Sitting on my balcony, enjoying the beautiful crisp morning, my meditation was interrupted by the sound of yelling. It was a female voice. I opened my eyes and saw a young boy carrying a garbage bag running ahead of the yelling sound. Around the corner came the source of the shrill, angry voice. I heard another boy crying. The mother — the source of the yelling —wearing high heeled boots, skinny jeans and a blingy jacket, sounded monstrous to me. I could not imagine that the boy could take it without first breaking down and then tuning it out, as an emotional survival mechanism. It wasn’t even the tone or volume of her voice that made my heart beat faster, it was what she said, over and over again to the small child: “Is it too much to ask that I have a good child? Can’t you be a good child?” The mother came around the corner, cigarette hanging from her mouth, turned and roared down at her crying child that he simply was not good enough., but you’re getting a lump of coal.’ My reaction surprised me. I focused not on my disgust for the situation, but on the higher voice in my head gently saying, “You need to be a better mother if you want the experience of a ‘better’ child.” With my ears and intention, from my unseen perch, I beamed this voice down to her but I dare say she was too angry to hear or absorb anything external. They disappeared underneath the carport and I closed my eyes and prayed that the child hear my voice…“You are plenty good enough, you just need your role model to calm down and see it.” Little man, carrying garbage while his mother treated him as such. In the past, I might have yelled down at the mother something like, “Hey ! If you want a better child why don’t you try and be a better mother?! What do you think this is, a stop and swap? Get your act together!” Or worse, I would have run down and gone face to face, toe to toe, without a word, smacked some sense into her. But instead, I felt compassion for her, as she quite obviously doesn’t understand. Lost in her anger at whatever, she literally cannot see beyond her own emotions; the feelings of those around her — which she affects so deeply — do not even register. She cannot see, while lost in her angry selfishness, that her children have no choice but to live in her home, do what she says, listen to her yelling and tolerate her anger. She cannot see that they are probably secretly wondering why other moms don’t act this way, or why they aren’t better children? Doubting themselves, when it’s quiet at night, perhaps wondering what they did wrong. This changes a child’s mind forever, this quiet constant doubting. It’s tragic when we don’t see that it is not our children who are behaving poorly and ‘need to change’, but us. They are from us; discendents of us, extensions of us. They role model everything they see us do. They become exactly what they see in us. Simple as pie. If we think the people around us are ‘bad’, then we need to look in a mirror. Our perception of the external is a perfect projection of the internal. So parents, if you want a ‘better’ child, be a better parent. I will heed my mother’s voice and not interfere, but secretly, I want to gently tell her that her children are not bad. She is not bad; she just feels that way. Perhaps because, like many mothers, she feels like no one ever listens to her… no one cares or sees or hears our distress signals. But people do see. They do hear. And they do care.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 13:51:21 +0000
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