Reconciling Kindness with Authenticity

I struggle to reconcile kindness with authenticity. So often they seem like opposite ends of the spectrum.

In helping my daughter through friend issues, I feel as if authenticity is at odds with inclusion. Do I teach her to look after herself first, even if this means backing away from a friendship that tends to bring more frustration now than support? But if I also advise her to be as kind as possible, what is she supposed to do when kindness to this person means a type of sacrifice for what feels like authentic friendship for Ava?

It’s one thing to make these kinds of choices for myself, and another thing to watch my child suffer through them. William is quite naturally adept at this. He genuinely doesn’t care if someone wants to be his friend or not. He decides for himself who his friends are (it’s a small number of people) and doesn’t feel obligated to extend friendship to everyone. Part of this might be that he is a boy. Or it could be his introverted personality, where he’s just as happy to be alone as with peers.

Reconciling Kindness with AuthenticityBut Ava is different. She’s extroverted, socially aware of how she fits into any particular group, and she’s in middle school, a place where belonging can be be a blood sport. I love that she feels ready to make certain decisions about her social life and is willing to accept the consequences of these choices. I think my fear enters in when I start worrying about how other people might perceive her if she stands up for herself when it comes to defining her friends.

I’ve lived through these friend choices and felt the pain of being labelled disloyal, cruel and full of myself. Over time, however, the anger fades away, along with the shame, and I’m left with a tighter, more intimate handful of friends whom I can trust. I had to prune away the negative in order to make room for the positive to grow and flourish. And my life is richer for it.

I want this for Ava, but I have to make my way through my own reservations and private anxieties to get there. It’s one thing to endure scorn and derision from others for yourself, and another to help your child through the same thing. When I talked to a friend about this, wondering aloud if Ava should stay quiet and not risk offending this girl or her entire circle of friends, my friend said, “It sounds like a leadership quality to not need a huge group of friends. Just one or two that you can really count on.”

This helped to soothe my fears for Ava. Perhaps kindness and authenticity can be reasonable bedfellows after all, but it comes down to listening to our intuition. When we feel like we’ve had enough, and we aren’t willing to endure a difficult situation a moment longer, then we honour our authentic self by communicating this with as much kindness as possible. Until that point, we watch and we wait, holding our tongue, which is also a form of kindness and generosity.

At the end of the day, it’s critically important to know that we all have choices. We are not stuck in painful situations. We must do what we believe to be right for us, and then learn to live with the consequences of our decisions.

Perfect Peace

Perfect Peace

My relationship with my dad was thorny, messy and difficult. It didn’t start out healthy and then deteriorate, nor did it flounder initially and then improve later. It was simply a brewing storm from the day I was born until the day he died halfway through my twenty-ninth year of life.

He’s been dead for thirteen years now. This May, I went to a friend’s house for a workshop on intuition. At the end of this perspective-shifting day, we did a group meditation where my dad appeared beside me. He handed me a note that read, “I’m sorry.”

IMG_1758Those words did not pass between us when he was alive, at least not in any meaningful way, but to hear them in that meditative setting seemed entirely right. They sewed up a wound that needed attention since I was a very young girl. In that quiet, contemplative place, something special, healing and transformative occurred for me.

I came home from the workshop and allowed myself time to let it settle. Soul work has its own rhythm and schedule. Thirteen years is nothing when it pertains to the soul. When we are ready, healing comes to us, with no amount of cajoling, forcing or urging on our part. I didn’t know it when I walked into that workshop, but I was now in a place to reconcile with my bipolar, alcoholic, lost father. And he was ready to return to me.

In one of his final letters to me, a few years before he died, he said that he would like his tombstone to 11709605_10153167002714613_9150352348049121802_n read Perfect Peace. This request seemed at odds with his turbulent life, but I’ve come to see that my dad never stopped searching for peace. It may have eluded him while he was alive, but a part of me feels at rest when I dream about him finding it at long last through death.

It’s always bothered me that there is no physical marker anywhere of my dad’s life and death. In the last few years, I have come to understand that most of my core character attributes passed to me directly from my dad. It was hard for me to claim these while he was alive, but now, with a daily reminder in the form of my son, I see evidence of my dad’s DNA in me and around me. And I feel so grateful.

The older I get, the less I demand of myself or of others. We are all doing the best that we can, on any given day. I think it would be quite different if I could sit down with my dad today and have a conversation. After my profound experience at the intuition workshop, I wanted to give something back to my father; to show that his time here on earth was valuable and important. It mattered. He mattered.

