Relationships All the Way Down
Why 'Where you are' is also 'Who you are'
My wife is sleeping in the Big bed whilst we navigate the breastfeeding stage with our youngest. So, finding myself homeless, or bedless at least, I’m claiming squatter’s rights in our eight-year-old’s bedroom.
For my son’s part, I think he quite enjoys the nighttime company, and for mine, with his meandering bedtime chat, I enjoy a version of him I wouldn’t normally get to hear.
I guess, as most of us do at bedtime, he reruns the day’s events in his head. Naturally, any fears or concerns he’s been having will come to light in this spontaneous mindful defragmenting.
Last night he wanted to tell me that he didn’t like it when his teacher announces, “Choose your pairs”; Meaning they all need to pick a partner to work with.
From his perspective, nobody ever wants to choose him.
He’s a very emotionally intelligent young man and he explained to me that he felt like it wasn’t that the other kids didn’t like him as such, just that they always preferred to work with someone else.
As a parent, it was hard to know where to take the conversation; do I take pity or give a pep talk?
Maybe dads in particular are looking for the thing to fix. I know as a general rule, I can be prone to jump to the ‘fixing’ part. The problem is the uncomfortable bit, it’s no wonder we want to get some traction as early as possible. But without really spending time intimately getting to know the problem how can we realistically address it? Just like it would be crazy to offer a stranger serious advice after meeting them for all of 5 minutes at a bus stop, it would be foolish to think I knew the ins and outs based on this one snapshot.
So I took pause. I checked in with myself just to see if I was holding my own centre.
Maybe sage advice or solace would come from this place, or maybe it wouldn’t, but at least I could be emotionally in the room with him instead of racing off into my own thoughts and fears. Trying to prise a tiny crack between what was going on for my son, with what was going on through the prism of my projections and entanglements from my own childhood.
My son gave voice to his thoughts again, “I should be homeschooled” he ventured. “Son, we’re not smart enough to home school you”, I responded but I wasn’t fully committed to this take. His closing words were “You have all the knowledge I need”.
Listening to his gently snore as he finally drifted off, I drifted off into my own mindful defragmenting. My own thoughts and fears surfacing… “Am I smart enough to be a dad? What does this small human need so he’s prepared for the unknown and unknowable future ahead?” I asked myself.