Talk to your Kids

Growth is hard. It means shedding the things you are most comfortable with. Letting go of beliefs you’ve come to live by.

Growing means getting uncomfortable in an already uncomfortable world. It means shedding layers of years of thoughts thought to be real. And letting go of people thought to understand you.

It means letting go and floating into an abyss and having only your faith and hope to hold on to. You are blind in the abyss. Not seeing anything above you, below you or inches from you. All you have is what’s inside of you & it’s telling you, “This is our only chance of survival. It’s either this or stay stuck in the comfortable and stay small and get smaller and smaller until you don’t even exist any longer. The other side of this is where we have the possibility to understand things our feeble minds can never dream up. So let’s get uncomfortable and feel our way through.”

Speaking to my child over dinner one night, she began to tear up as she spoke about the things she missed most before the pandemic. And as she spoke, it dawned on me, this is the first dark period of her life and she has no other ones to compare it to and say to herself, “Yea, ok, I’ll be fine. I’ve been here before, I can see the other side of this.”

She doesn’t have the capacity yet or the know how to see it through. She’s being told and forced to see it through but it’s so much harder to do that than to have the perceptions of someone older, like myself, that has been through some dark shit in her life and had the capacity to get myself through them.

Hope and faith are not in our DNA. One finds those along the path of life. They are found in the trials and pains and lows of your life. And you hold on to them long after the disaster has been cleared away and you search for them when life throws you more shit. Hope and faith work together interchangeably. Grace plays a big role too in all this. Something else that is taught and learned and not part of our DNA.

Adults have the capacity and means and have experienced many of life’s ups and downs to scavenge their way through, ask questions, come to conclusions. A child does not.

A child is still being told how to behave, dress, speak and what to understand. They have adults around them to protect them from falling, burning their hands, scolding them to stop jumping off the couch or they’ll crack their head open.

But we, the adults, never thought we needed to prepare them to have their lives and all they knew of it to be snatched right before their very eyes. By the time I came to understand we were not headed back into our known worlds any time soon, my child had already lost all the things she looked forward to-faces of friends, park dates, school events, kisses and hugs from family members, splitting ice cream on a hot summer day, impromptu meet ups, after school swim team and locker room antics. These all were taken away within a 24hr period without any forewarning or prospect to when she’d get any of it back.

Sure, life got slower and less busy and more time with family was spent and dinners and conversations went well into the night.

But so did dullness and boredom and restraints settle in. We closed up, we lost general functions and freedoms and impromptus without any end in sight.

We are being shoved all these rules but no one is telling us if there’s another side to this. We are being led by the blind and you can hear the fear in the voices of these rule makers. It’s the same fear I heard in my daughters voice last night. She was choking up and still too afraid to show me her vulnerability and fear. Like someone slipped her a note that said, “Suck it up, don’t cry.”

Maybe to her she thinks, what’s it matter if I cry or share how sad I am, it won’t change anything. And that’s the worst part. We went into this never taking into account that our children don’t only need physical protection but heart protection too. They don’t just need an adult to remind them to brush their teeth and get ready for bed but they need us to just listen more and see through them more and let them know, we too are scared, we’re humans too and we get your fears. However, we need to share ourselves and be vulnerable with them so they can learn that vulnerability is human. We can say: the difference between you and I, my darling child, is I have been here before and I’ve been at the backend of some terrifying things in my life. I have been afraid and not known if and how I’d make it through. I only knew that I wanted to make it through. I wanted to see the other side. I wanted to laugh and be free again and I knew that my great Father wanted that for me too. I knew that when I was put on this earth I wasn’t meant to live in fear or small. I knew that the reason for living was to live and gain knowledge and never stop learning. And whatever you believe in; God, Universe, a presence with no name, you must believe that there is something grander and greater than you that is watching over you and protecting you and created you as you unique as you are. So when you are in that scary place you can understand how faith plays out. You can put faith in what you believe and that will take you through to hope.

I also understand that it’s my obligation to protect my child and show her the ropes but that doesn’t mean I’m not supposed to not be human. Growing up in a home where both parents rarely showed their vulnerable side had me believe that when you become an adult you have all the answers and nothing is scary any longer. Instead what I’ve learned is that most adults hold their true selves from their children. Thinking, that if we teach them to suck it up and look ahead, we’re teaching them strength. Instead what we’re doing is teaching them how to not relate to feelings and how to shove them down and when we’re doing that, we’re taking their human side away. The side where we relate to other humans and connect with others. And when we’re not connecting, we aren’t given a chance to explore the possibilities and potentials of this world. My God created man and then He created woman to accompany him. We are known to need human connection to survive.

Is it scary? Yes

Is it confusing? For sure.

Are you alone? Never

Can you cry? Please do.

Will you be angry? Most certainly

Is it worth it? Without a doubt.

It is our duty as our child’s parents, caregivers, the adults around them to have them understand we too are human, we are not untouched or unscathed by life and we can show them the way out to the other side. Since we are our children’s first human connection, lets connect on levels of empathy and vulnerability and talk about fears and the scary things that sometimes children don’t know how to not make scary. Let’s be our child’s first human connection to a better world. Don’t be afraid to show your human side to them. Get down, literally, to their level and look them in the eye and explain to them things that they will otherwise make up on their own. Be open with them. Cry if you have to and please, let’s not ever tell them to suck it up or crying is for sissy’s. Let’s explore what’s passed the tears and get to the other side.