I get impatient with my kids when they can’t get over stuff.
I don’t understand why learning the thirteen colonies and spelling them is frustrating. I’m also not ten. But I still get impatient. Or when they get upset about, sometimes the simplest of things. To me I want to deal with the emotion, given a solution and move on.
Until I heard about the tunnel analogy. I don’t even know where I heard it – some people call it being on a train, some in a tunnel, but it didn’t leave my mind.
Basically, you can’t get out of a tunnel until you go through it. When you’re in the middle, the only way out is the exit. And the same goes for us and our emotions and our kids and theirs.
Sometimes you just have to deal.
We know that as adults. For instance, we don’t expect to get over death immediately – we understand it’s a journey. And sometimes, it’s the same for our kids – with friends or life or changing an agenda. I just forget it. I forget it for myself too. Sometimes I expect myself to have all the answers and yet I forget that maybe I don’t have the answers.
Heck, most of motherhood is a journey in a tunnel. We can’t get out, we have to keep plodding through, and sometimes we don’t know what to do.
Sometimes it is terribly hard.
We want to cry and put our heads down and stop…but you and I don’t.
We’re going through the tunnel. We’re dealing and learning and moving forward.
Sweet mom, allow the tunnel.
Allow the emotion in your own life and in your life of your kids. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but to them, it might be enormous. And for yourself. Don’t be so hard on yourself, seriously. There are place in life where you are just in the tunnel. Where you are learning and trying and you just have to try.
When we give space for them to process, and space for us to process, it is almost like a sigh of relief.
Because it is freedom.
It means that our emotions, their emotions, matter.
Remember the tunnel.
~Rachel
