There is only one boy in my house who wants me to kiss the hurts away, and he is the youngest.
I remember a time when my boys would get hurt, and they would come clambering into my room or into my office space asking for a kiss to make something better. I used to do it for the twins all the time, because usually when one would get hurt and see that Mama had kissed away that pain, the other would remember an unrelated hurt, from days ago, that still needed kissing.
Mama’s kisses used to be magic, but that goes away right around the age of 4.
The other day my youngest was trying to get off the couch, and usually he does it the right way, so I didn’t feel the need to spot him. He masters this climb nine times out of ten. I figure that’s pretty good odds. Unfortunately, this happened to be the one time out of ten, and he went rolling off the couch onto the carpeted floor, which we’ve been talking about tearing out and turning into a stained concrete floor. But after the youngest bumped his head and ended up with an impressive rug burn, I think we’ll hold off for a while.
He came to me with his little red mark on the top of his forehead, big fat tears rolling down his chunky cheeks. When I picked him up, he stuck his forehead right against my mouth. I kissed it, because this is our ritual, and who knows how long it will last? For now, he gets hurt, he brings the hurt to me so I can kiss it away. And it works like magic every time. He’ll move away and play again, seeming to have forgotten all about whatever was hurting him in the first place. And I never cease to marvel that he’s been healed just because of a little imagination.
I possessed this magical ability for a time with all of my boys. They used to all come to me, some more than others, because they believed that my kisses were magical. There’s something special about a little boy or a little girl (I don’t even know if they do it, because I’ve never had the experience of raising a little girl) believing fully in the healing properties of a mama’s kiss. Because the thing is, I always want to kiss away their hurts, even though one is nine and another is seven and another is six and two others are four and the last one almost two. I always want to kiss away their hurts, even when it gets as complicated as a little girl breaking their heart. Even when it’s as complicated as someone doing something terrible to them or the loss of a friend or making a bad grade on a test. I want to order their worlds just so, take away all that pressing pain and help them go through life with ease and comfort.
I’ve been thinking about this often lately. I didn’t have an easy childhood. I grew up on the edge of poverty. I knew what it was like to go to bed hungry, and it wasn’t my mother’s fault. She was raising three kids on her own, after my dad left when I was 11. I had to deal with parental divorce, and it broke me. I had to deal with a father who left for good and didn’t even try to keep in touch. And there were places that shredded in me. I don’t ever, ever want my children to feel that kind of pain.
Because I’m so sensitive to causing any kind of pain in my children, sometimes I beat myself up when I lose my temper and yell at my kids. But what it always comes back to is this: a little difficulty is good for kids. How else will they learn resilience if they don’t ever have to face the hard parts of a life? How will they ever figure out that never giving up is the only option in succeeding? If we order their lives just so, if we’re the perfect parents all the time—always patient, always calm, always completely and utterly adoring—how will they learn how to bounce back from the challenges in their lives?
We give them a safe place to explore challenge and perseverance.
The challenge in my own childhood is an extreme example. But I am grateful for it all the same. It has given me an understanding of others like me. It has given me wisdom on how to heal, how to be more human, how to prevent the same mistakes in my own life. It has shown me how far I’ve come.
I can teach my kids all day long about perseverance and what it’s like to overcome something difficult—because we can do hard things—and what it’s like to choose to love someone even though they’re being incredibly difficult and inconvenient, but the only way they’re going to really learn it is by experiencing it themselves.
I’m not saying that we should go out and try to make life difficult for our kids—although they’ll likely, at least for a time, say that’s what our sole mission in life is. That wouldn’t serve them, either. They want parents who are on their side, and as much as we can, we should be. But we can’t simply arrange their lives in order to protect them from every hurt that will come hurtling their way. We can’t beat ourselves up for the bad decisions and mistakes that we make over the years, because it’s all developing character in their lives. They get to see, by our imperfect lives, that they are growing up in an imperfect world, and they will need skills to survive that imperfection.
The other day, my 7-year-old came home with a paper that he had done in class, and it was some of that crazy math that I don’t even know how to do, even though I aced high school calculus and college algebra. The way the questions were worded, however, were confusing. He could not figure out what the question was asking, and neither could I. And I felt indignant for him, because he’d made a bad grade even though he tried really hard to answer them in the way he thought they were supposed to be answered.
I momentarily thought about writing a letter to his teacher, but I didn’t, because what he can learn from accepting that bad grade and knowing that he is worth more than his grades is something far more important than the triumph of acing every worksheet.
So I told him the truth: it wasn’t a big deal, he would do better next time, and the grade didn’t change who he was. He smiled at me so widely I melted into a puddle on the ground.
Sometimes all our children need to know is that they are capable of overcoming.
Good thing childhood gives them plenty of opportunities to absorb that truth. Our magic kiss.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
Photo by This Is Now Photography.
