I had to share it with you, you'd be proud of me. We talked a lot about how, on the one hand, the children need us to be a stable anchor for them and not to be shaken by emotional storms with them, and on the other hand, to be honest. So yesterday he (in fifth grade) came home from school crying and locked himself in his room, saying, "I want to be alone." What about alone now? He needed me.
I went into the movies, what happened to him there that he was crying like that?
But while I was going to go over him with the usual interrogations, I remembered sentences you told me like, 'If we take away the small burdens of life from him, how will he learn to bear the big ones?' And suddenly I could see from the outside that the one who was trying to calm down was me, who was actually busy calming herself.
Normally I would have gone into his room, but I took a breath and gave myself half an hour of respect for his privacy and his coping skills, and actually mine too. You won't believe it, I went back to work on the computer. Do you know what else I realized? If I rushed into him and dubbed him, he would hear the pain in the cracks between the words and would pick up on the fact that I was pretending to be a vocal mother, to hide the appeal.
Wow, amazing. And what happened?
After half an hour, he was the one who called me into the room. He changed into his school shirt and blurted out, "I'm hungry and... they told me I was fat."
I spent a few seconds again mingling with him, poor thing, what he had to go through, I knew it would come, what a bad mother I was for not being careful enough about food, and such... All the reassurances were on the tip of my tongue, what's wrong? You're super handsome, people are jealous of you... Don't pay attention to what they say about you! And you know what else? I also stopped the effort to 'connect' with him and find the words to 'give' him empathy.
I'm touched that you've started to trust your empathetic presence. Don't bother yourself with calculating the right words. Well, I'm anxious to hear what happened.
I looked into his eyes, and I have no idea where the words came from, as naturally as possible: And how do you feel?
He said, what about the body?
I said, yes.
So he said, sometimes fat and sometimes fine. And immediately continued, what did you prepare to eat?
Meatballs with mashed potatoes, I said. Do you want to treat me? He asked. I sat next to him, laughing at myself, at the part of me that automatically goes to dig for a healthy diet and that it is in our hands what fuel we put into our bodies. (Laughs) I remembered your advice not to give advice to those who don't ask for it and not to make an effort to give it to those who don't want to hear it.
medal
I can't help but keep showing off a little. I asked him, do you like it? And he said, great, Mom, you're the meatball champion. When he finished, he said, there's a lot of summer fruit now, I want a melon. I think he was waiting for a wow from me, for choosing fruit for dessert instead of a chocolate delicacy or something like that, but I was in a kind of sanity, equanimity.
עוגן
Wallah, exactly. Suddenly he tells me, I'm stopping the sweet drinks. I decided. It's unnecessary sugar. Wow, Pazit, I feel like jumping on him and kissing him because his weight really worries me. Look how he does it, huh? But I held back and just told him, okay. And now look at this part, he comes to get up from the table, looks at me, Mom, are you feeling okay? And I, yes, why? He laughed, well, never mind, thanks for hosting me.
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