One of my kids finds it really hard when his stuff gets moved, played with, altered or broken. He is not alone. I see it in others & I have viscerally experienced this myself! The frustration I would feel when as a fourteen year old I would press play & discover that my little brother had borrowed my new CD, when my then toddler picked up & wandered off & lost my new & irreplaceable earrings, or when my oldest child walked out of kitchen with chocolate around his mouth and I discovered that the little piece of chocolate cake that I had saved in the fridge to eat after the kids were asleep was now in his belly!
We recently had to deal with a situation that made us all feel bad. We gave our then 7 year old an iPod last year to mark his 5th year cancer-free. Then he lost it. We wondered whether we had been right to give such a young person, something so valuable and portable and lose-able! We spent many hours looking for it, over the months and decided that it was probably gone for good, so we decided that he could start saving for another one.
A few weeks ago, I went around our house removing the storm windows so that our windows could be painted. In the guest bedroom, I found a stack of old boxes left behind by our previous Au Pair. As I sorted through the garbage and recycling, I found the iPod case for my son’s iPod, still covered in the stickers that he had carefully decorated it with. Initially we decided not to tell our children. We suspected that it was a friend of our last Au Pair who had last used that room, who had probably stolen the iPod. We were concerned about how our children would feel about having Au Pairs in our house since this is something we have been doing since 2008 and I plan to continue to do, so that I can run my business and have the support I need with my children. Also, we love having international people share our home and their lives with us as it enriches our experience of life.
We decided to tell our children, partly because we needed to explain why we were buying said son a new iPod and partly because it was an important life lesson. And the lesson I shared with them is this: I choose to open my home up to others, I choose to love and be vulnerable, I choose to start my own business – I choose to expose myself to the world and interact with it. But, sometimes things will happen – those I love will die or they may hurt & betray me, belongings I have may break or be stolen, but I won’t hide away and protect myself from all the possible joy out there.
Today as I walked around the park with my children I shared with them that:
“It is better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all.”
That is my belief, I said, but you can choose differently.
Tamsin Astor-Jack writes at www.tamsinastor.com
©Tamsin Astor-Jack, Yoga Brained LLC