IMG_1760Because of him, I am who I am, and those same character qualities exist in William. We are a chain of DNA, stretching out into the future, and I wanted to say to dad, “Look at what you have done. I love you, I have no more hard feelings, and I think you would be proud of me, my husband and my kids.”

I ordered him a bench plaque and chose a picturesque spot in our hometown that holds special meaning for both of us. It was a healing experience to visit the bench with Jason and the kids on a beautiful summer day. I cried when I thought about dad, in that beautiful spot, and I experienced the perfect peace he spent his whole life pursuing.

Unicorn Expectations

I’ve had a rough start to my summer. I couldn’t seem to figure out why I was feeling so tightly wound, irritated and falling behind until I had a conversation with a friend about it.

“Like most moms, I get so tired in June and just attempt to limp over the finish line,” I heard myself saying. “As each commitment wraps up, like music lessons or board meetings or school events, I heave a sigh of relief and think, ‘now I’m done and won’t have any more stress for the next two months.'”

As soon as these words left my mouth, I started to laugh. How ridiculous is that? But it was a revelation about my own secretive messed-up thinking – the kind that lurks in the basement of my psyche and trips me up again and again.

unicorn“An expectation is a premeditated resentment.” I love this wise tidbit from the recovery movement. When we establish a set of expectations, especially impossible ones like having a pollyanna summer where everything comes up unicorns and rainbows, we are ensuring defeat before we even get going.

I’d like to think I know this by now. Magical thinking is a hallmark of growing up in an alcoholic home. It was sewn into my DNA along with good manners and a raging inferiority complex. I have trouble shaking this iron-clad belief that some future “there” is easier/better/happier than this present “here”.

I know with certainty that “the grass is greener” is the road to doom. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked, and yet I fall for its seductive charm time and again, like the badass in the leather jacket who catches your eye in spite of your many and reasonable misgivings.

Falling into magical thinking is a child’s response to a set of very adult circumstances. Unicorn expectations are not compatible with a vibrant, healthy, responsible life. When we want everything to be clear-cut and easy, and it’s anything but, we are pissed off and disillusioned before our foot even leaves the starting block.

I”m really grateful for the conversation I had with my friend. It opened my eyes to why I have spent the last two weeks sullen and resentful. Real life doesn’t match up to fairy-tale expectations. It’s better to expect some bumps and roadblocks than to assume it will be smooth sailing because the calendar turns to July.

Disconnected

Is it a hallmark of being human to feel disconnected from time to time? Adrift, from oneself as much as from another, off-kilter and irritated?

I must say that these vague and shadowy elements of human nature tend to piss me off. No matter how close I get to genuinely accepting the many unknowable mysteries of this existence, at my basest level I continue to long for stability. I prefer certainty to doubt, even though the latter opens the spirit and the former tends to close it down.

Perhaps the issue here is specificity. When I’m talking about human frailty and loneliness in the abstract, I understand its value and the lessons it teaches. But when my life is running smoothly, stacking up peaceful and happy days in succession like Lego bricks, I don’t want to be derailed by this ethereal loss and a gnawing discontent.

Especially when there is no damn reason for it, other than my own stupid expectations. I may have abolished my paper to-do list, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still draft one in my brain. To-do lists equal expectation. They generate that rat-on-a-wheel sensation of picking up the pace while not actually getting anywhere. And it feels miserable. It takes my joy and sucks all the air out of it, like those machines that prep meat for the freezer.

disconnected

Life is what we make it. We all have certain obligations to meet, which rev up our stress level, but I tend to forget that my reaction is squarely under my control. I can feel as if I’m failing and behind, or I can celebrate the accomplishments I’ve achieved and let go of the rest for this one day. That choice belongs to me.

I’m lost when I start projecting into the future. What I have is this moment, in the middle of this day. As Victor Hugo put it, “The rest is only the rest, and comes afterward.” Borrowing ahead brings a churning mental and physical stress, with the added kick of removing the pleasure you could have felt today. I am so unbelievably awful at staying in the moment when future deadlines loom in the distance.

I can see now that this is a big practice area for me. The summer is particularly difficult because I long to relax with my kids and simply play, making memories that will sustain me later on. And yet I worry I’m falling behind, not meeting my own expectations, or worst of all, being lazy.

I have no bloody idea how to strike this balance, but I do know that pretending to rest when I’m actually worried about future projects is not a sustainable plan. It brings about this sense of disconnection within myself, extending to those I love, and I’m going to have to find another way to make this work.