Anyone who has ever taken call at a hospital knows that there are “theme weeks”. Theme weeks are when you get consulted for the same or similar issue over and over again in a short period of time. In the world of neurology, for example, you might have seizure week, where you get multiple calls for patients having seizures. Or there’s stroke week, where even the type of stroke is similar, like multiple patients with speech difficulties or aphasias. Or there’s the week of altered mental status where everyone is confused, sometimes even the doctors who have to carefully match up names and patients as they can all start to sound similar after a while.
Theme weeks can certainly happen outside the hospital as well. We recently had one of these weeks in our house. I’ll call it the theme of exclusion, or just “girl drama”, although not all of this was limited to kids. There was the invitation to the birthday party, but not to the “after party” sleepover you weren’t supposed to know about, but found out about anyway. There was being caught in the middle of a group of three friends where two suddenly don’t get along and try to pull you to opposite sides. There was seeing your younger sibling invited to sleepovers that you have not yet had the opportunity to experience. There was the best friend who sat with you at lunch for years who suddenly decided to switch tables. And there was hearing about the fun neighborhood party and you weren’t included.
Some version of these scenarios are all too common among most moms of girls at some point. And they usually hurt. Watching your kids go through some of these events is heartbreaking for sure. Sometimes you just want to scream at the kids or the parents causing your child so much pain and try to make them understand – how would they feel if it happened to them?! It’s so natural to want to rush in and fix the problem and give your child advice. What I have learned, often the hard way, is that it is not our job to solve anything (unless there’s actual threat of danger, that is). Our job is to help our children identify and name their feelings and be there for them while they process those feelings. They often figure out some great solutions on their own when we give them the space to do so. It’s the kids who are never allowed to feel their feelings where parents always swoop in to fix everything who completely fall apart later in life when they are on their own for the first time. These negative experiences are how they grow. A great analogy I heard from a wonderful mentor of mine is that our children are on an (emotional) roller coaster. We are not supposed to get on the roller coaster with them. We should be waiting at the bottom and cheering them on. With this in mind, what I told my kids these last weeks is to think about how they felt in these situations – hurt, left out, sad, lonely, confused. To remember these awful feelings and try to never be the one to do that to someone else. Be the one who includes others. Hopefully they can learn from their pain and grow as human beings. Of course I want my kids to be happy, but my real job is to make them awesome, to help them build character and to live a more meaningful life. Unfortunately, the path to awesome can sometimes feel like hell.
What themes have you seen in your life lately?
