My youngest son got hold of scissors the other day.
You just read that and braced for impact, didn’t you?
Well, we all know how this story goes, don’t we? The child finds the scissors and begins a quest to discover the most delightful item he can test their sharp edges on. And when one thing is sliced, the pleasure of how easily the little tools of destruction mangled it leads to another…and another…and another.
Where was I while he was playing with scissors?
In the other room on the couch, listening to my church service online because I’ve been sick. You can see it, can’t you? The child in the dining room, quietly snipping away and instinctively knowing to stay silent as a church mouse while his parents sit unaware only feet away. It’s happened a million times in a million homes, and the same story plays out again and again.
He didn’t cut his hair. He didn’t cut up napkins or pieces of food. Instead, he found my loom where I had a table-runner I started and never finished but intended to come back to. Well, the pretty yarn was too much to resist. And so I no longer have a table-runner to finish.
In the process of discovering how fun scissors were, he also found some photos I intended to hang up. I guess you know where this is going. I no longer have photos to put in frames.
He also found the book I’m reading. Thankfully he only chopped a little of the cover and didn’t destroy the book as a whole. But it still feels like a blow to a person who tries to keep her books all nice and pristine so I can read them again and again.
I discovered it all when I went to make dinner. He’d long since absconded to the bonus room, sans scissors which he left at the scene of the crime, but when I entered the dining room, the mess was everywhere, the evidence of destruction littering the floor like so much detritus.
And so I did what anyone else would do. I started the process of cleaning the bits and pieces of my heart.
Sometimes it feels like as moms we can’t process our emotions because we’re in the thick of managing everything else in our lives. We’re running from morning ’til night with responsibilities and obligations and tasks we need to handle, we push ourselves to be there for our kids when they need the soft landing space and to help them process their big emotions and learn coping skills they’ll need as adults, and we fall into bed at night with tomorrow’s to-do list at the forefront of our minds.
I wonder if we’ve lost our own ability to process our emotions in the midst of handling those of the small humans in our lives. Or perhaps we simply forget that we have permission to cry.
Standing over the bits of photos on the floor and looking at the chopped up yarn, I have to admit, my first instinct was to just brush it aside, clean up, and move on. I had emotions, yes, but I also had things I needed to get done so we could eat dinner!
Maybe it’s because I’ve been sick for weeks on end, but my emotions were too close to the surface, and as I got on my hands and knees to pick up things that belonged to just me, I started to cry. My son destroyed things that were only mine and for my enjoyment, and it hurt that in the midst of the messy room with so many other things he could have chosen to cut up, he picked the things that would hurt me the most.
I know he didn’t do it maliciously. He’s four, the scissors were in his little hands, and he simply gravitated to the easiest and most interesting textures: the shiny, the soft, the cardstock.
You might not be like me, and so this might not really apply to you. But I tend to compartmentalize a lot. I like to put my emotions in a nice, tidy box in my head, shove them on a shelf, and pretend I’ll come back and feel them later. I’m busy, and there are too many things to get done to sit in the feelings anyway.
If you are like me, well, consider this a gentle reminder. You have permission to cry. You have permission to feel the big emotions we tend to talk about our kids having. And you have permission to experience them and let them go when they’re done. It doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the to-do list or not being productive. It’s just taking care of yourself.
