I originally wrote Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health for my young adult children. I wanted to impress upon them that they were now the stewards of their own health. I was no longer around to remind them to get adequate sleep, eat well, exercise. I realized that all parents could probably use a springboard to discuss important health and body image issues with their kids. So I had the text illustrated and voila! Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health became a poster. I have big dreams (OK, outsized dreams) that over time, this poster will spark meaningful conversations between parents and their children about making wise choices, the miracle of the human body, the way the media bombards us with unrealistic standards of what that body should look like, and more.

A dear reader sent me the photo above and shared an exchange she had with her 15-year-old son. I was thrilled to receive her note. Just as I had hoped, the poster prompted a quick but meaningful conversation, the thread of which she can weave into her already resourceful parenting.

I modeled the commandments one-for-one on the Original Ten. For instance: Thou shalt not steal became: You shall not steal your body’s tomorrow health by blowing off exercise today.

Thou shall not commit adultery became  You shall not eat adulterated foods, but consume instead greens and grains, proteins and fruits. And some ice cream now and then!

I love that my friend’s son thought the poster was “cool” and interpreted Mom’s 10th Commandment—You shall not covet your neighbor’s waist or her hair, not his height or biceps, nor any physical aspect that is your neighbor’s – as a caution to be yourself.

So here, in one-act, a brief play inspired by Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health. Setting: a kitchen in Michigan. Personae Dramatis: Mom and Son. Time: a school morning

Son goes to the fridge to get his lunch out, stops.
SON: What’s this?
MOM: Debra Darvick sent it to me.
(pauses a moment) I like it.
SON: Yeah.  It’s cool.
MOM: What’s cool about it?
SON: I like the Biblical phrasing. And it says…(points to each commandment in turn) I. Respect your mom. II. I don’t really know what this is about.* III. Respect your body. IV. Sleep well. V. Respect your mind. VI. Don’t do drugs. VII. Eat good food. VIII. Stay (acting out movement). IX. (screws up face and voice goes up with uncertainty) Don’t get tattooed? X. Don’t try to be someone else. (pauses a moment) I like it, too.
MOM: Good.

He proceeds to open the fridge, gets his lunch and packs up to leave the house for school.

MOM: (to the dog) That was easy.

And the *? It’s poignant that Mom’s 2nd Commandment—You will have no other body but this one—stymied my friend’s son. Young people sometimes live in blessed ignorance of this immutable truth: We have no body but this one; ergo, take care of it!

Ready to start a discussion with your kids? Order a poster of your own by clicking on the Contact Me link at the right. We are gearing up for e-commerce so please leave your name and email and I’ll get right back to you when we are up and running. To your health!

It’s your turn! How do you encourage your children to make wise food choices? Get adequate sleep and exercise? And how about you? What’s your biggest health challenge and how do you meet it?  Share this post with your Facebook friends and stay healthy together!

THANK YOU! 

Your enthusiastic response to Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health tells me that we are all looking for ways to stay healthy—and to help our kids and other loved ones form and maintain as many healthy habits as possible.

Among your responses in this first week …

I got a few suggestions for additional commandments: 
“Pizza is not a food group.”
“Remember to brush and floss.”
“Wear clean undies!”

Friends came up with ideas for expansion: Making the poster’s message into a little book or writing journal, creating a needlepoint canvas or a set of pillows, setting the words to music, even. For now I look forward to writing more columns that expand on the theme of healthy living by sharing recipes that I find, telling you about healthy tips that really work, or helping you to spark discussions on “inviting wonder into our lives” or “chasing away self-destructive thoughts.”

RICK NEASE, the artist who designed the poster, did a terrific job. I appreciate the way Rick created eye-catching images, and still managed to incorporate a lot of words on a poster that’s only 8-by-11 inches. Could it have been larger? Sure, but we heard from many people that 8-by-11 is the biggest size that will fit conveniently in appropriate spaces around the house, such as: a refrigerator door or a spot on the bathroom wall.

