I kind of hate conflict. With the exception of my anger issues with my kiddos, conflict tends to sideline me in a head-between-my-knees, breathe-into-a-paper-bag kind of way. It’s super-attractive and mature.
Which is why, when it’s over, part of me would opt to skip away with a “tra-la-la” brand of obliviousness. Maybe I would spring to the beach, where I could bury parts of my body in the warm sand. Preferably my head.
I have a child with ADHD and one who’s got a lot of impulsive energy (i.e. occasional irrationality typical to 10-year-old boys) at school.
I know that feeling of seeing the school’s number on my phone and thinking, Please let it be good news.
Of all the vibrancy of being in another culture this week, one of my least favorite is the language barrier. It’s as if I’m constantly stopping myself from asking the questions I want to know of people–from relating.
The late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, in his bestselling When Breath Becomes Air, writes of the two areas of speech in the brain:
Late one night last week, my husband arrived home to tell me we needed to get the car in the shop pronto. I decided to take it in after my dentist’s appointment the next morning (y’know, all the things I love at once: the dentist’s chair, taking an ailing car to the mechanic). As I pulled up to the stoplight, there were indeed some alarm bells going off in my head. You know it’s bad when the engine light is on. But what about when it’s, uh, flashing?
Well. Now I think it’s a little bit like the “blue screen of death”. The engine was shot. And when I say shot, I mean shot. As in, oil pumping out of a broken piston, etc. Even I, with my wee knowledge of mechanical workings, know this is bad.
So that happened.
My most popular post for this blog hands-down has been Shame on You? On Shame-parenting vs. guilt exposure. It seems like all of us can resonate with the gripping force of shame in our lives–and the longing to give our kids something more.
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Missed the earlier posts in this series? Get ’em here.
One of my favorite moments from Christmas break found my daughter and I in my little sunroom, paintbrushes in hand. She was trying out her new easel, and I was leaning against the loveseat, watercoloring. A happy surprise was how much she shared about what was going on at school.
My family, 2017
I gotta tell you guys: Blogging’s a humbling venture. Sometimes it’s like sending a piece of my heart into cyberspace, and just trusting God to do whatever he wants with it. Sometimes it’s less than I hope; sometimes it’s far more. My husband reminds me that instead of numbers, I can look at the hours of worship God is hopefully generating. He’s continued to do more than I imagined even through a tough year.
But really, this is the part where I get to finally thank you, readers. So many of you, I don’t know–and yet you continue to care about these things along with me. Thanks for caring about the relationships that matter most, and for sharing these posts with people you care about. Here were the posts that resonated most with you this year.
Do you ever get tired of being the driver in your home? Y’know–driving the homework. The dishes from their hands to the dishwasher. The manners and respect. The time with God. The self-control in conflicts. The propriety in dating.
I need to admit: I get tired of the lack of my kids’ ownership in the values my husband and I care about–whether it’s peace, or order, or worship, or personal responsibility. And as my kids get older, in some ways, my control diminishes.
The other night, one of my kids was at his finest. It was as if a switch had been flipped. He went from easy-going to stonewalling us, arms crossed, resolutely stubborn. And man, was I getting the stinkeye.
Though his attitude was not without consequences, God was kind to me. I think He reminded me that disproportionate reactions are a lot of times symptoms that something deeper’s being triggered. Thankfully, this tipped my husband and I off to dig and uncover the problem more than just slam down the symptom.
Because when you’re going through a hard time, life can feel a little…naked. So our emotional safety is directly tied to the degree of acceptance we sense from someone.
At some thoughts one stands perplexed, above all at the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or by humble love. Always decide “I will combat it by humble love.” If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humiity is a terrible force; it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing like it.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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