7 Year Rite of Passage: Peri Magruder

My daughter, Peri, turned 7 years old in January (Wow, she's growing up fast)! In our house, the 7th birthday is kind of a big deal. You see, after reading Robert Lewis' Raising a Modern Day Knight, we decided to try to mark our kids' growth and development at three critical birthdays: 7, 12, 18. This roughly parallels the pattern of European Medieval Knights (i.e. at 7, a boy was taken from his home to be a Paige, at 12, he became a Squire, and at 18, he became a Knight), and so we have adapted it for our own use as well. I'll be blogging, tweeting (you can follow #7yearsamurai on Twitter) and talking about this a lot over the next couple of days as we get ready with Peri, so wanted to outline why this is such a critical marker point in her life and how we're approaching its celebration.

Key Metaphors and Intentional Vision-casting – For each child, we select a “critical metaphor” for their journey toward adulthood in our family. For Elijah, we selected the Medieval European Knight for his metaphor, and so have referred constantly to a mixture of chivalric codes, stories, anecdotes, legends and training as we have given him a scaffolding for his faith, ethics, behavior and interaction in the world. We regularly analyze decisions, actions and expectations in terms of what is “knightly”, and have found it to be an effective method of parenting to give him a consistent picture of “what he’s shooting for” in terms of growing up. For his 7th birthday, we took him to Medieval Times in Chicago and spent the day behind the scenes with the "knights", learning about their training and having them walk us through the parallels between what they do "for fun" and what a real knight in Medieval Spain would have been expected to do as a normal part of his everyday life.

Peri's Metaphor: The Bushi Class Woman - Interestingly, the Medieval Knight is not a good metaphor for Peri, however. This is primarily because in most instances (read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror), Medieval women were not expected to engage in knightly activities, were often put on pedestals where rather misogynistic and chauvinistic ideals trumped their individuality, and relegated them solely to activities such as needlework, food preparation and childbirth rather than the active championing of their culture’s best ideals. This will never do for our daughter, who already possesses an intensity and strength that warrants something “stronger” in terms of the vision we want to set for her. As the Japanese concept of the Bushi (i.e. "Samurai class") included both men and women, however, it fits perfectly. I have read Stephen Turnbull’s (see Samurai Women:1184-1877) accounts of how in the absence of their husbands, Bushi women not only embodied the softest, most refined and gentile qualities of their culture, but if you attempted to maraud their villages when their men were absent, they were quite skilled in drawing the Naginata from the lentils of their doors and cutting down the invaders with ruthless efficiency and skill.

"A Woman of Both Hands" - As a result of the above, we have begun to craft a core metaphor for Peri that incorporates the Bushi ideals for women into what we are calling “A Woman of Both Hands”. On the one hand (the metaphorical Right Hand), Bushi women were supposed to embody the apex of beauty, humility, decorum, politeness and elegance. However, more than any other culture we could find (with the exception of Southern Ukraine where the real life Amazon Warriors lived, or Northern Iberian Celts who trained their women to be as bloodthirsty as their men), Bushi women could also use the “other hand” (i.e. the metaphorical Left Hand), and were capable of a martial prowess that seems to be largely unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and to do so with unflinching courage, strength and efficiency. The trick, then, is not only to equip our daughter with the ability to “use both hands”, but to know which instance is appropriate for which. We have already begun to use this language with her in instruction.

Sunday, April 3rd - On Sunday, April 3rd, we will again journey to Chicago to spend the day with our friends at the Japanese Cultural Center near downtown. They have been exceptionally accommodating, and we have made some fun friends in the process of designing Peri's special day. To cement the metaphor of the Bushi class woman, Peri will have the privilege of spending the day with several masters in various Japanese arts across both Right and Left Hands. To start, she'll spend some time with a first generation Japanese lady who will explain to her both some Cultural Basics (appropriate bowing, standing, walking, eye contact, etc) as well as the rudiments of Japanese language and writing (Kanji). After that, she will learn about the traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony and how it is performed from a Tea Master. Then, after lunch, she will spend time with two Japanese sword-arts (Iado and Kenjutsu), and finish the day with some unarmed Budo (primarily Jujutsu). We will finish off the day with dinner at Big Bowl, an Asian restaurant downtown where Sami and I fell in love when we were students at Moody Bible Institute.

I hope you'll join us here on the blog and through Tweets as we map out the day!