Rick included a series of apples in his imagery and that prompted more reader questions:
“An apple a day?”
“A reference to Adam and Eve?”

There’s a practical value in having one prominent, white apple shape in the middle of the poster: You could customize the poster with a commandment of your own.

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD?

If you like this project—please help me to share the news and develop future columns that will explore subjects that you’ll find helpful. You can do this by adding a comment, below, or by visiting my Debra Darvick’s Reading Room Facebook page, where I share more thoughts with readers on a daily basis. I’ve even got some intriguing photos on Facebook that you might enjoy!

Keep sending me your questions, suggestions and tips for more healthy commandments.

What would you write in that white apple space in the middle of your poster?

 

What’s a parent to do when the kids are all grown up, living far from home—but we still wonder: Are they eating well? Getting enough rest? Exercising? Making time simply to delight in their surroundings?

How do we encourage this balanced approach to healthy living?

The solution I’m sharing with you, starting today, is Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health—a nifty little poster sporting ten health reminders, modeled one-for-one on the Original Ten.

Reminders like: You shall not take the miracle of your body for granted.

And: Remember the power of sleep and keep it wholly.

And: You shall not covet thy neighbor’s waist or her hair, his height or his biceps.

When we’re young, we assume we’re invincible. Nothing will wear out, except perhaps our sneakers. Or the iPhone battery. We consume whatever we want and assume our digestive tract will just deal.

I wrote Mom’s 10 Commandments of Health as a way-in for parents and their kids to discuss the blessing of good health, the miracle of our bodies, and how best to respect and protect them.

In the coming months, I’ll focus on one or two commandments each month, either in this column—or sometimes on my Facebook page, inviting discussion, sharing health tips I find interesting, links to good reading and good eating. The goal is for some “healthy” interaction on the topic of health and wellness.

My hope is that the words on this poster will be assimilated into a family’s conversations and way of life. Among the many examples: Perhaps one day, an 11-year-old girl whose classmates measure their self-worth against one another’s physical attributes, will remember the commandment about not coveting another girl’s hair or her waist and will find within confidence to be exactly who she is.

IT’S EASY TO FIND THIS PROJECT! We’ve set up a very simple Internet address to find the latest on this project, http://www.Moms10Commandments.com (Tell a friend about this now.)

Want a poster of your own?  Visit my new ETSY shop. They’re ready and waiting for you to give to anyone’s whose good health is important to you. (This includes you!)

COME ON, JOIN IN …

And now it’s time to make this interactive: What was your mom’s No. 1 health commandment when you were growing up? Have you incorporated it into your life? How? What health commandment holds sway in your own house?

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD?

UPDATE, February 17: Readers are responding enthusiastically and, in a second column, I invite readers to share more ideas. I call this follow-up column: What would you add?

This bumper sticker made my blood boil.

The snootiness of it, the smug denigration, the car owner’s assumption that anyone who is religiously engaged and strives to have a relationship with…dare I use the G-word?…is intellectually vacant.

Maybe I was making a judgment call of my own.  Perhaps the car’s owner was acknowledging the opposite sentiment—those of us who engage with religion don’t check our intellect at the door. It takes a lot to believe in God—a lot of thought; a lot of living; a lot of faith, reading and struggle; a lot of conversation with like and unlike minded folks. But I’m likely giving credit where credit isn’t due. For this car’s owner, the meaning of the bumper sticker lay behind door number one. And it ticked me off.

Spiritual and religious journeys are as varied as the seekers on the path. I only know my own path, and believe me, my brain is mightily engaged every time I study the Torah, read rabbinic commentaries, and even pray. I’ve learned that when the words stay on the page they are one-dimensional, often puzzling, sometimes over the top.

Until they are experienced.

