“Mom,” says my six year-old, “100%.”
That’s our shorthand. It means, Mom, I need your full, undivided attention.
And he looks at me with an innocent fierceness, like it’s a serious legal issue or dire weather warning.
I watch him. He has no agenda. It’s not like he’s saying, Hmm, if I maneuver her through guilt then she will drop what she’s doing and I will learn to dominate her and then every woman I ever encounter.
Instead, I think…how does he know?
How does he get that I’m not 100% at this moment, instead a flag at three quarters –mast? I mean, I never said I was thinking of something else while I was nodding. I never offered up any disclaimers. I was trying to pay attention. Trying. Pretending.
Our kids can detect the forgery. If we’re paying even a sliver of attention to this dynamic, we might notice how a child, exquisitely insightful, can try to wake us from our reverie. Sometimes, it’s messy. Sometimes, it’s an overt acting out in response to our, well, our acting.
But, always, always, it’s an act of grace. A tantrum of grace. That swatting of our arm after we have been especially absent? Grace. I know, I know, not graceful. But, believe it or not, full of hope. Hoping we will get the message. Hoping we can connect. And that arm-swatting thing will stop. Really.
But, we do not usually get the message. And it is not because we do not want to or do not have the intelligence, or even the willingness to receive.
It is partly that we are afraid. Spooked by a culture that has spent hundreds of years telling us to break wills and stamp out exuberance and reign in tyrant tots before we ruin them.
And, it is partly that we do not see our children as our witnesses. We tend to think of them as small innocents who could not possibly be paying as much attention as we are, even in our here-nor-there state of mind. Just because they look innocent does not mean they don’t get it. We don’t really believe that they see through us, or sense our disconnect, or can gauge when we are distracted, derailed, or depressed. We may think we can divide our attention indefinitely, and they will be none the wiser.
We would be so wrong.
That a child of six knows how and attempts to smoke his mother out of her hiding place is nothing short of a peace offering. He may deliver it in his own brand of chaos. (Where would he have learned that?) He is, as all children are, trying, to restore our balance and the equilibrium of our relationship.
But, in our culture of control, we miss it. We miss it mostly because we are not expecting to find it in them. From them. If it feels like chaos, we have learned that it must be stopped. If it seems like mutiny, it must be thwarted. If it looks like trouble, cut it off at the pass. So, we put all of our efforts into defending our position and circling the wagons.
Instead of accepting the offering. Deciphering it. And finding our peace. Even in the chaos. Because of it.
We are not prepared for this sort of ‘reverse teaching’. We are accustomed to feeling fearful, mistrusting and defensive of kids’ behaviors, to perceive a request for our full attention as somehow rude or breathtakingly audacious. Not see it as a gift. A breathtakingly auspicious gift.
We cannot get to the gift because we are stuck in the behavior. In perceived offenses. Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t speak the truth to me, young man. Don’t you go looking into my troubled soul and finding a mirror to hold up. Oh, no you don’t!
Oh yes, he does. I think of it as a grace period. As grace. Period.
That window of time and truth in which I can see it clearly if I care to, and then respond in kind by opening the window further for both of us.
Mom, 100%.
This paves the way for me to say, “I can give you 74% right now or 100% in about thirty minutes.” Without fail, he will wait the half hour and we are both the calmer and wiser for it. And why not? Who wouldn’t choose full presence, even if he had to wait for it? The problem lies not in the waiting, but in the searing pain of never connecting.
