Greetings, everyone. It’s been a week — and it’s only Thursday! I successfully got over whatever virus I was harboring that supposedly wasn’t Covid, only to develop searing ear pain and lose pretty much all my hearing in my left ear over the weekend. An urgent care visit (Monday) and an hour-long-drive to an ENT (yesterday) later, I am now recovering from an impacted-earwax-induced ear infection. Although it was not fun to have someone use a small spoon to manually remove bloody gobs of hardened ear wax from my infected ear, I can now hear again and am not in constant pain which is really quite nice.
However, I also seem to have caught another mild cold. Thanks, January!
But wait, there’s more. On Monday, our Volvo, which we have loved and relied on for nine years, drove its last trip. As I was driving my daughter to gymnastics practice, I heard something dragging under the car. I told myself it was a branch, although deep down, readers, I knew it was not a branch. Turns out it was our muffler (muffers, by the way, are hella ugly!), and lots of people in the gymnastics parking lot were very excited to yell at me that part of my car was dragging behind my car.
Because we were told by a trusted mechanic a few months ago that this was likely the last winter we’d be able to drive the car without investing far more in repairs than the car was worth, because I hadn’t yet fixed my little side mirror problem, and because we suddenly had a muffler dragging behind our car, my husband and I decided to take Tuesday off of work to lease a new car. Having a new car is fun! But this was not an expense we were expecting to shoulder this month.
Tl;dr: I am fine, we are all fine (well, except for the Volvo, which the dealer offered us $100 for, LOL, poor lass).
Now I want to hear from you, and I have a specific question for you today. I have no good segue for this, so I’m just going to go for it. I’m wondering: How do your kids treat themselves? Are they gentle and forgiving, or do they berate themselves? How do you handle it when they ARE hard on themselves? Do you have any funny or meaningful anecdotes involving your kids and their self-compassion (or lack thereof) that you’d be willing to share? Truth be told, I am looking for short anecdotes to include in my book chapter on self-compassion. If you share something here that I might be interested in including, I will of course ask permission first. And I anonymize all anecdotes. If you’d prefer to share stories only with me, you can also contact me privately.
My kids are quite different from each other in how they treat themselves. My daughter is, at least outwardly, much harder on herself than my son is. It’s so hard to hear her say something like, “I hate myself,” or “I’m the worst person in the world” — I want to grab her and shout “No you’re not!” …. even I know that’s not the best approach. Instead I try to say something like, “It must be so hard to feel that way. I’m sorry. And I can imagine many people in your situation might feel the same way.” Still, it breaks my heart every time.
What kind of negative self-talk do you hear from your kids? How do you think about and handle it? Please share in the comments!
My 4 year old is generally pretty nice to herself but can be a bit self critical at times. My husband has really pushed hard on the importance of honesty so she will sometimes come up to me and almost whisper, “Mommy, I lied.” And I will say, “About what, baby?” And usually it’s like I lied and said that there wasn’t any pee on the floor (she sometimes waits until that last minute and it can kind of go all over the place), or I lied, I didn’t nap at school really- I was just laying there pretending. I obviously want her to be honest, but I don’t want her to feel super guilty about it because these are quite small lies in the scheme and seemed to be rooted in a desire to please us with her ability to do “the right thing.” I am a people pleaser, but I don’t necessarily want her to be like me in that way!
Oof. That is a lot, Melinda. Hopefully you get a breather now.