Last week I was speaking with a tiling buddy whom I met at Song & Spirit. Like me, she is Jewish. Like me she grew up in a non-kosher home, eating BLT’s, enjoying shrimp cocktails. Like me, over time she began to follow Torah’s mitzvot (commandments) as they pertain to the food we eat.

She told me about visiting a farm when she was a young adult. The farmer placed one of two baby goats born that morning into her arms and asked her to take the kid into the barn. “The mother goat followed me into the barn and when I put her kid down she began to nuzzle it. Then she stopped and began looking frantically for the other kid. Not until both babies were with her did she calm down. In that moment, I understood why Torah forbids us to seethe (boil) a kid in its mother’s milk.These animals are [sensate] creatures.”

My friend quit eating pork and shellfish. She began eating according to Jewish tradition. All because some arcane sentence in the Hebrew Bible came to life in a barn, and made her think.

Religion. Because thinking is hard.

Yes. I can imagine no better endorsement for religion. Because thinking is hard. If we don’t think, we dismiss one of God’s greatest gifts to us—our minds. And then, we run the risk of becoming as flat, mindless, and one-dimensional as a bumper sticker.

Author Shirley Hershey Showalter crossed my radar one day on Read the Spirit.  In her own words she’s “a farmer’s daughter who became a college professor, college president, and foundation executive.” Her memoir, Blush, A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World, was published in September, and I finally got down to reading it last month.

Showalter grew up in a close-knit (is there another kind?) Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. Her memoir traces her childhood years up until the fall she enters college. Showalter was the first in her family to head to college, making a choice that was definitely not mainstream within her Mennonite community. She describes a life few of us have lived and yet one that continually intrigues—a life pared down to what matters, a community that stands firmly against the dregs of our culture. A community rooted in its faith and history, and guided by shared values.

Twerk? Never. Work? Yes—with pride.

As you might surmise from the title, this is no Mommy Dearest memoir, but a recounting of a childhood and family life that seems nearly too good to be true. It’s not that the Hershey family was free of conflict and grief; they experienced it aplenty. But I found myself wanting more, as if even the conflicts were painted with such a light touch that, were I a dog I might have taken the book in my teeth and begun shaking my head back and forth just to get a rise out of the pages.

IDENTIFYING DEEPLY

Yet time and again, I identified deeply with the author’s stories about going to school and feeling keenly that it was a testing ground, a place where she recognized “the ways [she] fit and the ways [she] didn’t.” I couldn’t help but think back to my own early days in first grade, the lone Jewish kid in a class of 28 gap-toothed kids all of whom knew the words to a song called Jesus Loves Me that followed the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. She wrote of her fourth grade teacher, Miss Gibble, “the most notorious teacher of them all.” But Miss Gibble was also plain, “an anomaly,” wrote Showalter, “in front of my own classroom… she would understand me in ways my first three teachers could not.”  My own Miss Gibble was my eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Hirsch. That eighth grade fall was the only time in 12 years of public school that I didn’t have to feel awkward being absent on random days in September, because my teacher had been absent, too.

It was not only on the school front that Showalter’s experiences echo in the Jewish community. She wrote of the day neighbor women came to help out after her mother suffered a miscarriage and recalled hearing their judgmental whispers to one another about her mother’s housekeeping as being “not very redd up [cleaned up or put away.]” Reading that I remembered a conversation I had with a young Orthodox mother who lives in a Jewish community nearby.  “Oh, they are all ready to help in a minute, but they’re always peeking in your cholent (stew) pot, too.” Petty judgment knows no religious or spiritual bounds.

Now retired from university life, Showalter is pursuing memoir not only as a personal endeavor, but as a teacher of the genre as well. Not everyone could write a memoir titled Blush. For some of us it might have to be titled Scarlet, or perhaps Marooned. But we’ve all got a story to tell. Showalter’s memoir serves as inspiration that whatever the story, whatever our community of origin, so very many life experiences are universal, and as such they have the power to resonate quite neatly across every seeming divide.