I'm So Glad You Told Me

I don't read authors who write in a tone of voice that sounds too much like how I wish I sounded when I write. Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle Melton, Nadia Bolz-Weber... I hear they're amazing and that I'd love them so much. Oh well. They make me feel like shit, writing all their thoughts down first, so I just act like they're not there most of the time.

Sadly social media interferes with my campaign to make them not exist so I trip across what they think quite a bit. This long preamble to say, Brene Brown said something once and I read it lately by accident and now my whole life is different.  God knows what would happen if I read the rest of those assholes.

I think I've mentioned here that parenting has been more work than I wanted these last months. It has been for years really, but since late fall, things really took a turn for the dumpster fire and I wasn't altogether we'd all four make it through to the other side. I did what I do and spent most waking hours scouring the interwebs for hope. Looking for a solution that would cure what ailed us, ideally with only 5 or 7 minutes of effort.

Where I landed was where you all knew I would land: there is no shortcut to peace to be had - one can only decide to point themselves in the direction of peace and hope there are enough granola bars in your pockets to get you there. The trick is to find the straightest path there, and just keep taking the next right step*. For years. Years and years and years and years as far as I can tell.

For me, the path to peace seems to be marked Empathy Road. Correction Crescent, Angry Alley, Punishment Path and the Vale of Resentment and Tears all led to places I did not want to be anymore. But empathy - believing that a child wasn't giving me a hard time but was having a hard time and needed help handling that hard time - that brand of empathy and living with another seemed to lead to the place I most want to be. A place kind of like Hawaii - it's expensive and I'm never sure we should go, but I'm so relaxed and warm and happy there that I keep going back, embarrassed though I am that we spend so much to be there.

Meeting a child who's words and actions are awful with warmth and calm makes me look like an idiot. I worry all the time about teaching people (read: my children) they can treat me poorly when I don't demand they Stop That Right Now or All Manner of Goodness Will be Removed From Your World. I have judged a thousand mothers for letting their sweet progeny get away with being assholes.

And yet.

It turns out that shouting and stomping and demanding and insisting and drawing lines in sand and not giving in turned me into someone I loathed. Someone who cried in the dark and knew my adult children would drink because of me.

But as I really decided to listen to the whispered hurt behind the shouted angry words my child hurled my way, I discovered they told me what they were afraid of, and what they thought might go wrong. They told me they didn't know how to do the things asked of them out there in the world, and as often, not even the things asked here at home. They whispered, 'please help me'.

And so I started whispering back, 'okay'.

Because I have known my own self to be washed over with rage and anger when fear got the best of me. I have shouted curse words because they were easier to say than "I'm afraid I wrecked us." I have ranted and raved out loud while my sweet tender heart whispered "please help me turn this off". I have felt the rage grow and grow when instead of help I was offered criticism and disappointed dismissal.

Cruising the internet to learn about how to get to empathy eventually brought me to Brene Brown. Of course. In her TED talk, she includes in a script for empathy, "I don't know what to say, but I'm so glad you told me."

Everything is different now. I don't have to have solutions for my people. I just have to be grateful that they told me they can't. Even if they tell me with hurled sticks and stones and words that mean to hurt me.

I'm so glad you told me, I say. And thus find myself one step closer to peace.

As I said to my own mum a few weeks ago, I decided I'd rather regret grace.

May it be so.