Rules for Listening to People You Love But Don't Agree With

Rules for listening to people you love but don't agree with.

1. Choose to believe what they are telling you - that there is a truth at the root of what they are saying, even if it is not what they think they are saying.

2. Ask for clarification and more information instead of arguing. 'Can you tell me some specific examples of what you're talking about?' 'Can you tell me why a is more important to you than b?'

3. Move the conversation towards consensus by finding out what want or need is underneath their position. They want to feel safe - you also want them to feel safe. If you're both working on ideas of what would help them really be safe instead of attacking their first thoughts about what would make them feel safe, you'll get a lot more of what you want, too.

4. Say it's okay for the two of you to disagree. It really is. Disagreement is not the problem and can be done respectfully. Disrespect is what is not okay.

Scars

Sometimes my kids ask me about my pierced ears.  The dents where I used to wear dangly things, sparkly things, bright things before they were born are interesting, and maybe a little mysterious, and they like to see if they can remember the story I’m going to tell them and if I tell it the same way as I did last time.  It’s not a long or complicated story: I used to wear earrings, but when I got pregnant with my oldest child, my skin became much more sensitive and all my earrings irritated my ears.  So I stopped wearing them.

And that story is true.  But the other true story about them is that those are my scars.  In tribal cultures everywhere people have used scars for thousands of years to mark important transitions in life – from childhood to puberty, from adolescence to adulthood.  When I was 8, two things happened: I was ‘old enough’ to decide to get my ears pierce and my parents separated (and ultimately divorced.)  Partly I pierced my ears because I’d wanted to and it was girly and I got to wear pretty things.  But also those physical wounds, holes in my body, were marks of the wound I had taken to the spirit, the hole in my family and self.  I didn’t know that as a child, consciously.  Looking back I know it beyond doubt.

I had a hard time the years I was 12 and 13, too.  A lot of it had to do with my relationship with my father, although not all of it.  When I was 13 I got another piercing.  This time I did see it as a mark on my body, not just for fun, but at the time it symbolized my triumph over that hard year, over the hard feelings.  Now I think, maybe marking pain with more pain isn’t really triumph, but at 13 I thought it was.

Maybe to become a mother in my 20s, I had to let go of those wounds.  I still carry the scars on my body, but I no longer decorate them, call my own or others’ attention to them, plan how to emphasize them each day.  In my body, or my mind.  Trying to do that irritated me, distracted me from what I needed to do.

It makes me wonder what it would take to let go of other scars I carry in my body and soul.  My chronic but fairly mild asthma might be due to allergies, but I also know my lungs are scarred with grief.  My thighs and hips, breasts and back and belly are scarred with stretch marks from the physical, fast growth of puberty and pregnancy, but I also know my skin is stretched from the emotional and soul growing I did at those times.  The skin on my foot and ankle is still discolored after breaking the ankle two years or more ago, even though I can walk and run and jump on giant trampolines with my kids now.

I can see the scars on the bodies of people I love, too.  Sometimes I know or guess what the scars reveal about their souls; other times I don’t. 

The way we see ourselves, the way we see others reflects into how we see God.  I realized today that I don’t want God to be unwounded.  I don’t want a God who has no scars.  I do want a God who can show me how it is possible to grow beyond my scars.

Trust and Parenthood

I am not a very trusting parent.

In some ways this is true. 

I have never left my children with a babysitter.  I think they have gone somewhere or stayed somewhere without me or my husband or one of their grandparents about 5 or 6 times in the seven years since our oldest was born – and about half of those were during a time I had a broken ankle and couldn’t drive. 

I don’t accept advice from experts – medical or familial – about my children without lots of questions.  I am a skeptic if you are suggesting I do something to fix something about one of my kids.

I know some of this distrust, this possibly excessive self-reliance, comes from my family history.  I’m the child of a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.  Maybe especially because the abuser was a family member, not a stranger, the idea that it’s hard to know who is trustworthy is deep rooted in the family I come from.  I also see a link between my distrust of authority figures and the religious tradition I come from.  In Unitarian Universalism we value the inner voice of conscience and each persons’ search for truth and meaning – more than we value the external voice of any kind of authority or the narrow path to a received Heaven.

In other ways, however, it is not true that I’m a distrustful parent.

I do trust myself.

I do trust my children.

I do trust the Universe.

I trust – but I verify.

I trust myself to be the best mother I can be to these children.  I adapt.  I change, I grow as a mother.  I don’t know how to do everything right.  I don’t have all the resources I want or even sometimes need.  But I do the best I can at the time.  This doesn’t mean I never have regrets or mess up.  I do, all the time.  But I keep trying. 

My oldest child is a highly demanding person.  Somehow, that’s not what I was expecting as a very new mom.  I sort of thought I’d have a calm, quiet baby who’d let me get things done.  I remember this moment in the shower in the first few days of his life when I just said to myself, okay, this is not what you were expecting, that’s okay, this is who he is, get on with it.  And that was that.  I did get on with it.  I enjoyed him as a baby and I enjoy him now.  I trust myself not to get stuck on expectations that are not in line with reality.  I trust myself to keep being able to do that mental shift to deal with what is before me now.  But I check in with myself about it all the time.  Have I got stuck?  Am I adapting?  What do I need to do differently?

