younger kids ride with her mom. We pass the tidy suburban streets of Provo, home to Brigham Young University. We talk a little about how the Latter-Day Saints who go to school with us are probably off at Church camp, tucked up high in the foothills of Mt. Timpanogos. I can see them in my mind, perching demurely on the logs that ring the campground fire, singing “I am a Mormon girl/I wear my hear in curls.” I know this because I’ve been invited up into those foothills with some of those kids before. Maybe because they genuinely liked me, or maybe because they were quietly practicing their evangelism skills on a willing participant. In Utah, I can never be sure.
In any case, I haven’t been invited up this year. It hurts, sometimes, to live life outside of this club to which everyone else but us seems to belong. (Well, us and the meth heads.) I’ve even started to take some of the religious seminary classes offered to Mormon kids at my public school. Mostly because that’s where the cute boys always seem to be. They are missionaries in training, with gleaming Ken-doll smiles, enhanced by expensive and recently-removed orthodontia. Who could resist?
Our parents overhear us talking about these boys, and are adamant: we are not at liberty to convert to any organized religion while we are still legally children. No matter how cute the respective boys may be. They have many Mormon friends and family members themselves, but they’re wary of the LDS kids in our lives who seem to see us as either hell-bound Jezebels, or an opportunity to put notches in their convert belts. They urge us to keep our options open.
The world is bigger than Utah, they tell us.
So instead, we turn up X96, Utah’s one “alternative” rock station, as Meredith Brooks comes on the radio. My dad pretends he doesn’t hear the swears as we sing along:
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
Another memory: morning at the campsite. Us kids wake early. My dad will be asleep for several more hours. We don’t wake him. He likes to stay up late on these trips, staring up at the moon and strumming songs by Dylan, America, or Neil Young on his guitar: Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand…
Karen’s mother is stirring too. She’s an earlier bird, but we know not to disturb her either. We know they’re here to eke out a little peace and quiet, as single parents dealing with a bunch of bratty adolescents around the clock. Who are we to stop them?
My dad has packed a cooler full of what passes for contraband in Utah — caffeinated soda, 3% ABV beers. I slip a few cans of soda to my friends. They offer me and my little brother the bananas they brought in their Jeep in return. We four take them to the lip of this weekend’s stunning canyon du jour for a breakfast picnic.
We are careful to step from rock to root, never disturbing the cryptobiotic soil underneath, which looks to the naked eye like the bubbly crust of a burnt marshmallow. This living combination of microorganisms takes long years to form. It is what keeps the desert floor from eroding and blowing away. Older footprints ring the campsite, preserved like Neil Armstrong’s on the moon, from where errant travelers stepped decades ago. When my father wakes and sees them, he’ll shake his head. “What a shame.” If he sees fresher ones from us, we’ll hear harsher words from him.
The bad guys
The zoetrope of my memory flicks forward: The blue sky is deepening in color, from turquoise to azure. In July, temps might hit the hundred-degree mark before noon. We find a perch under the shade of a gigantic juniper tree, and talk excitedly about what the day might bring. In the past, we’ve looked for trilobite fossils together in a deposit of shale, or hiked down the length of a hidden stream inside a slot canyon, stopping to sun ourselves on the rocky shores like lizards.
On this trip, my dad might enlist us to help with a volunteer project he’s taken on for a local environmental outfit – documenting wilderness sites on BLM land that are slated to be claimed for oil rigging outfits.
This volunteer work is boring – standing on dirt roads, holding up our fingers to designate the photos as exhibits A, B and so on. The nonprofit’s lawyers hope to use them to demonstrate pricelessness of this place in court. We do it anyway, because we sense that it’s important.
Amongst ourselves, though, we wonder aloud to each other about why it has to happen. Like the Mormon missionaries who knock on our doors, who want to know why we don’t believe in what they believe, we too are baffled. Don’t we all need to live here? Why would anyone be so concerned with dictating what humans do with their individual bodies, and so unconcerned with what they do to the home we all share? Why do people like this consider us the bad guys?
Exploring my options
The zoetrope of my life has continued to flick forward since then. My mother, a transplant from Buffalo who stopped coming along on these soul-retrieving trips after my parents’ divorce, lost her interest in living on the outside of things around the time I turned fifteen. So we moved “back East,” to where she’d come from.
I’ve been here for over twenty years now. I spent the first ten exploring my options, just as my parents taught me to do. I made hamentashen with my new Jewish friends “back East” for Hanukkah. I sang along with my maternal grandmother at the Baptist church she adored. I aced my papers on the history of the influence of Catholicism on Europe’s monarchies in A.P. History. I studied post-colonial theorists like Edward Said alongside the lore of Islam for fun in college, and Buddhism and Hinduism on my own afterwards. When I became a teacher, I learned more about the Christian liberation theology practiced by Dr. King, and the Indigenous belief systems of tribes such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and the Lenape, on whose ancestral lands I now live.
