What My Children Are Learning by Watching
My children are watching how I move through this season. What they see, they learn. I am gentle with what I am teaching them.
There is a quiet audience for everything you do these days. They are small. They live in your house some of the time. They watch you, even when they do not seem to be watching. They are learning — in the deep wordless way children learn — what it looks like to be an adult in difficult conditions.
This is a heavy thought, and it is also a hopeful one. Heavy because it means your behavior is teaching them, every day, whether you mean to or not. Hopeful because the version of you who keeps showing up steadily, kindly, honestly, is teaching them exactly the right thing. The teaching is happening. It is happening through your ordinary days. It is happening through the way you greet them in the morning. It is happening through the way you handle the small frustrations of a Tuesday afternoon. It is happening through the way you say no to certain things — without becoming sharp — and yes to other things without becoming over-large.
You do not have to perform a different self for them. You only have to be the self you are continuing to become. The self who is gentle with yourself. The self who is honest with the people in your life. The self who knows what to spend your energy on and what to release. They will watch this self take shape. They will absorb its movements. They will, when they grow up and need it, have a template for how an adult lives through hard things.
This is your most enduring legacy. Not the words you say to them. The ways they see you living. The years from now, when one of them is in their own hard season, the body memory of what an adult did inside one will surface for them. First the not-knowing. Then the small remembering. Then, slowly, the knowing of what calm looks like, what self-respect looks like, what tending to oneself in a hard time looks like. The knowing will help them.
Today, do one small thing well, in their watching presence or in the privacy of your own room. Both count. Both teach. The teaching is not in the announcement of it. The teaching is in the doing.