Gravity and Grace
grav·i·ty (Oxford Dictionary)
2. extreme or alarming importance; seriousness.
"crimes of the utmost gravity"
My father is on the riding mower at 7am—not his usual habit. As I get ready to get in the shower, my mother gives me a look that is equal parts compassion and “uh oh”. It is me; she tells me. I am the reason my father is on the mower early in the morning. He is working off his anger. As I watch him, he becomes almost cartoon-like where you can see the steam surging out of his head. I immediately began to crumble. My pre-therapy assessment: Anger is not good. Making mistakes is not good. Danger…danger, my alert system goes to Def-con 5.
My crime? My 3rd year of college was about to begin, and I was under a deadline to submit my parking permit request form. It required a notary’s signature and it just so happened that my father was a notary. My memories are that I had been asking him to sign it for a couple of days and he just hadn’t had time. I even left it strategically positioned at his place at the kitchen table conveniently with his notary stamp right next to it. Nothing. I boldly took it one step further and embossed the paper with his seal so all he would need to do is sign his name. That, ladies and gentlemen, was the fuse that lit the fire.
I will never know what was in his head at the time. Was he overwhelmed by the pressures of life? Did he feel caged and cornered by responsibilities? Was my action another sign that he wasn’t living up to expectations? Or was he just plain irritated with my impatience? Even if he was still here today, I doubt he’d remember the incident or the reason for his reaction. But to me…it was an enormous crime. I had made my father mad.
Good girls don’t make mistakes. Good girls don’t make people angry. If you want to be safe in this world, you have to be small, unseen, and self-sufficient. These words were never said out loud to me. That were just inherent truths to me given my wiring and the legacy of trauma in my gene pool. What should have been a mutual annoyance turned into primal emotions on both sides. He went into internal rage and I into internal shame and terror.
2 grace (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
b: mercy, pardon
d: disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency
e: a temporary exemption: reprieve
It is 8am on a Wednesday and I have just dropped my child off from school. Instead of getting to the chores of the day, I start working outside. First cleaning the pool, then sweeping a walkway and pulling up weeds. As I am vigorously sweeping, something about it feels familiar and the lawn mower memory emerges. I am not in a rage, but I have been extremely frustrated the last few days. There are things about parenting an ADHD child that have pushed me to my limit. In a life that is already layered with extreme stress and worry, I am resentful about behavior that feels like it is intentionally making things harder. I don’t need harder. I am working off my emotions with the broom just like my father was doing with his lawn mower.
I can’t know what is going on in my child’s mind, but I am sure that nowhere is the thought of intentionally trying to make my life harder. He has his own lens and his own worries. He is struggling to make sense of an orderly world with a disorderly brain. Our brains are out of sync. We are mutually frustrated with each other and that is ok. Annoying, but ok. He is not responsible for my fight or flight. He is not any more responsible for the legacy of trauma that I was, or my father was. He is responsible for his own choices and actions and that is a lesson he is learning. The hard way.
These mirror moments of parenting are “brutiful”, as author Glennon Doyle would say. It is a gut punch to see yourself repeating parental patterns AND it is liberating to see both you and your parents as humans. We are ALL full of contradictions and fears. We are all just trying to figure out our way in life. We make a lot of mistakes, and our job is to learn and clean up after ourselves…not to pass on the pain.
In this mirroring moment where I saw myself as my father, the intensity of my emotional muscle memory changed. As a young adult I did not yet have the tools and resources to see things as they truly were. But now I can see my father riding the lawn mower and I have compassion for him. I can forgive him for not being able to articulate his emotion in other ways. I can have grace that, like me, he is doing the best that he can being a messy human in a messy world. I can understand that it wasn’t my action in itself that set him off, but likely it was tied to a lot of other adult frustrations that had nothing to do with me. I can have my frustration with how it was handled AND I can have so much grace for him.
I can turn towards myself and evaluate my own parenting moments. Where can I have grace towards myself for doing the best that I can? (Maybe sweeping hard was what I needed to do so I didn’t take it out on him). Where can I have grace towards my child? (Maybe he is doing the best he can today). Where do I need to clean up or explain my responses? (Did I pass on my other frustrations to him?) Or where do I need to hold firm. (Where do I need to keep him accountable?) Grace gives me more options.
I can only hope that someday my child, whether he becomes a parent or not, will be able to give me the same loving grace.
