My girls are almost 2 and 4. Each day I watch love and anger spill over from one onto the other. One second they are trading hugs and the next they are fighting with such fury it startles me. We talk about forgiveness, we talk about being nice, we talk about keeping our hands to ourselves. We talk 'outwards' to the way we treat others an awful lot.
I was born a very sensitive person. I am sensitive to how I am perceived and how I perceive other people. Look up sensitive in a thesaurus and one would see that it can mean many things. Sensitive can be thoughtful and subtle. It can be insightful, impressionable and perceptive. It can also be awkward, difficult and embarrassing. Sensitivity is vulnerability. I often did my very, very best to hide it. I was so lucky to have a loving family that was quick to encourage me and point out all the things that were beautiful and precious in me early on and I relished in those things. But as is inevitable, I also encountered insults, teasing, and moments of fear and humiliation and at some point I began collecting those encounters like stones. I was sensitive to each and every strike. I learned to hold on to them. I taught myself to assign value to their weight. I was born with a million questions and bright inquisitive eyes, with fair skin and curly auburn hair. Each time I was teased about my skin being the color of dead fish or for ‘kissing up’ in class it felt like the strike of a little shard of granite. I would work against the sharp edges of that granite, rolling it over and over until the shard wore off and the surface wore smooth like a heavy river rock, and then I would deposit its weight in my bag.
At first I deposited freckles and teacher’s pet. I deposited not sitting with the popular girls before dance class or knowing how to style my hair the right way. It wasn’t long until I learned to deposit what I should have said but didn’t or said but shouldn’t. It took no time at all to learn to take hits of rejection in friendships and relationships and wear them down to smooth stones to be easily carried.
At some point, during my teenage years, my bag felt full enough for me to start hurling granite shards of my own. At times I was whipping them with such ferocity and fear, I could almost forget the weight of my own bag. I carried that bag for a long time. I carried it until it was thread bare, worn through my teens and my twenties and it was only in my recent years that it occurred to me to drop the bag. And when I did, the stones shattered like glass upon the concrete floor of understanding, for they had been frail and hollow all along. They were weighted only with the value I had so generously filled them with.
I learned two very important lessons from my time carrying those stones. The first is that I don’t believe they are ever first cast because we are looking to strike at one another’s sensitivities. I believe they are thrown in desperation. We believe that the sting of the strike will distract someone else from our own place of sensitivity, of vulnerability. We all throw stones, some are larger than others. I try not to focus on what is thrown at me anymore, because I understand what the weight of carrying my own feels like.
The second lesson is that we pray and preach and guide our babies to treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated.
We push them to forgive, to love, to be kind, to be gentle….we teach them to be kind to others.
But we forget to remind them over, and over, and over again that they need to be the first recipients of their own kindness. That perhaps they are the most important recipient of their own love and forgiveness.
Love always…always. comes from a place within.
I don't know when the first stone will strike them. I don't know when they will cast their first one. But I pray I can show them the power of forgiveness. I pray they learn how very, very worthy they are of love.
