The respect that you show your parents is wonderful and is a model of behaviour that you child will incorporate into her life.
Not easy frequently, given that my father and I are pretty diametrically opposed on most issues, but something we strive for and seem to have come to at least an uneasy balance on in the time we see each other (usually due to my not bringing up subjects
). He basically confines his attempts to reconvert me to emails, which I can more easily ignore.
It does mean that we have to be more vigilant, especially around holidays when there are family gatherings. The mindset of most of the family is illustrated by the fact that they were lauding the behavior of a stepnephew who was having problems in kindergarten for going to school and telling the other (Christian) children that they were going to hell for being the wrong kind of Christian.
You mentioned that your husband is a Buddhist. This is what the Buddhist said about the duties of children to their parents. The sutta doesn’t require belief in the family traditions, just respect.
He’s actually not officially Buddhist, we’re both Hellenic, but has studied Buddhism and finds a lot of value in many teachings both from Buddhism and Shinto. In search of physical religious community, we attend a UU church where the minister is Buddhist, so she has had a fair amount of exposure to Buddhism as well.
It’s an interesting aspect to honoring one’s ancestors and heritage (which are part of my religious tradition) when those are so tied up with a religion in which one cannot believe. It is something I have struggled with, particularly when it comes to things like holidays, especially Christmas. My mother died when I was a teenager and one of the things that was very important to her and our family was Christmas. Not necessarily in the religious aspects, though she was Christian and we did go to church every time the doors opened (and more), but in all the “trappings”—lights, decorations, baking, getting together with family. We gathered with several generations of family each year (my grandparents, great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts/uncles, etc).
Although my daughter doesn’t have all those sorts of relationships (most of the older members of my family died before she was born and the younger ones moved away–a hazard of having a child relatively late in life), we work to pass on the stories and traditions. As we decorate our tree, we talk about the “why” of each ornament—the crocheted “snowflake” made from a tablecloth her great-great-grandmother made, the little plastic star that hung on her great-grandmother’s tree, the spun glass angel I gave her grandmother, the ones that symbolize our heritage or beliefs in some way. We talk about the things our families did when we were growing up, make connections, etc.
The fact that she does not have that complex web of close family relationships with extended family in which I grew up makes me even more reluctanct to knowingly or intentionally be the cause of any rift between her and her grandparents unnecessarily. It’s a rift that is highly likely to occur if I am confrontational about my beliefs. They have chosen in the past to do things like declare my sister dead to them for not adequately following their form of Christian teaching (they got over it eventually and she is much more gracious than I in willing to forgive and forget), refuse to attend weddings and other family occasions if they disagree with something, etc.
I can give her a sense of belonging to the land (my family has been in this immediate area for close to 250 years–I have ancestors from the 1700s buried in a cemetery in a park adjacent to our subdivision) and a sense of the history of those that have gone before (genealogy is a spiritual practice for me), but she also needs the actual relationship with those of her family that are living if I can reasonably provide that. If in the case of my side of the family that requires me to bite my tongue a bit on a regular basis, I am willing to do so to a large extent as long as it does not negatively affect my daughter.
Note that that
does not include allowing them to covertly proselytize her, baptize her or tell her that we are all going to hell. I have drawn the lines in the sand fairly plainly on those issues. Blessings over food and a certain amount of Jesus talk I can deal with. So far, so good.
I stepped up the comparative religious education a bit at that point.