  Staying with my relatives has left me in a pensive mood for the week. I can in no small part thank my Tucumcari aunt for influencing the course of parenting John and I took. She was the first and only woman I saw breastfeeding as I grew up. I still remember her shooting milk across the room to get a rise out of me. When I was pregnant she sent me Penelope Leech and La Leche League books. It was she who influenced my bio-pop and step mom to homeschool, as she did and continues today. My aunt and uncle in Fort Collins have themselves become grandparents three times over in the last three years. Accordingly, I find them and their home greatly changed. Their home was designed with a stately style, with wood floors and huge floor rugs, thoughtfully upholstered furniture intermingles with dark woods and antiques. A parlor room houses the piano and the ticks of a grandfather clock echo through the downstairs. Only now, fine knickknacks are almost entirely elevated out of children’s reach and the wood floors’ decorations include bright plastic toys. As a child we visited these relatives often. Together with my aunt and uncle’s three daughters, I must have grandly descended the stairs a thousand times in pretense as either a groom or a bride.
But I’m sure that then my aunt had the same theories regarding decor that my mother did, that children had to learn to keep their hands off furniture and fine pieces, rather than removing them for the duration of their childhood. And so I find myself in farcical dissonance with my memory of deep respect for the sacred order of the house (and fear of disrupting it) alongside my relief that somewhere along their life journeys, my relatives learned to be wonderful grandparents.
It’s a difficult observation because my own parents are here, and I’m forced to double the reflection to them. I suppose they too deserve this honor, but I’m reluctant to give it to them. Why? I always want more from them than what they give. I want them to more thoroughly dedicate their time and resources to their grandchildren. I want them to wallow on the floor in wild games of child-led fantasy. I want them to abolish their child-unfriendly decor and fence their pool in, or better yet, fill it in with dirt. 
