It’s been a white-knuckle ride on the family front this week. In the hurly burly of our working days my husband and I have drawn on reservoirs of patience we didn’t know we had to embrace exam season.
We knew anything that went wrong would be our fault, that our stressed out teens would blame us for everything from inexplicably sore throats to wrong shaped fruit but we also knew that our revising off spring needed extra care as they handled the pressure of their days and the future looming ahead of them. Just suck it up, we kept saying to each other.
Me and Mr C trudged back and forth across the kitchen helping out like a couple of supporting characters in the muppets, delivering cups of tea, gathering plates. You all know the drill.
On top of this we encountered a couple of stressful family issues outside the six of us. Emotions were running high through all the bloodlines it seemed, but we weathered the storm and lived to fight another day.
Before I went to sleep each night I questioned whether we’d handled all these situations well, and I feared that if there was a mothering exam to be taken I may have not scored top marks this week. I worry I don’t have enough patience, I keep forgetting things and sometimes the words tumble out of my mouth before they’ve been through the empathy sieve.
On Thursday I spent the morning interviewing an expert in family therapy for the launch of her new book in front of an audience. As we spoke about mums, dads, siblings and children she used a phrase which made me feel a whole lot better. She said that ‘love is not a soft skill”.
We all assume it comes easily, that it can cure everything, everyone can do it, that loving is a simple thing within a family structure. But it isn’t. Looking back on our week with our kids and our immediate family outside the home I realised that she was right: love is not easy. Loving those closest to you throughout your whole lifetime is probably one of the hardest things you can do. It’s not a skill we are born with, you really must work hard at it.
The therapist explained that even when we are adults our parents matter to us enormously, sometimes that goes unrecognised as family relations get complicated. Sustaining the love is a skill, building the love before they become adults is a skill you have to practise and think about. You don’t just do it naturally. I expected the love bit to be the easiest bit of parenting but of course it isn’t, it’s the most difficult bit about being in a family.
A parent in the audience told the therapist she wished she had read her book before her children had reached their teens. “I look back and think I have done it all wrong,” she said. Her voice was shaky and I was struck by how we often look back on our parenting and only see the parts we feel we failed at, we never pat ourselves on the back for the situations we handled well, we don’t talk about them out loud enough, the times we conquered problems with love, of how we worked out what do with the love we had to give. We assume those moments of success don’t warrant marking, but they do, they are the ones that matter most, the ones we should remember more. That’s when we learned how to use our love well.
I agree with so much of this Lorraine. Love is a skill we are not taught and yet love frames so much of our lives that sometimes i think we should be. But i suppose in not being taught how to love, we end up approaching it in our own unique ways. That's why I've always thought it crazy to judge anyone's relationship or parenting or they way we love our parents even.
Beautiful. And we have exam season starting fully next year. So I'm glad to have read this now. Thank you.