My mother and I are energized by different goddesses. If you want to know how to cook something, how to arrange flowers, how to put together a room, you go to my mother. If you want to rearrange the landscape of your inner world, to discern meaning from a life circumstance, or to learn how to simplify your life, you come to me.

It wasn’t always so clear. As a child, what my mother couldn’t understand, she couldn’t celebrate. When she said to me, “You’re such a dreamer,” it sounded like displeasure. I could have handled it better had she known to say, then, “I don’t understand how you can enjoy playing in the woods by yourself, or sitting by the waterfall. I need to be doing something, accomplishing something.” Maybe I could have sorted out our differences then, without thinking I was inadequate or bad.

Parents are gods. Little ones take in their parents’ judgments like a plant takes in water. There is no resistance, no discrimination, no understanding that their parents may be troubled, or tired, or immature, or just plain wrong.

It’s all in how it’s said. “I’m mad at you. I don’t like it when you don’t listen to me” is different from “You’re bad.” Now, my mother never said I was bad, but the way she told me I was a dreamer made me think I was bad. Mother and I have talked and resolved all this. She’s great that way. She always says that it is hard for young parents to see things from the child’s point of view.

I just know, and I want to make it evident, how a child takes in judgment. I was always ashamed I was a dreamer, different, not sophisticated in worldly matters. I thought I was a disappointment, a problem. I grew to hide that part of me. I buried it alive. Miraculously, it grew below the surface and saved itself for me until I was ready to claim it again in later years.

Surprisingly, as I grew to love that part of me, my mother grew to love that part of me as well. Now she says, “I don’t know where you came from, Van, but I love to think of you wandering around in your imagination. I wish I could see things the way you see them.” 

That’s what parents do, you know. They send their child on a journey by the things they say, by the judgments they make, most of the time, unknowingly. The child absorbs these judgments as if they are truth. It takes a lifetime to discern, to reclaim as special those parts of us.

Let’s face it. All children are sensitive. All children want to hear they are worthy of our love, even when they are not behaving as we’d like. It takes a wise parent to tell a child what behavior is expected without telling him what’s wrong with him. And if she still doesn’t listen or conform to what we need from her? Then tell him you are mad he cannot listen, not that he is “bad.”

My three-year-old grandson accidentally broke a pane in my french door. I told him I was angry the glass was broken, that I wish he could have been more careful. He cried the moment the glass shattered, watched my face. I freely expressed myself, but I consciously kept my focus on the broken glass and on my frustration, not on him.

The next day we were playing, as we are wont to do, outside in the grass. In the middle of our imaginative game, he stopped dead center and looked at me, his grin covering the entire lower portion of his face. “Are you still mad at me?” he teased. “I’m still mad about the broken glass, Archer, but I’m not mad at you.” I knew his intention had not been to break the glass.

I’m sure I used “you statements” with my own children, about something, though I don’t think I ever told them they were “bad.”  I’m glad I get a second chance with grandchildren, to be more curious about them than judgmental, to try to discern the god or goddess fueling them into little persons. Life is good. It’s never too late to reinvent ourselves.