What It Feels Like for a Tomboy

I took my son to a new climbing gym this past week.  Over the years, I've climbed with him a few times, but in the past 6 or 8 months, he's really gotten into it and it seems like it's a sport that is sticking.  At the different places we've been in the past, there are various 'rules' about who gets to belay and what is required.  About half the time somebody who wants to belay can get a demonstration from an instructor and take a 'test' immediately after and then belay that day.  The other half of the time, you have to already know and pass a test without demonstration.  The main thing about being a belay is to tie the appropriate knot to keep your climber safe from falling.

To set up the story further - I suck at mechanical stuff.  Tying a knot, though ridiculously apparent for some people, is not at all apparent for me.

You might see where this is going; I wrongly assumed that this would be one of the more 'lax' gyms. Here I am... getting ready to take my belay test, with my impatient almost 14 year old son standing there, probably not exactly thrilled to be with his mom anyway.  And the gym manager is standing there too.  Then, the manager calls over two trainees - both male.  They are all standing around staring at me waiting for me to tie a knot.  And I don't remember how.  And oh, did I mention? I have this weird harness thing strapped around my thighs and groin.  It's getting more humiliating by the second.

I feel myself starting to get flushed, upset. I say, "Guys, give me some space.  I can't remember with everyone standing around staring at me."  So they walk away, leaving me in a mental fight with a rope for about ten minutes.  Feeling embarrassed, frustrated with myself, overwhelmed.   Yet, I know when to give up.  So, I do.  I return the equipment to the guys.  And I say, "I totally get that safety is first, but you have no idea how overwhelming it is as a woman trying to do something that I'm not good at with four dudes, who know what they're doing, staring at me.  It was just too much."  And I started to cry.   Not sob, but tear up.  And they were so nice about it - "You're right - we could have been more sensitive to that. "

And for many people this might have been a totally embarrassing moment.  But for me it was total progress.  I felt so good about it.

I don't know what it's like to be a boy/man, but I do know what it's like to be a tomboy.  I know that I was raised to be tough.  To be valued for being tough.  To bait my own hook, to run the fastest mile and do the most sit ups, to brush off any hurt as 'no big deal.'  To swallow my own fears and feelings to take care of my baby sister, to successfully fight off a potential child molester and not tell anyone, to not make anything a big deal, to not inconvenience anyone.

Many choices and circumstances in my life since I was a kid reinforced this thing of me not feeling my own feelings.  Or moving really quickly through my feelings.  It's some combination between my innate personality, the way my significant relationships reinforced these qualities, and it's a muscle that's fully developed in my vocation.  My work, whether in hospice or private practice refines this because a great skill in my work is to totally imagine myself in someone else's shoes - it's not so much how I would feel about my client's life, but imagining how he/she feels about their own life and beginning our work from that place.  And in hospice, I even prided myself on not really crying - I'd let myself get teared up, but I was incredibly cognizant that 'this was not about my feelings.'

Some of my girlfriends, are what I could call 'princess girls'.  I'm guessing that from childhood they have been valued as the precious people they are, and doted on.  And when they said, "I don't like it" or "That won't work for me", they learned that people will listen and change to accommodate.

Earlier in my life, I think I might have been hard on princess girls.  Kind of like, "can't they just power through it?" Or "must be nice to have someone clean your car off when it snows."  But truthfully, I guess I was a little jealous.  It is a sad thing to have to be strong all the time.  To not feel that it is ok to ask for help and when you ask for help not expect to receive it.

When my son and I drove home after the climbing gym (he still climbed with an auto-belay and he and I both bouldered too), I told him about talking to the guys at the gym about my experience.

My son said, "Mom, you felt micro-aggressed."  He's kind of judge-y about that, being a sort of emotional libertarian and almost 14 years old and knowing everything.

I said, "No."  And I paused for a long time because I tried to think how I really felt.  It was both about being female and about being specifically me and the way I have walked through this world.  "I just wanted to tell them how I felt.  I don't want to pretend like things don't hurt me anymore.  Pretending that has actually started to hurt me more.  Maybe guys feel like that all the time.  If that's true, that's not right."

I guess there is a good side and a down side to possessing either quality.  Someone who holds or hides their feelings, suffers - sometimes you get separated from your own feelings and don't realize you have any anyway, sometimes your expectations of others are so low that you don't know a good relationship from a bad one, sometimes you just feel silenced.  But the other extreme is isolating as well.  If you always expect others to accommodate you, do you really know what it's like to be in a relationship?  Perhaps it's hard to take pride in yourself because you don't develop a healthy amount of toughness and stamina.

Isn't it funny that you can live with yourself your whole life and not know things about yourself?  I actually didn't even know that I held my feelings inside or didn't ask much of others until the past 5 to 7 years.  As I've been starting to share this with friends, they say, "that's so weird!  You are a therapist!"  or "I would never think that about you."  But I know it's very important, because when I talk about it, it makes me feel really sad and at least half the time, I start to cry.  I actually grieve for the time I've spent not sharing or always putting my feelings on the back burner.

