Somedays it’s hard being a mom.
I have a girlfriend who called me today rather down. I ask her; “what’s wrong?”. She goes into this story about how she went into town and took her almost three year old girl with her. They took some time to go to the park and play. Her little girl is the shy slow to warm up type, so she just watched for a while. This other little kid was playing in a sand box nearby, and he yelled for her to come over and play. After some time she decided she wanted to and she wanders on over. Right before she got in the sand box too, she asked; “play too?” this kid didn’t even look at her and said “no!” My friend saw that her daughter was really confused and stunned and about to cry. So goes over to get her daughter to go play with something else and distract her before she lost it. The kid in the sand box yells and makes fun of her as she leaves. Mostly the mom is down because she didn’t know what to do in the moment. She’s angry that this kid told her daughter to come play, then when she did, rejected her. Then he even taunts her as they leave. But he’s a kid too, so she stuffed her maternal urge to yell at him for hurting and rejecting her daughter like that. It’s hard to know what to do in those moments as a new parent. you search your head and run it over trying to think why and how it went wrong. But then you just have to let it go. There is no way of understanding it all the time.
While I listened to her story I wanted to tell her it’ll all get better. But then it reminded me of the poem…something about, everything I needed to know in life I learned in kindergarten. It doesn’t really change. As a kid I had people invite me to play, then suddenly change their mind and tell me; “No”, and leave me standing with my jaw open. I’m forty one years old and have found some people who will still do that. Sometimes they will even make fun of you as you leave confused.
I suppose the difference for adults is our sandboxes get bigger and we get more sophisticated about how we tease and hurt others while they walk with their jaws open.
What are you going to do when the kids in the box don’t feel like playing nice?
Somedays it’s hard being a human.
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