Judith Warner, of the New York Times, has reminded me of something that seems so easy to forget:
"My daughter Emilie, who is 8, cannot get out of her head the story of the Wal-Mart worker who was trampled to death by frenzied shoppers in the early hours of Black Friday...
I’m not sure how Emilie heard about Damour. It might have been at school – where she learns, to my great regret, about events like 9/11 and the Holocaust. Or it might have been at the dinner table, where I fear I may have let my guard down the other night and vented my feelings after I read about his death.
“It’s the end of everything,” is the kind of thing that I just might have said.
I normally try very hard to shield my children from those kinds of feelings. I know I’m given to negativity – some might say, to hyperbole – and I’m aware that such expressions, however annoying to adults, can be toxic for young minds. But these are hyperbolic times. The glow of the election is fading. The economy is tanking. It really feels like the wolves are at the door. And so when a temp worker – the economy’s weakest link – is crushed under the weight of it all, it feels, well, like the epitome of everything. Or did to me.
I should have expressed myself better..."
I'm a whiner. I'm a complainer. I'm a talker. I have a tough time keeping my thoughts to myself, and am remarkably skilled at airing my thoughts to exactly the wrong person.
I know intellectually that it's usually a good idea to think carefully before speaking. Unfortunately, opinions sometimes travel from my heart to my mouth without making a visit to my brain, as I wish they would. Most of the time the result is embarrassment for me, but nothing permanently scarring for which I'd have to wear a mask in public for the next decade. Sometimes the consequences are dire, such as when I open my mouth to the wrong person about the wrong issue and before I know it the horse is not only out of the barn but halfway across the pasture. I'll never forget the snarky comment I made to a coworker about a sleazy-looking girl making her way toward us across the room, only to learn she was his wife. Eek.
Come on -- you saw that one coming, didn't you?
This is an especially unfortunate situation in a home where I am the sole parent. Although I have extremely supportive family and friends, I don't have another adult in the house to whom I can routinely vent about my issues and the kids' issues, so I bottle up my feelings and thoughts and opinions and occasionally let them bubble over in conversations with the kids. If one of the kids is having trouble with a friend or a classmate, I desperately want to be nonjudgmental and circumspect, but frequently lose control and find myself venting to them about their friends.
As appealing as the concept may be, I can't allow my primary role as a parent to evolve into being my kids' best friend. This would interfere with my ability to guide them and discipline them, and I'm the only one in the house who can do those things. It's incumbent on me to hold my opinions of their friends and classmates, write about them, blog about them, complain about them to the checker at the supermarket, but not air them to my Cleo or Robey.
I'm working on it. It's challenging.
Any suggestions?