While I hope to spend the rest of my life learning more, and can never claim to have total knowledge as a white person of all that has been lost or destroyed by colonialism, I have tried to honor each in their turn as I consider which values to carry forward in my own life, and which to leave behind.
I have spent the next ten years building a life with the cutest boy I could find, a former Catholic altar boy who has never once tried to convert me (though he has convinced me to root for the Celtics). He’s been my favorite conversation partner as I’ve built and taught countless units of study about all of the history and ethics systems I’ve studied, to help my students better understand how to consider their own options. He’s also been an active participant in defining our own shared belief systems, now that we’re raising a child together.
My childhood wilderness trips, and the protective magic they cast over my life, often come up in conversations. My husband and I both share the sense that the values they taught — nature, restful solitude, respect for our interdependence, and one’s own autonomy — remain important ones that we want to pass on to our son.
Unfortunately, we can’t teach them the way we were taught. Utah’s national parks are far more crowded now, and summers are significantly hotter due to climate change. Every time we fly, we knowingly add to the problem. Crowded East Coast campgrounds or beaches don’t provide the level of restful solitude we seek, either. At the same time, our years of gathering others; perspectives have taught us that our actions as a family need to demonstrate responsiveness to collective challenges like racism and the climate crisis, just as our own trips were used in part to protect the environment, and not just to passively take from it.
Like my dad’s broken-in Wranglers, marked forever by his long-discarded tobacco tins, our values now are grounded in the memories of all that we’ve loved before, but they must also grow with us as we change.
I was given a [conservative Christian] framework, but then in my awakening, there was a realization that this is not my ethic. Because my desire to be ethical is about wanting everyone to flourish, to receive healing, to be in their bodies, and to be liberated.
– Molly Bolton
Many opportunities to practice
Today, we continue the tradition of “show, don’t tell,” but in different surroundings. We’ve discovered the joys of climbing the friendly Catskills, and the quiet, off-the-beaten-path bay beaches of Barnstable, both a few hours from where we live. At home, we use our garden to convey our values of respecting nature and enjoying restful solitude by setting him up with his own shovel and sandbox while we work the soil on the other side of the yard, letting him be but reminding him not to step on the bugs. We plan quality time with chosen family, just as my grownups did, because we still want our son to learn to navigate the pleasures and perils of being in community, even if we do so in a backyard and not a slot canyon.
As a result, our four-year-old may not know a trilobite deposit from a hole in the ground, but he can tell you the difference between a scallop shell and a periwinkle, and he can choose between whether he wants to offer a hug or a high five when a grownup says goodbye. These are the signs that tell me we’re still moving in the right direction.
I know that these practices won’t necessarily yield results in the short-term — in fact, as
has written in the NYT, children raised to voice theirr choices can appear more difficult or defiant during these under-five years. I’ll be the first to admit this — my son is turning out to be what they now call spirited, very much in the vein of his bull-riding grandfather. But my time as a teacher has taught me that learning comes through having many opportunities to practice, as I was given on my camping trips throughout the years — not just one big trip to an expensive destination.The research shows that this autonomy-supportive style of parenting (also known as authoritative parenting, which is distinct from both overly-authoritarian and neglectfully permissive approaches) eventually pays dividends later on in life. It can help children grow into adults who can love learning, love others, love themselves, and love the earth, in all the healthy ways we’d want for them.
We also continue my family’s tradition of letting that learning and teaching be messy, even without the dust-smeared faces and dirty sleeping bags of my youth. My childhood trips normalized the notion that people can be hot, or tired, or peevish about the millionth time that someone does something after you told them not to do it, and they can be loving and learning together too. I cannot say that every lesson I received as a child about the value of cryptobiotic soil, for example, was delivered in a chirpy, cheerful, or patient tone. Our trips had yelling, and fights. I remember those, too.
But what I remember most is the pleasure, and the permission. The moments of singing together, as we drove away from a hard situation. The moments of silence as we looked out over a vast canyon vista, at the end of a long and bumpy road. As a deeply imperfect parent myself now, that is what I hope my child remembers of me too.
“You’ve earned the right to grow. You’re going to have to carry the water yourself.”
—
, “Tiny Revolutions”We have also added new traditions our lives that neither of us adults had growing up, because now we three together get to create a new and unique set of values. For example, we’ve added nightly dance parties to our routine. They’re something our son began to ask for a few years ago, at the height of our pandemic-era struggles with grief and loss. They’ve become a great way for us to pass down our shared value of loving vintage Mo-Town records and Beastie Boys b-sides.
If you come to our home for one of these parties, my son will tell you that there is one rule you have to remember, one we’ve devised all together: you can do anything you want with your body, as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Including yourself.
And that’s about as clear a statement of our “ethics of permission” as it gets around here.
"But what I remember most is the pleasure, and the permission."
Love this. Thanks Ryan — a ton of wisdom here.