Since birth, my youngest daughter has been a bit of a nervous Nelly and has always had some bouts of worry/anxiousness. Lately, I’ve been wondering if her anxiousness may be anything I am contributing to without even realizing, or if she was just born this way. I know I do everything to try to be calming and to ease her mind when she is in the storm of worry in her little mind.
It is when I am in those thoughts that I remember…I was also that little girl.
It was the summer before I was to begin first grade and my family had just moved halfway across the country from New Jersey to Wichita, Kansas. I’ll never forget being so nervous that I got sick in a booth at a local restaurant with my mom the day before I was to begin my new school in this new place with new people I’d never met before. Or, riding the bus home on the first day of school, tightly holding my backpack while looking down at my address carefully written in the “This Belongs To” portion of the inside of the bag with tears silently streaming down my face, building up the courage to get up and show the bus driver my address to make sure he knew where to drop me off.
Spoiler alert: He already knew where to take me.
But why did I think that he didn’t?
Flash forward to my youngest daughter a few weeks ago—it was pouring rain outside and we were in the car, needing to get out to go into a store. She was sobbing, paralyzed with fear of the rain. And, even though I had an umbrella to make sure the rain wouldn’t touch her, she cried to me: “I can’t mommy; I can’t. I just can’t.”
It was at that moment that, together, we took hold of that thought and replaced it.
We replaced that lie with Truth: I can do the hard things.
As her big, wet tears soaked my hair, I repeated our truth over and over again, praying it, claiming it, believing it for her: I can do the hard things.
Soon she started murmuring those words too, claiming them as truth in her own little 4 year old life.
My 7-year-old daughter repeated the same words out loud in that backseat, sweetly encouraging her little sister that it was all going to be okay.
This is a lesson that they need.
They need it now, they need it tomorrow and they will need it fifty years from now because this is a lesson I need. I need it now and I need it tomorrow, and I need it for every day that is to come.
I calmly looked into the sweet little tear-filled eyes of my 4-year-old and told her it would all be okay—that we can do the hard things and that, sometimes, being brave means having to face our fears in the face and show them that we are bigger than them.
It was then that she took a deep breath and jumped into my arms for me to carry her under the umbrella into the store. Once in the store, the biggest smile came over her face.
“I did it mommy… I faced my fears! I was BRAVE.”
When we left the store, she didn’t even want the umbrella on the way to the car. I could see how she felt so empowered, knowing that she could do something that was once extremely hard and fearful to her.
I could have cried. My heart swelled with empathetic feelings, flashing back to my first grade self. My 7 year old and I looked at each other and smiled so big knowing that, together, we all got her through that hard thing.
Have you noticed that being a mother often times has us flashing back to our childhood experiences and forcing us to face our own demons/fears? Ironic, huh.
The only thing constant is change, and the only thing we can control is our self. So why do we often get caught in a cycle of internal worry/anxiousness? As mothers, we shield what we can from our children. But I’ve learned that it is also imperative that we teach our children how to manage these feelings when they come, too. Because, as we know, feelings of fear/worry/anxiousness will rear their ugly head more times than we would like.
Our children will be faced with many of the same things we are often faced with as adults:
They will have to forgive when others aren’t sorry.
They will have to make a decision they are afraid to make.
They will have to get up earlier than they want to get up.
They will have to give more than they get in return.
They will have to care more about others than they care about them.
They will have to feel unsure and insecure when playing it safe seems smarter.
They will have to lead when no one else is following.
They will have to invest in themselves even though no one else is.
They will have to try and fail and try again.
They will have to be kind to people who have been cruel to them.
They will have to be accountable for their actions even when it’s hard to admit wrong-doing.
Sometimes in life we need to sit with our feelings in order to overcome them. Taking long, hard looks at ourselves to understand what we are feeling and why isn’t easy, but it’s definitely necessary. These “teaching moments” (as I call them), are imperative to help our children (and even ourselves) to better understand what is really happening to cause their “big feelings” and our “big feelings” as parents in those times, too.
We can do it—We can all do the hard things.
