The Moment of Making it Better

  – by Sarah

 

It’s around 7:30 of an evening in the Heart of Dixie. I am chivying Tabitha home from her evening constitutional, which is where we “Go outside, Mommy!” And then we play with rocks and do whatever comes naturally, usually involving the neighbors, their pets, their cars, balls, and whatnot. We walked a three door walk admiring a lovely waxing half-moon. One door from our own home, kids were retreating from a front door. The kids in that house were not available to play.

Sister and brother M and J are new to the neighborhood. They live with their mom nearer the end of the street, at the cul de sac. We met last week, where I heard all about summer reading and learning times tables and Tabitha managed to rope them into a game of Ring Around the Rosie where nobody actually ever fell on the ground.

“Hey, they’re not home!” M notified me.

“Hi, Miss M! Busy?”

“Out with their cousins,” she replied, almost disdainful someone could choose family over neighborhood kids.

“That happens,” I noted.

“This is Sarah,” M told an older girl with her. “This my cousin.”

“She’s watching us,” said J.

I introduced myself to their sophomore cousin and we started walking down the street, toward my house, away from M’s destination, the neighborhood playground. The cousin explained that she was keeping an eye on the kids while her aunt, their mother, went for take out. We chatted. She asked me, point blank, how old I was. When I answered 36 she laughed out loud and said, “Nooo!” Then, “She your daughter? You old for a baby.”

“Yes,” I assured her. “I had her when I was 34.” She admired my visible tattoos. I asked about how the multiplication tables were coming.

And then thunder rumbled. M didn’t notice, but tugged on her cousins arm. “The park,” she whined. “We were going to go to the park.”

“I want to go in,” said J., quiet and rigid.

“You said we got to go to the park!” M announced.

“It’s okay,” the cousin told J. “It’s no big deal.”

More thunder.

“Is that thunder, Mommy?” Small Tabitha, there, watching and listening. I briefly considered downplaying the thunder to help assuage J’s feelings, but decided that it wasn’t worth lying to my daughter.

“Yes, T-tab. That is thunder. There is a thunderstorm coming, maybe.” 

“We need to go inside,” J said quickly.

“Park!” M bellowed.

And then everything was tense. The cousin didn’t know how to handle what looked like imminent fighting, nor the weather, nor these two strangers. I thought I might try to lead by example. “Well,” I said. “There’s two things we can do. M, you can take one for the team and go home and maybe J will owe you a trip to the park. Or you can rock paper scissors and just shave 10 minutes off your park trip for J if M wins.”

The two of them were on it. These kids were clearly used to using Rock Paper Scissors to hammer out some compromise.

Unfortunately, M won. “Park!” she hooted.

J visibly wilted. “I want to go home,” he moaned, tears welling up in his eyes.

The sky was still and the thunder was distant but I could feel what this kid was feeling. You don’t mess with lightning and thunder. You especially don’t mess with it, of a summer evening, in Alabama.

“Hey. You don’t cry,” said his cousin. It was imperative. You. Don’t. Cry.

And my heart clenched. I thought of everything I knew about acknowledging feelings, confronting and labeling emotions, experiencing and moving through them.

“It’s okay to cry,” I said, almost but not quite regretting gainsaying his cousin and babysitter. “It’s okay to be scared. That’s understandable. That’s reasonable.”

There was a pause.

“J, if you would like, you may come to my house while your cousin and sister go to the park. Would that be okay?”

“Yes,” he said and turned up my drive.

“Wait,” his cousin shot. “Do his mom know you?”

Good woman, I thought. “Yes. We met earlier this week.”

J, meanwhile, was well into my garage and about to open the door into the kitchen. I could imagine my husband, who dislikes all of the people all of the time, confronting a crying 8-year old boy in his foyer. “Go, I said.” And then lightning flashed again. “That was lightning. Fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be okay,” she assured me.

I walked Tabitha and J through the now very dark garage and into the kitchen hollering, “Honey, we have a new friend. This is J!”

My husband, bless him, didn’t miss a beat. “Okay. Hello.”

“J, this is my husband Christopher. J is going to hang out with us while his sister and cousin go up to the park.”

And then more lightning and thunder and cousin and M were on their way back. She was being very practical. She didn’t want to get caught in the rain. M was disappointed and about two furrowed eyebrows away from being petulant. J was supremely relieved.

As he turned to leave I said, “Hey, J.” And then I had his attention. I bent so I was on his level. “Hey. You know any time you want or need to, you can come here. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, hugging me, then pulling away.

“Thanks. Have a good night.”

He didn’t say anything, but turned to follow his sister and cousin.

I’d like to think I’d made a tiny difference tonight. I took a boy scared of the weather and said here you are safe. I talked to a boy overwhelmed with emotion and said that is okay. You can feel. It can come out. I set an example to a young woman that everybody feels and feelings are to be recognized, acknowledged, accounted.

Sometimes parenting, and indeed living, the RIE way, isn’t natural. It’s natural to want to Make It Better. But just minimizing the moment, stanching the tears, bucking up the fears– that doesn’t make it better. What makes it better is stopping and staying in the moment. What makes it better is naming the feelings and holding them up, letting them be powerful so that we may draw on their power to learn and to grow. What makes it better is being scared, then being comforted, then being changed, then being sent back home with your slightly surly older sister. I hope that J remembers that it’s okay to cry. I hope that he remembers that it’s very okay to be scared. I hope that he remembers my house is at the intersection, with the big rosebushes and that he can come anytime. I hope he remembers that I listened and that there will always be those who listen.