Taking time to seek and grant forgiveness
“I’d forgive a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g,” my 6-year-old said this morning as he looked directly into my eyes from across the kitchen counter. I blinked back my tears and told him it was a wonderfully wise way to live.
“But,” he then said, “some things take longer to forgive than others.”
Ahhhh. So true, I thought.
How’d this too-deep-for-the-early-hour conversation come about, you might be wondering? Well, let me back up to about 15 minutes earlier. With the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur approaching tonight, I had engaged my boys in an impromptu, breakfast-time discussion about forgiveness. First, I commented on what loving brothers they usually are (I’m such a lucky mommy!) and then said, “But sometimes people who are really close hurt each other or hurt each other’s feelings. Can you think of ways you’ve been hurt by your brother?”
“Well,” The Diamond chimed in quickly, “I do remember when [The Buddha] threw a shoe at me and it hit me in the cheek.” The Buddha was more reticent, but I could tell he was thinking.
Then I asked them each to think about ways they might have hurt the other. I helped them along as they took turns naming their offense, apologizing and asking for forgiveness. We also brainstormed ways they might have made the situation better at the time. It was a beautiful series of exchanges.
On the last round of apologies, I asked each boy to identify how he felt when his brother hurt his feelings. My goal was awareness on both sides: for the “offender” to understand the impact he had on his brother, and also to create greater awareness of how we feel when someone says or does something to us that’s not nice. We had some revealing moments with this, too.
After the Buddha’s schoolbus came for him, The Diamond wanted to continue the conversation. He thought for a moment about what he might want my forgiveness for. “For not always listening,” he said. He apologized and asked for my forgiveness. “Absolutely,” I said.
Now, my turn. I told him I was sorry for not always listening to him, either. “Will you forgive me?” I asked. He responded:
“I’d forgive a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. But some things take longer to forgive than others.”
He may have been talking about shoes being thrown at his face a couple of months ago, but I couldn’t help but think about long, long-ago slights. How much am I holding onto? And how long have I been holding on?
I know that when I hold on to pain and resentment, it hurts me more than anyone. I once read, ““Resentment is the poison I take, wishing the other person would die.” Between that sentiment and my son’s, I go into this weekend of Yom Kippur with incredible reminders of the importance of letting go. I am listening to you now, Diamond. I will seek forgiveness. And I will grant it.
Wishing you peace,
Michelle
Down a Short Flight of Stairs, Up a Mountain of Confidence
I stood in the doorway just now as The Buddha, knowing he looked handsome in the picture-day outfit he chose, walked across our front porch toward his waiting school bus. Then tears came to my eyes as I watched him walk down the crazy-tall, uneven stairs … without holding on to anything or anyone.
I didn’t know he could do that.
Every day we see so much anxiety, around homework, around new activities, around just about anything he thinks will be too hard for him. Sure, the miswiring in his brain and body really do make these things more difficult for him than they are for most kids, but we also see that things come so much more easily for him when he believes in his many abilities. For The Buddha, walking down stairs unaided is as much a mental game as a physical one.
This short journey down five steps was a brazen display of confidence that has been a long time coming.
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Coach’s Query
Where in your life would a small confidence boost make a huge difference?
9/11 Fortified Decision to Create New Career Path
Ten years ago tomorrow, on September 10, 2001, I handed in the resignation letter that would end my 12-year journalism career and launch my new path as a life coach.
The next day — yes, that infamous day — it became crystal clear that I’d made the right decision for me. Life was too short. I was too miserable. I had some evolving to do!
By 8 a.m. on September 11, I was at work in my office, two blocks from the White House. As usual, I had turned on the TV and set about the tedious task of creating the list that would tell online news organizations around the country what “Web packages” we were working on that day.
It was the early days of newspaper Web presence, and most of the sites out there weren’t nimble enough to handle the breaking news Web content we’d been providing, so we’d switched to a more predictable schedule pegged to upcoming events — entertainment on Mondays, health on Tuesdays, sports on Wednesdays, etc.
Around 8:45, I heard urgency from voices on TV and looked up to see smoke pouring from the top of the World Trade Center. A co-worker and I were trying to make sense of it — an accident? an explosion inside the building? — when the second plane hit. This was no accident.
Then the Pentagon was hit. Then the Pennsylvania plane went down. Meanwhile, rumors were swirling about a fire at the Capitol, a bomb at the State Department and problems elsewhere in Washington. I couldn’t reach my husband.
Our office’s big boss told us to stay put. This is a news organization, she said, and it’s our duty to cover the news. The newsroom mobilized. Palpable tension and fear, tempered by a sense of purpose.
