Recently I was talking to another mom at an event and she was telling me a little about her teenage son. I said something in response to what she told me that indicated that I wasn’t quite as involved in my son’s personal life as she was in hers. In that moment I realized we were both judging each other.
I was judging her for letting her son date at such a young age. I was judging her for judging her son’s girlfriend for not being Good Enough for him. She was judging me for my lack of involvement in my son’s life and my not getting up in his phone frequently enough. And judging her son’s (now ex-) girl for growing up in an unstable household without adequate support, leading to emotional issues and self harming behaviors.
She said the girl would call her son at 3 a.m. because her parents were fighting and she didn’t know what to do.
My kids could have done that this year. Called someone in the middle of the night because his parents were fighting again and he didn’t know what to do.
Does this post look familiar? I scheduled two posts for the same date last month, and didn’t realize till they’d already gone live. I pulled this one down and rescheduled it. If you’ve already read this post but didn’t request the book from your library yet, consider this your friendly reminder.
Are you intentional about modeling how to deal with negative emotions to your kids?
Society, and our nuclear families growing up, have a big impact on how we process our emotions. Some families have certain acceptable emotions. Maybe it was OK to be angry, but sadness was mocked. Or only certain responses to negative emotions were encouraged. Snarky wit in response to feeling hurt? Cool. Crying? Not cool. Society also teaches us no one wants to see you when you’re angry or sad.
How do we teach our kids to function in a healthy way in a world full of broken people?
As I finished up Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, I was laying on the sofa with a raw throat, feeling feverish. I was surrounded by feverish, coughing kids laying next to me, on me, and across from me. And I knew I was in heaven.
The struggle to forgive reality for being exactly what is is right now often breaks us through to nondual consciousness. -Richard Rohr
That is the spirit of Rohr’s book: Recognizing the Kingdom of God is right now. He introduces Jesus from a perspective I first encountered in Breathing Underwater, and builds from there, using primarily scripture, but also the words of the mystics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, and his own ideas.
His object isn’t to convert his reader, just to encourage another way of thinking about the world, so even if you don’t consider yourself religious, this book is a safe place to explore ideas about God without having to feel like you’re being backed into a corner. Yet the book doesn’t shy away from big ideas.
This year, my oldest girl turns twelve and my youngest girl turns 6. Two will never be twice as old as Five again. Five, at six, is no longer a baby.
Good Friday. The two challenging kids who are usually in school were home. I was scheduled for a night shift. I was dreading the anticipated lost sleep that night, and wondering how I was going to get through the next week with all my little kids home, my oldest home, and my two big girls away visiting family friends.
