Ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?” Failure can actually be a good thing, but only if we choose to learn something from it.
I love you, sweetheart! Now go deal with those three consequences I gave you, OR ELSE!
Love you,
Mom
She wrote back telling me how much better that email made her feel. In that moment, though, I realized that I don’t extend the same grace to myself that I give to my children.
I try to parent my kids to look at failure as a lesson, not a verdict; to be patient and forgiving not only of others but of themselves, too; and yet I can’t seem to take my own lectures to heart.
There are times when I swear that parenting will send me to the loony bin quicker than my youngest can utter “But why?” for the 584th time today. And then there are other times when I feel like parenting is healing me. Considering how insane I feel most days as I try to survive the circus I’ve created, it might be weird to admit this, but I actually find parenting therapeutic. I’m giving my kids what I needed, and sometimes what I still need.
In the case of Matea’s math test, I gave my daughter permission to fail, I gave her grace, and I gave her my faith in her. I’m learning that if my child deserves those things from me, then I don’t deserve any less. One time when Luka was seven, he got so upset and frustrated with himself about something he had done, and I wasn’t happy with the way I was handling his frustration. So I looked at him and said, “Listen, you’ve never been seven before. And I’ve never been a parent to a seven-year-old before. So let’s learn together.” You don’t expect a seven-year-old to know how to do certain things the very first time around. If it’s your first time parenting in a certain situation, give yourself the same grace you’re giving your child. Let yourself mess up without beating yourself up for it.
Beating myself up sometimes actually feels easier than cutting myself a break. Easier because it’s more familiar and what is familiar tends to feel more comfortable, even when it’s bad for us. But always just doing what is easy and comfortable (even when it’s unhealthy) is not the example I want to set for my children. And I know they’re learning much more from how they see me live my life and how much grace I give myself than they will ever learn from any lecture I preach at them. If I want to raise kids who can deal with mistakes in a healthy way, I have to lead by example. And that’s really freaking annoying sometimes. Can’t we just rent good examples for our kids so that we don’t have to work so hard? Is that an option? Not asking for a friend.
I was given a beautiful example of grace and perspective shortly after my divorce. In the wake of the drama, desperation, and guilt that accompanied my divorce, I became so depressed I could barely even recognize myself anymore. Raising young children is hard enough when everything is going well. But in that low moment, nothing in my life was going well. Luckily, a dear friend discovered a way for me to get free therapy sessions from some psychology students who needed to log treatment hours in order to graduate. One particularly hard day, I was telling my therapist how I felt like I’d become a really bad mom.
“I’m crap. I really am. I’m a big pile of crap and my children deserve so much better than me. This is not the kind of mom I thought I’d be. This is not the kind of mom I used to be.”
The therapist asked me for some examples. “Be specific. I want to understand what makes you such a horrible mom now in comparison to when you first became a mom.”
“Well, before my divorce, I used to cook these amazing meals from scratch for my kids, and now so many days I just make mac and cheese out of a box. And before my divorce, I used to take my children to fun places. We went everywhere, to museums and parks, and now I’m so depressed that I just stick my kids in front of the TV, sometimes for hours, while I hide away from them and cry like the sucky mom that I am.”
I went on and on with these examples, sure that my therapist was fully judging my deterioration as a mother.
Once I finished, the therapist leaned in, looked at me so genuinely, and said, “Wow, Kristina. You are an amazing mom!” With not a hint of sarcasm in his tone, he continued, “You are at your rock bottom, yet you still make sure that the needs of your children are met. You still take the time to go buy that box of pasta and boil it and make sure it’s cooled down enough for them to enjoy it. You are so depressed, but you don’t want your children seeing you like that all the time and worrying about you, so you turn on their favorite cartoons so that they can laugh and enjoy themselves while you hide and cry by yourself. That is so selfless.”
The therapist took every single bad thing I said about myself and turned it around completely. He took every insult I had thrown at myself and transformed each one into a compliment. This conversation was nothing short of life changing for me. I needed to learn to do that for myself, to switch my perspective and tell my critical inner voice to sit down and shut up. (But, you know, nicely. With a compassionate, nonjudgmental, licensed-counselor voice. That I’m obviously still working on.)
It is an act of love to listen to a sad story someone is telling about themselves and then help them spin it so it’s maybe a little less sad and a little more meaningful. It can be both simple and profound to step up and be someone’s emotional PR rep. As much as you might want to, you can’t fix someone else’s problems for them and it doesn’t make anyone feel better to hear that their situation isn’t as bad as it seems, so resist the misguided impulse to recast their reality for them that way. But just listening without judgment and reframing their narrative with compassion is one of the kindest things you can do for your children, your spouse, and especially yourself.
The grace and kindness my therapist gave me that day helped me learn something else as well: I have worried that if I praised my children too much for small accomplishments, I would set their standards too low and accidentally raise brats who wouldn’t strive to live up to their full potential. What I realized instead is that without praise for the small things, there’s no motivation to get past the small and try to accomplish the big. Giving our kids a chance to see they’ve made us proud is powerful; it puts the wind in their sails.
We don’t mean to, but many of us parents tend to notice the bad in our kids. We’re scared we’ll raise lazy, entitled, mean humans, so we’re constantly on the lookout, making sure we catch them every time they do something bad so that we can nip that behavior in the bud. And, yes, consequences for bad behavior are important. But what if we decided to be just as vigilant, if not more, about noticing what our kids are doing right—even small things—and praising them for that, too? And what if we extended that to ourselves and looked not just at the areas that need improvement but fully appreciated every facet of our lives where we shine?
Let’s be honest. We are responsible for a ridiculous number of things. We handle everyone’s schedules, we make sure the doctor and dentist appointments are made, and we get our kids to those appointments on time (sort of). We make sure our family is nourished, physically and emotionally. We are the comforters, the conflict-resolution gurus, the therapists, the potty trainers, the storytellers, the teachers, the chefs, the sanitary engineers, and the CEOs of our households. With so many things on our plates and so much constantly racing through our minds, it’s easy to slip into autopilot parenting mode. We might as well be pressing the replay button on our words, like the most disappointing action figure ever, complete with the lamest set of prerecorded phrases: “Please have another bite.” “Please put your shoes on.” “Please finish your homework.” Parenting can feel like a monotonous cycle; it’s the same thing over and over. By the end of the day, we’re drained from all we’ve managed to do and yet we feel like we’ve accomplished nothing.