But it was a Tuesday. That meant that we’d promised our subscribers a sports package for the next day. It was my duty as managing editor, my supervisor said, to keep our product on schedule. The country’s tallest buildings were collapsing, our city was under attack, and I’m pretty sure I could not have possibly cared less about Barry Bonds and the single-season home run record he was threatening to break.
I felt the resentment rise. Tension and fear, intensified by a sense of impotence. It was an all-time career low that only confirmed my decision to leave.
At one time, my career as a news editor had felt purposeful. But the events of September 11 — both the personal and the collective — drove home that my position had come to feel pointless.
In the month that I continued at my job post-resignation, I grieved the loss of the thousands who died on September 11. I grieved the loss of our nation’s sense of security and invulnerability. I grieved the loss of my beloved grandfather, for whom I would name my first child a year later.
And after I left, even though it was my choice to leave, I grieved the loss of an identity that had been mine for a dozen years. For a long time, I remained caught between who I was and who I was becoming. The work world I knew made me so unhappy, but I knew it. The unknown work world awaiting me scared the crap out of me. Sometimes it still does.
Yet, to this day, I thank my uber-challenging boss often for making life so uncomfortable that I finally left a career I had lost passion for long before. My once-new path has opened my life to enlightening experiences, to amazing people, to my beautiful children, to my own heart.
Ten years later, I can say it’s been — and continues to be — a process of evolving and growing, of deepening and broadening, of realigning and reinventing. For all of it, I am profoundly grateful.
Kisses & Punches: Remembering My Brother’s Authenticity
If you’d met my younger brother when he was little, say 5 or 6 or 7, there would have been no mistaking how he felt about you.
As soon as you were introduced, chances are he either would have planted a big, sloppy-wet kiss on your cheek … or stretched his arm out to the side and swung it like a baseball bat, right into your gut. Hard.
No pretense. No question about where you stood with him. I guess you could say he wore his emotions on his sleeve.
Totally authentic.
Steven, who would have been 40 today if he’d lived past 21, always was a kid of extremes. Small but scrappy. A serious risk-taker who also risked a lot for the people and things he cared about.
He loved speed, and his need for it progressed over the years. He lost or broke countless pairs of glasses jumping off the bike ramps he built. His skiing buddies called him “kamikaze” because he loved to ski straight down the hill with nary a single turn. His car no doubt took a beating from all the quick shifting into high gear.
He loved his friends. A poster-size picture of him and his BFFs smiles out into the bedroom that was his. He liked to do stuff to make those guys happy. Sometimes stupid stuff. He did even stupider stuff for girls.
I’m pretty sure he loved me, too. As we grew older, a huge gap in understanding widened between us. We were so different, but we certainly had our touchstone moments over the years. I’ve often said that we were five years, six grades and worlds apart, but we were never closer than the night he and I were home alone when the vet called. I, a teenager at the time, sat him on my lap to break the news. The split second I uttered the words, “Dusty died,” it was like someone had turned on the faucet full blast. He sobbed for a full 15 minutes. I’d had no idea how much he had loved that crazy cat.
I was reminded of all this and more a couple of weeks ago when, at picnic back in my hometown, I went over to say hello to the family who lived two doors down from mine while I was growing up.
Twice that evening, our neighbors brought me to tears with memories of my brother as a little boy. Tales of him playing the neighborhood sentry, stopping cars at random checkpoints. Tales of him tearing up our bucolic streets, first on his bike then in his car. Tales of times he let show the extraordinary sensitivity that lay beneath his angry exterior.
After years of seriously negative behavior, Steven spent the last months before his fatal car accident channeling all that emotional energy into a seriously positive pursuit: training to be an emergency medical technician.
He loved riding with the ambulance crew. I suspect rushing out on urgent calls appealed to his strong desire to help people and gave him the adrenaline rush he so badly craved. The experience changed his whole outlook. After years of barely interacting with our parents, he began excitedly waking them at 1 a.m. to tell them about his shift. A young adult of extremes.
You see, he never really stopped wearing his emotions on his sleeve.
Totally authentic.
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Coach’s Query
In what ways are you totally authentic? In what ways do you want to be?
Hearing aids: Can they help us listen to ourselves?
The Buddha welcomed hearing aids into his life today.
Ever since we got the news a few weeks ago, he’d been surprisingly excited about them … especially for a kid who used to scream and cry whenever we came within 5 feet of him with earplugs for the pool. We give much of the credit to his aid-wearing best pal, whose family we thank profusely for paving the way for us.
