Maybe you've had something you really wanted to be good at, only to discover you've done a complete nose-dive instead of the triple twist you were attempting.
Just so this morning.
Espen and I are standing in the kitchen after breakfast. He wants to open a banana like a monkey. I've been thinking alot about how to be as kind as possible to the Earth, given its state of disrepair caused by over-consumption and exploitation. So, I'm a little unenthusiastic about opening a banana right on the heels of a big breakfast.
"Are you going to eat the whole thing?"
Espen nods and grabs for the banana.
"I'm asking this because I don't want to waste food. It hurts mother earth when we waste food because it takes a lot of her energy to grow it."
Espen nods again and starts opening the banana.
He holds it in his hand and studies it for a moment before making it dance across the table.
"Ok, Boo. Why don't you eat it and we'll get going."
He turns it into a bridge and looks at me smiling.
"Oh! A bridge." I say. "Now eat it."
He holds it over the ground.
"No. Espen, just put it on the counter if you don't want it."
He turns away from me and dangles it provocatively over the ground.
"Espen. Don't do it. Stop."
I move towards him and just as I reach him, you guessed it, he opens his hand.
Plop.
The banana lay on the ground in the suspended silence as I felt the anger rising up my body.
"Espen!" I raised my voice and put him on the ground. I took him by the hand and marched him to the back porch.
"If you can't respect mother earth and your own mother by following directions, you need to play outside for awhile." Not super clear logic, I know.
I shut the door, fuming and walked back to the banana. Washed it. Ate it. Breathed. Went back to the back door where Espen was whacking the glass.
"Buddy, I'm sorry I lost my cool, it's just upsetting when you waste food and don't listen."
Espen danced away.
"We're bad people, mommy?"
My guts froze.
"What did you say, Espen?"
"I'm a bad person, mommy."
There was my sweet little boy, without a malicious bone in his body, saying he was a bad person. That was NOT what I was trying to evoke in my little sermons on taking care of the earth.
I felt like puking.
"Oh, Espen. You are a GOOD person! Sometimes we do things that aren't kind, but that doesn't make us bad."
"What do you do, mommy?" he wanted to know.
I was scrambling from the shame of having anything to do with giving him the impression that he was a bad person.
"Well, sometimes mommy says things that she means to be kind, but then she realizes they hurt someone...like you thinking you were bad because you threw the banana down. I'm really sorry I gave you that idea."
"It's ok, mommy!" he said happily and ran off to play some more.
But I can't stop thinking about it. Not because I want to punish myself and wallow in shame, but more because it was an unintentional result of a style of communication that has been going on long enough to make an impression. And I didn't really even see what kind of seed it was planting.
So now, I'm pondering, how do I change my language and behavior to reflect the good kind of person I want to be?
It's difficult to accept that I have unconscious programming that carries this kind of message. You are not a good person. I no doubt picked it up from a variety of places growing up, but I'm not interested in investing energy in figuring out WHERE it came from so much as discovering an ALTERNATIVE to it.
Because if there is one thing I am damn sure of, it's that Espen is a wonderful human being. And despite my failure to embody that belief, I will begin again, with a new intention to uplift, encourage and gently instruct so he can experience what it is to fail within the arms of a loving parent, rather than a condemning one.
Oy Vey.
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