About a year after Ari was born, Philip and I decided that he should have a vasectomy and that if his balls were going to endure a painful procedure, they deserved a party. We sent out invites to our close friends that featured a photo of a lemon with the caption “All juice, no seeds!” I prepared a menu of meatballs, spicy cheese balls, Cuban stuffed-potato balls, Sicilian arancini (risotto balls), cake pops, truffles, coconut almond balls . . . well, you get the idea. Balls. Only balls. Earlier that year the New England Patriots were accused of deliberately deflating footballs before the Super Bowl in what became known as the famous “Deflategate,” so I bought a bunch of little footballs from a party store, let out the air, and those became the party favors: deflated balls. So two days after Philip’s vasectomy, as he sat on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas on his crotch, our house was filled with our favorite people and a lot of laughter.
Why all this fanfare and fuss for the little stuff? Well, the truth is that I don’t naturally see the bright side of things. My default worldview is pessimistic. (Probably in part because I’m Croatian. I don’t know if you’ve ever delved into Eastern European literature, but let me tell you, it’s pretty bleak stuff. Brilliant! But bleak.) I consider myself a recovering pessimist. I have learned to go out of my way to proactively create my bliss. Finding the good in life is a struggle for me and a conscious choice I have to make daily, since, apparently, you can’t have Amazon Prime just deliver a box of happy to your house. They sell pretty much everything except for the stuff I really need: joy, patience, naps.
I noticed early on in motherhood that my children inherited my tendency toward the negative. Years ago, while driving home from a soccer game, I was listening to my kids whine about their day. Practically everything made their list of complaints, and I was sick of it. I decided something had to change, so I made up a new game.
“All right, Luka and Matea,” I yelled from the front seat, “I have a new game for us. It’s called Yeah, But. Every time you have something negative to say, you have to follow it up with a ‘Yeah, but . . . ’ and then add something positive. I’ll start. Ugh, I’m almost out of gas and the last thing I feel like doing right now is stopping at a gas station. Yeah, but . . . I have a car! And I have money for gas, and I don’t ever want to take those things for granted. Okay, your turn now.”
Luka quickly spoke up. “We lost our soccer game, and I’m really upset about it. Yeah, but . . . I love my team and my coach, and I’m glad we have another game next week.”
Then Matea chimed in. “I was really bored today all day. Yeah, but . . . tomorrow I have a playdate with Siena!”
The Yeah, But game has become a regular exercise in our home. I don’t allow my kids to dwell on the negative. They can complain, of course; I welcome them to express their aggravations and concerns and I think it’s really important to let them talk through those feelings. But then I try to encourage them to find something positive in whatever situation they’re dealing with. There are too many good things in their lives (in all of our lives) to let the days fly by without pausing to acknowledge our blessings, and I would be doing my children a disservice if I allowed them to always just wallow in the negative.
To compare the pitfalls of focusing on the negatives to food (since eating is my favorite sport), brooding over the annoyances, disappointments, frustrations, failures, pain, and resentment is like marinating chicken. A few hours or even a full day is good. But if I let that chicken sit in the marinade for weeks or months or years . . . instead of ending up with a dish that I can proudly serve to my family, I will end up with a gelatinous poison. Same protocol applies to negative feelings. We should allow ourselves to feel what we feel. Take a dip in that marinade. Let the marinade make us more tender. Get a little seasoning. But don’t leave yourself marinating forever. The Yeah, But game is a way to finish the marinating process before it gets out of hand.
That night during the war in Croatia when the shrapnel from the grenade flew through my bedroom window, it hit and destroyed the bookshelf that was right behind the head of my bed. The entire thing collapsed onto my bed and shattered into pieces. (Another reason I’m thankful that I wasn’t sleeping in my bed that night.) The thing on that shelf that meant the most to me was a photo album my mom had put together. Pretty much every photo she had of me, from birth to twelve years old, was in that album and it was almost completely burned. We had no digital backups or negatives, so we had no way of reprinting those precious memories. There are about ten pictures of me as a child that I rescued from the little corner of the photo album that was still intact. Most of them had charred edges.
When I was thirteen, I was so angry that my childhood photos had been destroyed that I took a pair of scissors and cut off some of those charred edges. I guess it was my unsuccessful way of trying to erase any reminders of what had happened to my photos. During my senior year of high school, a teacher asked us to bring in a kindergarten or first-grade photo of ourselves for a project. I didn’t have a photo of myself at those ages. And I didn’t feel like explaining why, so I just didn’t do the project. I pretended I forgot about it and accepted an F on the assignment.
Later on, in my adulthood, I was complaining to my mom about how much it bothered me that I didn’t have many childhood photos. “I don’t even know what I looked like at certain ages. It makes me really sad.” My mom listened and let me take a dip in the disappointment marinade, and then she said, “I understand it’s really upsetting. And of course you’re sad about it. But also keep in mind that that’s the only meaningful material possession you lost in the war. Your photo album. You have friends who lost everything.”
She was right.
She didn’t point this out to suggest there was something wrong with me for feeling sad about the album; she was just reminding me that I needed to put my loss in perspective and realize how much I had to be grateful for. Yeah, but . . . how amazing is it that at least that one corner of the album didn’t get burned? Yeah, but . . . my parents’ entire home could have been destroyed and it’s still standing to this day. Yeah, but . . . I could have been in my room that night, sleeping in my bed, and then I might not even be here to be sad about the photos I lost.
I want to make sure I’m clear on something here: I’m not in any way suggesting that we should suppress our feelings or our pain because someone else has it worse. I’ve been on the receiving end of comments like “Well, you don’t have it as bad as so-and-so, and you need to get over it!” Or “Your being upset about that one event is an insult to people who experience it daily!” Or “I went through that, too, and it didn’t affect me the way you’re saying it affected you, so you must be lying or exaggerating your pain.”
Whether it was about my divorce or my depression or even something as sensitive as being sexually assaulted both as a child and as an adult, I’ve received feedback that has made me feel like my feelings aren’t valid. I can tell you from experience: those words aren’t helpful and they don’t lead the recipients to gratitude or happiness. Statements like those come from a place of judgment, and judgment has never helped anyone become a more positive person.