I, on the other hand, wore my lack of enthusiasm on my sleeve when we got the news a few weeks ago. One more thing to remember each morning. (Organization is not my strong suit.) One more thing to keep clean. (Please don’t look inside our humidifier!) One more thing to decide whether or not to explain when children stare. (We first danced this dance with eye patches years ago.)
But after a day or two, I got sick of my own whining. After all, this wasn’t even about me. I thought, “Maybe I’m the one who needs hearing aids so I can clearly hear how annoying I sound?”
So I consciously changed my message from, “We just found out The Buddha has to get hearing aids” to “We just found out The Buddha could really benefit from hearing aids.” The change in just a few words completely shifted the energy of the delivery. The new version felt so much lighter, not weighed down by self-pity. It easily became a natural thing to say.
This morning, moments after the audiologist turned The Buddha’s hearing aids on, we asked him what he thought.
“I like them,” he said with a smile.
We asked whether he could hear better. “Yes!” he said. “I can!”
By late in the afternoon, his enthusiasm hadn’t waned. When he got off the bus from school, he was still liking them so much that he told his brother: “You should get hearing aids, too!”
“I don’t need hearing aids,” his brother responded. “I need listening aids.”
And that’s just a whole ‘nother post 
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Coach’s Query
Put your imaginary hearing aids on and really listen to your words. Do you hear a negative message that you’ve been putting out there? How can you change it to make that message feel lighter?
Choosing How to Use My Voice
Last week, I wrote a rant. At the time, I felt like I needed to write it. I was so upset about a world-class hospital’s treatment of my childhood friend in the immediate wake of her double mastectomy that I wanted to “shout” about it.
My grief sought an outlet. My outrage and disbelief and pure confoundedness poured out of my broken heart and onto the keyboard. The hospital became a foil for my frustration over my inability to do much at all as my friend does her damnedest to beat this Stage 4 monster.
And once I gave my anger and sadness and pain a voice, I wondered, did I need to publish it for the world to see? Did I want this rant as part of my permanent record? As part of the energy I was putting out into the world?
The whole time was writing, I kept thinking, “Who or what am I serving with this?” My stomach churned and my neck muscles tightened and I knew all along that this rant really served only my anger and frustration. It kept them alive. Fed them. Helped them grow.
Yes, it momentarily seemed to serve a purpose, but, ultimately, it didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it made me feel worse.
Lesson. Learned.
I can’t undo the the events that led to my friend finding the determination to drag herself out of the hospital just 24 hours after a traumatic surgery. And wishing for the situation to be different than it was … well, I knew that was a sure-fire recipe for sadness and suffering. And for goodness sakes, I sure didn’t want to be someone who contributed to suffering, especially my friend’s. She’s got enough going on.
My friend told me that at some point for her that horrible day in the hospital, “Something suddenly just switched.” In a split second, she went from tears to tenacity.
So, in this moment, I’m making a conscious choice to keep the rant to confines of my computer journal (and soon may choose to delete it altogether). I’m making a conscious choice to focus on the inspiration I find in my friend’s unrelenting resolve to heal. I’m making a conscious choice to put healing, not hurtful, thoughts out into the world.
How do you choose to use your voice?
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Coach’s Query
I think the desire to vent or rant once in a while is pretty normal for those of us who haven’t yet achieved enlightenment. A journal is one valuable place to let it all out. Some people choose to put their feelings on an artist’s canvas, others prefer a primal scream into a pillow.
When you feel like ranting, what conscious choices do you make? Or what choices could you make the next time time you feel like ranting? What outlets do you find helpful?
Unsticking Our Stories
The stories have been stuck in my head.
The story about my dear, dear friend with an aggressive, Stage 4 breast cancer. The one about my friend’s father with a quick-moving form of leukemia. The one about my mother-in-law’s otherwise healthy friend who died after slipping on a short set of tiled stairs and hitting her head. The one about my friend’s brilliant college-age nephew who is in a coma after being struck by a car that turned into his designated bike lane.
Also …. the one about spending an amazing day in a community of mental health professionals and volunteers who work 24/7 to guide survivors through loss and toward healing. The one about what I’m learning about “contentment” in a wonderful meditation class. The one about the exciting new coaching-based program a friend and I are co-creating with unbelievable ease.
In truth, the stories haven’t been completely stuck. They just haven’t been coming out easily through my fingers. Instead, my voice has been my medium of choice.
I’m a talker. I process my world out loud. I make sense of situations by listening carefully as the words tumble out of my mouth. As thoughts fly out, my brain catches them, edits them, brings coherence to them. What has been muddy starts to become clear. What has been painful finds release. And what has been educational and uplifting becomes more deeply rooted.
