There’s a couple who live a few doors down with their young son. On Monday he was off out with his mother and, as she strode purposefully to the car, he was haring up and down the road, skipping and jumping without a care in the world. “Come on, you’re wasting time” she called without looking back. Dutifully he calmed down and wandered behind her to the car.
Sometimes children need to be given clear guidelines. It’s important for them to know where the boundaries are, even if they don’t much like them, because it helps them to feel safe. A childhood without boundary is as destructive as one with too many. But the claim that he was “wasting time” jarred.
At dinner last night my son was telling me about the killjoy attitude of his head teacher who has, apparently, cut short the final day of school for those leaving this year, in order to limit the high jinks of the boys, excitable at their imminent release into an unsuspecting world. This will also prevent them from taping any more year 8 boys upside down to the rugby posts, or moving the entire contents of the library out into the court and turfing the library. Apparently he also delights in telling the boys how much he doesn’t like Christmas. “He’s so cynical” says Tom, my 18 year old son with everything in front of him, of his head teacher, the man we entrust to reconfirm our own teachings about how to keep an open mind and avoid cynicism.
In a session this week a young client struggling at school is talking about how he finds it almost impossible to control his anger when he is pushed and taunted, as he repeatedly is. Feeling he has a binary choice between the painful white of disconnection or the dangerous black of full on aggression I wonder what happened to the grey in between, the place where assertiveness and self esteem replaces his fists and his tears. He tells me that he isn’t allowed to be vulnerable because he learned from his father that this is weakness, and weakness is not tolerated.
Somewhere we learned to “just get on with it”, but it’s bullshit. There is a wisdom we hold in childhood which we surrender when presented with alternative opinion from the adults in our lives. This wisdom is the freedom to show how we feel, to run if we feel like running, to be excited without needing justification, and to be OK with feeling sad and cry about it.
Many of us will have been encouraged to find a bit more strength as we grow up, to hide difficult emotions, to avoid talking about our feelings. Some of us will not have been given the truth about a death or allowed to go to the funeral. Others of us will have lived in the middle of a toxic relationship, constantly wondering when it’s all going to blow up in our faces but never being given anything to provide the clarity we crave, until our worst fears are realised and it blows up in our faces.
It is us, the adults, who have covered up and lost our strength, not our children. We have surrendered our resilience by claiming the opposite. We render ourselves far less able to cope by our desparate claims that we are coping. A willingness to be vulnerable is as strong as it gets, because it shows that we don’t need to be bullet proof in order to survive the bullets.
So, it isn’t strong to hide emotion, it isn’t powerful to pretend that we are not hurt, and it is not necessary to “get over” the death of someone we love within a specific timeframe, or indeed, ever. It is not manly to sort everything out with fists, and it is not impressive to be cynical and suggest to others that low expectation is the way to avoid disappointment. These are the tales we have been told as children by foolish adults and, if we absorb them, we repeat them to the detriment of our own children. So it goes.
The mother down the road was right to hurry her little boy along, because he needed to understand that when you have to be somewhere, you need to get there. But it wasn’t true to tell him that he was wasting time. In fact, he was living, being a child, standing in the moment. In this respect listening to his mother was the last thing he needed, because time spent doing what makes us happy, what makes us skip and jump and laugh, what reflects our true feelings, can never be a waste, and don’t let any misguided adult tell you otherwise.
Wise words as always.
Thank you 🙂