“NO, NO, NO! You can’t do that,” the man half my age barked at me from behind the reception desk at the doctor's office.
I felt like I was a little girl being scolded. I think that was his intention. My knee-jerk reaction was to apologize obsequiously. After all, I’m supposed to have a psychic ability to understand what is right and appropriate in all situations, and when this psychic ability fails, it’s my fault.
But I’m not a little girl anymore, and I didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m a mom, who walked into the office with her two year old and looked around for any hazards that might tempt tiny, sticky fingers. When I spied several plastic cups of half-drunk water lying on the table next to us, I picked them up and took them to the water cooler. As I poured one into the drain, the receptionist decided to school me, as if I were a four year old.
I didn’t apologize. Instead, I said to him calmly, “I don’t appreciate the way you are talking to me.”
He had the gall to yell at me, “Well, you should have asked first!”
My next thought was, “Well, if you had done your job and kept the waiting area clean, I wouldn’t have had to.”
But I didn’t want to get into an argument with him about the content of his expression. My beef was with his poor, poor approach. Plus, now, there was a new problem. Now, I was really pissed, and when I’m really pissed, I know to keep my mouth shut or I will say something that I regret. Worse, I might just explode.
So I sat down, while the rest of the people in the waiting room tried to ignore the elephant in the room. I was shaken and embarrassed. I was struggling to calm myself down, something I needed to do, in order to entertain my two year old before seeing the doctor.
Conflict is hard enough without having a two-year-old appendage. If Claire weren’t there, I would have walked out of the office or made a phone call to let off some steam.
But life doesn’t offer that kind of generosity to parents of young children.
So I sat there, trying to read a book to my daughter, while barely able to focus.
Thankfully, Claire’s only two, so she zeroed in on the book, instead of my inability to calm myself after a fight. But I couldn’t help but wonder what she would have taken away from my interaction, if she were older.
Someday, it’s going to happen. Despite our best efforts, conflict simply cannot be avoided in life.
I was glad I stood up for myself, but I questioned whether it would have been easier if I had chosen not to engage with that man and just moved on. I would not have, then, had to deal with the man’s obnoxious comment back to me, which rendered me so mad that I couldn’t see straight.
It's important to me to teach Claire how to deal with conflict and how to soothe herself while it's happening and afterwards. These skills will serve her for a lifetime.
To this end, I focus a lot energy teaching Claire to calmly speak her truth.
In reality, I don’t have a good grasp on how to disagree peacefully, as an adult. Modeling what to do when you are struggling to remain in relationship with another person is not a strength of mine.
And, in this situation, I barely entered the fray. There are times when I'm either the instigator of the bad behavior myself, or I return my fair share of volleys to my worthy opponent. I'm not brave enough (yet) to write about those moments!
I don’t think that society helps the situation either, particularly when it comes to women. The cultural pendulum seems to swing between two opposite, equally corrosive extremes. You are either supposed to be the good girl and suck it up. Or adopt an “I’m mad as hell and I just can’t take it anymore” attitude of movies like
Waiting to Exhale. While watching Angela Bassett "exhale" works as a super fun, cinematic conceit, it’s not exactly the exemplar of how to lead a good and moral life.
There has to be a balance between being a complete people-pleasing push-over and resorting to slash and burn tactics. In my experience, both approaches seem to have the uncanny ability of ending up burning you as well -- the former through implosion, the latter through the repercussions of your explosion.
But what do I know? I don’t have any answers. Really, this post is more of a question. What would you have done in my situation? How do we teach our kids to have a “good” fight, every now and then? How do you bounce back for your kids when you’re taken off your center?
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Kristi, Finding Ninee, Bravery
