Here we are, sitting around a table, listing our highs and lows of the day.
And the oldest, 7 years old, he doesn’t want to tell us the low, because it’s something that, even now, makes his eyes water, but we coax it out with gentle words and open hearts.
He tells us how he lost the battle with his anger today, how he threw a pencil clear across the room (no one was hit), how he had to sit out 10 minutes of recess for his failure.
He hangs his head, like he’s ashamed of this mistake he made hours ago, and then he says, Sometimes I forget how to handle my anger.
I don’t like to see that hanging head and those watery eyes and this failure he can’t seem to shake, so I remind him we all make mistakes and we all try to be good and we all forget sometimes.
He just shakes his head, like he’s the only one who ever made a mistake as bad as this one.
So I tell him about his uncle, who was sent to the principal’s office in first grade because he refused to sit on the reading rug like his teacher said; and I tell him about his aunt, who was sent to the principal as a kindergartener because she cut her best friend’s hair when she was supposed to be cutting paper; and I tell him about me, the time I left school as a high school senior without signing out because I had a bum knee and athletics was the last class of the day and my coach never took attendance—except for that day I left early.
I tell him about how the principal called my mom and how she was waiting for me when I got home and how I had to make a formal apology for breaking the rules and how I had to spend three days in ISS, In School Suspension.
I tell him I know what it’s like to not do the right thing.
Sometimes, in the heat of those discipline moments, when we’re trying to teach them that no one can ever be perfectly good and that we’re all just learning how to be the best versions of ourselves and that we know what it’s like because we’ve been there, too, we forget that they don’t know our stories like we do.
And if we don’t share those stories, our words are just words.
They get in these situations that seem so trivial to us, but they can feel like the end of the world to them, because he threw a pencil and failed, once more, to get a handle on his anger before acting. We know it’s not the end of the world, not even close, because we’ve been there before. We’ve thrown that pencil in a million different ways.
But they don’t know we’ve been there before and that we made it out alive.
So maybe instead of just focusing on those moments of teaching a better way and reviewing those Laws of Anger and Alternatives to Anger, we give them an opportunity to know and understand and truly believe they’re not alone in their failures.
Because there was that time you called a boy an ugly name, because you were embarrassed and angry and vengeful, and you had to write a note of apology to him and your teacher. And there was that time their uncle yelled something out the window of a bus on the way to a football game, and the band director made him sit out of marching two whole games because of it. And there was that time their great-aunt lined up those onion pieces she’d saved from lunch, all of them shaped like boots, and walked them back and forth across her desk to her own theme song while the teacher was talking, and she was marched down to the principal’s office to make that call home.
Sometimes knowing they came from a long line of people who made mistakes and lived through them helps them better understand that they can live through their own failures, too, that life is not about being perfect but is about still standing tall on the other side of those mistakes.
My boy is quiet for a long time after all this story-telling, and then he smiles and says, Well, at least I didn’t get In School Suspension, and his daddy and I laugh.
Sometimes stories can help us find that brighter side, too.
Rachel is a writer, poet, editor and musician who is raising five (going on six) boys to love books and poetry and music and art and the wild outdoors—all the best bits of life. She shares her fiction and nonfiction writings over at her blog, and, when she’s not buried in a writing journal or a new song or a kid crisis at home, she enjoys reading Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and the poetry of Rilke. Follow her on Twitter @racheltoalson.