I trust my children deeply.  They mostly know when they are ready to do something, and when they aren’t.  They mostly know their bodies and what they need to eat and how much they need to sleep and when they need to play and when they need to be quiet.  Mostly.  There are times they need some help figuring these things out, or when what they need or want isn’t working with what other members of the family need.  My job as a parent is to help them with the negotiations, with resources and ideas about what to do differently.  There are limits to what they know and can figure out because their experience base is limited.  I set limits and boundaries and, because of who my particular children are, do a lot of conflict resolution.  I occasionally suggest getting help with something I think one of them is struggling with in some way.

And I do trust the Universe.  In a sense, that is.  I don’t believe the Universe will magically make everything that ever happens to my kids turn out to be for the best.  I don’t like it that they will experience pain and suffering, I do fear (like all parents) that they could be hurt or killed for no reason in a thousand different ways.  But I do believe that it is possible for them to learn and grow from the bad things that will happen in their lives.  If they choose, these things can be made into meaning.  A humanist at heart, I believe that the human struggle for life and happiness is a thing of beauty and a passion worth participating in.

Trust, but verify.

But awe is present in these events, too

Queen Maya Devi giving birth to the
Prince Siddharta, the future Buddha.
Sculpture from Nepal, in the
Musee Guimet, Paris

“Japan has moved eight feet,” I say.  And, “the Earth moved four inches.”  I do not say, “Thousands of people are dead.  Millions of people’s lives have been completely disrupted and will never be the same in any way.  Your lives, all our lives, will be different than we thought they would be ecologically, economically, forever.”

I do not believe in raising princes, but I cannot figure out how to tell them the truth.

I know about theories of child development.  I know these particular children, my children.  They are four and seven years old.  What they know about Japan – animé, that their uncle lived there for a semester abroad, that Mama visited as a teenager and stayed in a house with a view of Mt. Fuji – is all fantasy and theory.  Not real.  My four year old looks at a slideshow about the disaster with me and chortles with a kind of glee at the destruction.  “No, it isn’t really funny,” I say gently.  “All those houses and cars might have people in them,” I try.  “Well, I want to see the pictures, but not have anyone get hurt,” he says, with the air of someone offering a reasonable compromise.

How can I make something so far away concrete and therefore comprehensible to a four year old?  How can I explain something so vast and incomprehensively complex to the black and white, right versus wrong sensibility of a seven year old?  He needs to believe that good will always defeat evil, because his own mean and aggressive impulses so often seem stronger to him than his ability to reason and his desire to show caring and compassion.

My own and others’ feelings of grief and sadness and fear wash over me this morning like the tsunamis rushed the beaches and towns.  I, too, struggle to grasp the enormity and reality of what has happened far, far away, even though I am long past the concrete stage of human development.  So these waves are (also like the tsunamis) unpredictable and quickly over, leaving tumbled thoughts and empty spaces behind.  I see my friends and colleagues post “thinking of the people in Japan,” and “so grateful my cousin/colleague/friend in Hawaii is safe” on-line. It is tempting to try to fill the empty, chaotic places left by this event in my heart with similarly facile, easy expressions of gratitude for the well-being that I did nothing to deserve.  Or at least, to put on that face in public.  But I suspect that those friends and colleagues might be masking some uneasily submerged anxiety.  Like me, they may be wishing to hold on to the insular, falsely comforting sense that there’s nothing wrong here. 

Instead, I take a deep breath and try for something deeper, something more whole.  I want to be really grateful today that my family has a safe place to stay.  That our car runs.  That there is food in the stores to buy, gas to pump, that we mostly have the money to pay for these things.  That when we are sick or hurt we can go to the doctor or hospital to be cared for, and even have medical insurance to pay for some of the cost.  That when someone dies we have the time and resources to mourn them.  That my children have enough toys to fight over (morning, noon, and night.)  That even our worst fears and secrets are for the most part problems of abundance, rather than scarcity or abundance.

I want to be grateful today that I have so many choices. 

I want to recognize that because I was born and live and parent in this particular place and time, through no fault or virtue of my own, I have one very particular choice: the choice between surrendering to despair or to awe.  When we look at the pictures and hear the numbers and imagine the pain, despair is present.  But awe is present in these events, too.  How can an entire island nation move eight feet?  How can the earth shift on its’ axis four inches?

I want my children to know that there is suffering in the world, so they are ready for suffering when it comes (as it will, one way or another) to them.  But they have to understand it in small ways in their own bodies and minds and spirits before they will be able to understand it on the scale of a catastrophic disaster.  They have to learn to show compassion to themselves and each other and their always imperfect parents before it will make any sense to them to practice compassion on a global scale.

I forgive myself for my smallness and inability to hold awareness of the suffering far away and my own grief and sorrow for more than a few brief moments at a time.  Like my children, I have so much to do.  For now, I let the kids go, to be in their own concrete, righteous world.  I nurse the baby, and let her catch my few tears.  She is young enough to simply let all of this grief, awe, and busyness be.