One great thing about my job though, is that it helps me understand that in whatever places in my life that are painful or where I am growing and changing, many other people share some of the same struggles.  And I think that's why I write about it - maybe you are a caregiver, a tomboy, a tough guy.  Maybe you got the message to suck it up or that your feelings were not as important was someone else's feelings.

Here is a challenge from me to you - try something different.  Be willing to be a little embarrassed.  Be willing to look not exactly tough.  What you will find is that it feels really good to feel that other people care and want to listen or help or even put your feelings first.  I'm finding that just speaking up makes me feel different, a little better somehow...not exactly like a princess, but maybe something a little like that.

1) You Are Doing a Good Job as a Parent 2) And, How to Talk with Your Kids about Sad Stuff

Driving my kids to and from various camps in rural Missouri the past couple of weeks, I've been grateful for two advances in technology - Google Maps and deodorant.  I think about both of those things frequently on these camp drives, and it brings me a sense of peace.

One thing I'm not grateful for is the proliferation of advice on parenting that just seems to snowball in the years since I've been writing this blog.  With every parenting question, you can find 50 different articles with nuances of advice and so much of it just makes parents more afraid, walking on eggshells, insecure that they have totally f****ed up their child/ren already.  Today, I am writing with anti-advice 'thoughts' (for lack of a better word) and I'm hopeful that if you follow my blog, you will forgive me as I am being kind of hypocritical because I just complained about parenting advice online.  Oh well.

The reason I'm thinking of it more intently right now, is that personally, I've been confronted with a few sad, worrisome, and even tragic situations in my community in the past couple of weeks - children and adults I know who are directly dealing with death, disease, grief and violence.  I've been asked by several parents - "how do I/we talk to our kids about this?"

Here is what I've come to believe about 'saying it right' to our children:

1) If you are worried about saying it right, you are probably not going to say anything to your kids that is damaging.  You are already consciously, intentionally putting the emotional needs of your child/ren as a high priority.  Please don't be so anxious about yourself.  You are a loving parent and you're going to do a good job.  No matter what 'advice' I give after this...(you might ignore the rest, in fact)...this is what I want you to know - if you are worried about doing the right thing and consciously trying to do well by your kids during a crisis, you are a good parent.

2) Kids do not understand the broad implications of words like Cancer or Divorce or Hospital.  They don't have the range of life experience to instantly know that Divorce can mean living with new people like stepparents and stepsiblings and divided Christmas holidays.  They don't know that Cancer can mean dad getting treatments that make him nauseated or lose his hair or that he might not be able to coach baseball.  They don't have the thunderous realization that any change means months of uncertainty and change of routine.  They don't know what it means to have to make a 'new normal.' This general understanding creates great fear in adults, but our kids can be more in the moment (the way we know we are supposed to be, if we listen to our yoga teacher).

It's ok to answer questions that we know the answers to and it's also ok to say "I don't know yet."  Or "when I know the answer, I will tell you" or "I am not ready to talk about that yet."

3)  Kids will remember feelings we convey more than exact words.  When my ex and I first separated, my youngest was in first grade.  The very night she learned of it, she cried at the dinner table and asked me, "Are you and Dad going to get divorced?"  "I don't know," I answered. "But I do know that no matter what happens, we are going to be ok."  When I think about my lowest, most frightened moments, what I've longed for is someone to tell me "it's all going to be ok."   I try to honestly convey that tension to my kids - "hey - I don't know all the answers, but I do know that hard times enter all our lives and hard times also pass."

4)  It's ok to show your sad and scared and angry feelings to your kids, but don't lay them on your kids to fix.   You can say, "I am sad today.  I'm so glad I have grandma to talk to."  Or, "I am worried today, but I know tomorrow will be a better day."  You can cry in front of your kids,

5)  You can make mistakes and then give your kids the great gift of modeling to them that you own up to it.   All you have to say is, "I've been thinking about it and I don't think I said, x, y, or z in the way I wanted to."  Or, "I just want to check in with you about when we talked about X - I wondered if I wasn't a good listener. I am sorry."

Our culture seems to have idealized childhood somehow - to be imparting to us parents that we are supposed to keep our kids in an idealized bubble of childhood that is all and always baseball and apple pie and playdates where everyone gets along.  Yet, we are doomed to fail if this is the unconscious standard we hold ourselves to.  Even if bad things don't 'happen' from the outside, our kids deal with inside struggles too - ADHD, anxiety, not making a team, being left out.

In my work, I ponder with people about 'why do bad things happen?'  I notice, in particular this can be a disheartening question for people who believe in a loving God - how and why could a loving God allow bad things to happen?

I believe in God (as I've said, I don't care if people call God God or Nature or Love or Energy...or whatever...to me, it's not important).  I know and believe there is a great, loving Mystery that is way beyond my human understanding.  One thing I can understand about that Mystery is what it is to be a loving parent.  To me, a Loving Parent embodies some part of that Mystery.

In one way, as loving parents, we wish we could prevent our children from ever having to know or feel any pain in life - anything bad or scary or cruel.  But, then we would protect our children from Life itself.  It would be no good.  We would control our children and they would not ever be truly free; they would never truly live.

We are parents and we can't protect our children from everything.  We shouldn't.  We can be there - imperfectly.  Not saying it 'right', but doing it right... because we do what we do with love.