Though talking is my go-to processing method, I value the clarity that writing has to offer. This space is meaningful to me, and I apologize for my recent absence. Please be on the lookout for more soon!
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Coach’s Query
What do you do with your stories? Do you speak them out loud? Do you write them down? Do you draw them with a paintbrush, sketch them in pencil or mold them from clay? Or do they stay stuck in your head?
Get Thee to a CPR Class
Prompted by The Buddha’s choking incidents and the oh-so-smart idea of a friend, my husband and I went to a Pediatric CPR class this past weekend. It had been a bit over eight years since I was instructed in infant CPR and far, far longer since my last adult CPR training.
I hope we never ever ever ever need to use what we learned last weekend, but in the wake of our (thankfully successful) experience of muddling through the Heimlich a few weeks ago, I’m happy to now know how to do it for real.
Our instructor at Georgetown University Hospital was fantastic: a former Emergency Medical Technician now in med school. She told it like it is, and shared some of her experiences in the field. And even though we were learning peds CPR, she so often told us the comparisons to adult CPR that I feel just as prepared for those situations. (That is, as prepared as anyone could be after a 2-hour course in which the only “person” you attempted to revive was a child-sized mannequin.)
I highly recommend it for anyone with kids, and, the rest of you, please get to a adult CPR class one soon.
Meanwhile, check out these CPR and Choking instructions from the Mayo Clinic.
My Son’s Life in My Hands … and the Hands of Others
Last evening, I had my child’s life in my hands. And today, still, my hands are shaking.
Last evening, for the second time in less than a week, The Buddha was choking. A few moments later, after an inexpert but effective-enough use of the Heimlich maneuver, The Buddha was back in his seat, excited to get back to finishing his fajitas. I, in contrast, was a wreck. Sick to my stomach and flush with the aftermath of an adrenaline rush.
Last evening, after the boys went to bed, I lay my head on my husband’s shoulder and cried. A lot.
“What if?” I sobbed to my husband, who seemed shell-shocked. What if? What if? I could barely say it. What if my Heimlich hadn’t worked? What if I hadn’t been able to force that piece of chicken or yellow pepper or whatever it was out of his airway? Holy shit, honey … he might be dead!
Grief, Interrupted, indeed.
All day today, almost every time I have talked about it or let myself roll the tape in my head, I tear up. I am scared. I am scared it will happen again. And I’m scared shitless that, if it does, I won’t be able to save him again.
One choking incident seemed, well, like something that could possibly happen to a boy known to have weak mouth muscles and some swallowing dysfunction (though never, ever before a choking incident). Two incidents so close together, though, made us wonder, had something recently changed in his anatomical structure? Or had we all just gotten a little too complacent because, according to his feeding specialist, he had met his goals for the moment and actually began a break from therapy in December.
We’re actually not 100% sure that his airway was fully obstructed. It’s tricky for amateurs to assess in a kid like him. In each case, at first he was coughing/gagging, which made us think he might clear the obstruction himself. But then he got quieter and quieter. Last night, when we asked him if he could talk, he clearly and calmly shook his head. He became eerily silent. That’s when I began doing the Heimlich maneuver. Did I need to do it? I honestly don’t know. Do I regret doing it? Definitely not.
Thursday, the evening of the first incident, I did it all wrong. I had a clear image from years before of a friend angling her choking 3-year-old downward and hitting her on the back. So, yep, that’s what I did. Even though I know better. I panicked. Luckily, a friend was there to do it right.
Last night, I was a bit panicky, but remained calm enough to do what I had to do. I learned I could count on me in this particular crisis, but I hated every millisecond of it. It felt like an incredible amount pressure. Even though I brought this sweet, precious boy into the world, in that moment, I didn’t want to be responsible for his well-being. I just wanted him to be OK.
Now I have to count on me — somewhat forgetful me — to watch over The Buddha when he eats. To remember to cut up all his food and to remind him to take small bites ONE. AT. A. TIME. then swallow before taking another bite. Man, I thought we were past all this.
I want The Buddha to be independent. He’s growing up and becoming his own little man in so many ways. I don’t want to watch over every bite — and he’s been letting me know he’s not so thrilled about it, either. But, for at least a while, I must. And so must his amazing father, his wonderful teachers, his attentive babysitters. After all, my child’s life is in our hands.
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Coach’s Query
When have you risen to the occasion, even when you were scared?
Also, I invite you to share your story of being similarly scared.
