This whole afternoon, since getting home from school, he’s been quiet and withdrawn, and I know him well enough to know that there is something weighing heavily on his 8-year-old heart.
So even though I should be working and he’s caught me in the middle of a story, I set my laptop on the coffee table and turn my full attention to him.
“What’s bothering you, baby?” I say.
Sometimes he talks and sometimes he doesn’t, so I’m not entirely prepared for when he says, “Some kids were mean to me at school today.”
And the first thing I want to know is who, because being mean to my boy is not tolerated in my mama heart.
It takes great effort to ask the question that won’t answer this one.
“Oh, yeah?” I say. “What happened?”
He was playing on the playground today, he says, and he asked his friends if they might want to play a Power Buddies game he’d made up.
Power Buddies are characters my boy has been developing for a year now, superheroes with elemental super powers. He has created a whole new world where they exist and loves to share that imaginary world with his friends. Often, they play along willingly.
“They said Power Buddies were stupid,” he says, and his voice breaks clear down the middle. “They said I would never write their stories and publish them in a book. And even if I did, no one would read them.”
He’s crying hard now because of this hurt. Blood starts roaring in my ears.
Because I have been here before, too.
But I don’t try to fix it. I don’t try to make him feel better. I just fold my boy in my arms and let him cry at this hurt from friends he thought loved him the way he loves them.
There will be time for what comes next.
///
My second year of college I signed up for an introductory creative writing class.
The first day of class I knew I wouldn’t like my professor. He was arrogant and opinionated and rigid in his beliefs about the way things should be done.
The first poem I turned in was a religious one about how dark and light can coexist. It wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t bad enough to merit the big red C he marked on it. He’d scrawled a piece of explanation across the back page. “Leave religion out of class,” it said.
So I did. And yet every poem I turned in after that he marked “melodramatic” or “flowery” or “fluff,” no matter how happy or dark or serious I got.
He used my short stories as material to rip apart in class, in front of the 25 others students.
He was a bully through and through, set on discounting me at every turn. But I didn’t drop the class, because I was not a quitter.
I stuck around and kept trying, kept getting better, but he never could bring himself to acknowledge that I was the hardest worker in the class.
When he handed back my last short story of the semester, it was with the words, “You will never be published. Look for something else to do. Your writing is not good enough.”
The words dropped down deep and sat there like permanent stones.
///
If we’re not careful, the words that others speak so carelessly can become more than just words. They can become lies that we believe.
I let those words of my first creative writing professor derail me for a while. I let them tell me what I could and could not do. I let them still my pen, because, of course, he was right.
What was the point?
For six years, every time I tried to pick up a pen, his voice came whispering from that dark wound in my heart.
No one cares about this story, he said.
These characters are boring, he said.
You will never, he said.
And then, one day, I decided to test that lie. I decided to open my notebook. I decided to write.
The thing about those critical voices is that when we test them and find them as untrue as they actually are, they then have the potential to launch us into greater determination and effort.
I let the words wreck me for a time. I gave up, but my giving up didn’t make me feel any better. I knew what I was made to do, and letting someone else determine whether or not I did it left me hollow and shaky on the inside.
So I chose to write—not to prove him wrong but to prove to myself that I could do it when someone said I couldn’t.
Sometimes those voices aren’t curses at all. Sometimes they are the greatest blessings of all.
Because in overcoming them, we learn just how resilient we are.
///
Two years ago I sat in the lobby of a hospital with my husband for a meeting with the pastor of a large church where my husband was spending a few months as the interim worship pastor.
The pastor had called a meeting to tell us that if we were to move forward, if my husband was to get the worship pastor job, I would have to stop leading worship with him.
My voice just wasn’t good enough for the size church he led, he said.
I was playing in the big leagues now, and I didn’t have what it takes, he said.
There would be no husband-and-wife music ministry at his church, he said.
I sat and listened to his words, and I would not let the crumbling inside make me cry. I didn’t say a single word about his thoughts, just thanked him for his time and walked back to the car with my husband when the torturous time had finished.
I spent a whole year reeling. My husband and I found somewhere else to serve, where people made it their mission to seek us out after the service ended and tell us how much they enjoyed our voices together. They couldn’t see it from where they sat, but every single time I got up to the microphone to sing—every single time—I heard that pastor’s voice.
Just not good enough, he said.
I believed him. I believed him even though my husband and I had been in a band for a decade and had three full-length albums under an independent record label.
What if all of it was bad, just because of me? I couldn’t bear the thought.
So I stopped writing music. I stopped singing. I stopped offering our worship leading services to the people with whom I came in contact, because they wouldn’t want us anyway.
And then, months later, I stood up, and there was a big, gaping hole where the music had been.
So I started crawling back to it, writing a song here and there. I started singing in the hallways of our home so my kids would smile at my silly lyrics that they hadn’t heard in too long.
I started to call that voice a lie.
///
Sometimes those words can hit us so hard we don’t think we’ll ever get back up. Sometimes it takes us a really long time to get back up. Six months. A year.
Six years.
It’s hard to say what makes people use their voices this way. Sometimes they’re jealous. Sometimes they’re just set on their own way and don’t care if getting that way is cruel. Sometimes they just don’t understand the responsibility that comes with their speech-freedom.
It doesn’t matter why, really. What matters more is what we do with their words.
Will we let them define a new, broken us? Or will we let them propel us into a new, better us?
Even though those voices shout loud and hit hard at all our weakest places, we don’t have to bend. We don’t have to break. We don’t have to let the stones inside.
We can let them drive us deeper into the journey of discovering who we are and what we can do, because we know, deep down, why we are here and who we are becoming and what we must do.
We know whether or not those voices and their words are true, and it doesn’t matter if they feel true in this moment right here, right now. It only matters that we call them FALSE.
Who would I be without writing? Who would I be without music? Fulfilled? Satisfied? Happy?
No.
Then I must keep on. No matter how many voices gather against me, no matter what those voices say, no matter how loud they get.
My boy has finished his grieving. I pull back only when several minutes pass without a sniff.
“Do you think your friends are right?” I say.
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think you would be happy if you didn’t write your Power Buddy stories?” I say.
“No,” he says. We look in each other’s eyes. “I want to tell their stories.”
“Then what are you going to do?” I say.
He’s quiet for a minute, and then he says, “I’m going to write their stories. Will you help me, Mama?”
Of course I will. Of course I will help my son prove to himself that he can do something others say he can’t.
Because I want him to know that “they” can’t tell us who we are or what we can or cannot do. “They” are not us. “They” have no idea why we have been put here.
But we do.
So every Wednesday night, during our snuggle time, we have been brainstorming my boy’s Power Buddy series.
We are telling those stories together, he and I.
Even though people said he couldn’t.
Even though people said it was stupid.
Even though people said no one would read them.
We do it anyway. Because we know.
We are doing what we were made to do, and this is wholehearted living.
