Musings from the middle

I’ve grown so much more comfortable with vulnerability in these last few years—hell, in these last few days—that I think I regard it as a friend now. Vulnerability equals honesty for me. And I don’t want to be afraid of expressing what I feel anymore.

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There’s a line in one of my favorite songs, “We can do hard things,” by Tish Melton, that says:

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start…

I can’t tell if we hit rock bottom last week when he finally broke open. The optimistic part of me wants to believe that that was as hard as it gets. That those hours of raw unraveling and admission were the wake-up call he needed. But believing is a choice, I think, not a reflex. Not something we can just automatically trigger. Belief requires us to make a conscious decision whether to trust in an uncertain future, or to turn away from it and cling to a certain past.

Belief is a tightrope, and it feels like I’m stuck in the middle of it—wanting to move forward, taking one cautious step at a time, but afraid of being disappointed again, constantly looking over my shoulder at the path back to where I’ve already been.

Maybe the real courageous act isn’t to force myself to move in either direction, but to just stand right here, where I am, at the uncomfortable balancing point? To be OK with holding the vastness of both belief and fear at the same time? Maybe this is where a different kind of transformation happens. Not just at rock bottom, but also at a much less solid—a much more uncertain—middle.

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Sometimes I can be a really shitty parent. I’m not saying that as self-deprecation, but more as recognition that I’m not always great at following my own advice.

I talk to my husband a lot about trying to see things from our kids’ perspectives. That they are not adults, and they need different things than we do. Different responses when they’re angry or scared, different explanations for the decisions we make, different support to get through their challenges. And then I go and do something completely contrary to all of that, trying to nudge them toward a way of being that I think is best, and not meeting them where they are—where they need me to be with them.

The ability to recognize when I’m doing this is progress in itself. I’m able to hold myself with some level of compassion for my mistakes, although there’s definitely still judgement mixed in there, too. I subconsciously know that no one’s perfect. Parenting is just an endless series of making mistakes, recognizing those mistakes, and trying to do better the next time. There’s no manual, so we’re just all making it up as we go. But I still catch myself standing on the edge of the bottomless-pit-of-parenting-guilt when I fail to show up as “emotionally enlightened” for my kids, even when it’s such a small misstep that it’s only perceptible to me.

Guilt, like shame, is a hard thing to let go of, especially when you’ve been conditioned for it to be one of your go-to reactions. I’ve found real comfort and grace lately in apologizing to my kids when I catch myself in one of these situations. I try to recognize when I didn’t show up the way they needed me to, acknowledge how it made them feel, and promise to do better next time.

I don’t always do better next time.

I think our kids are here to teach us things we didn’t know we needed to learn. I just have to remember that it’s also not their fault if we keep flunking the tests.