I have spent quite a lot of today crying.
The day started well, I was calm with my kids as we prepared for school and all details that entails, the morning ran smoothly and I reached a crafting session in good time and in good spirits. I have been crafting these last few weeks to prepare for a community Christmas event, creating seasonally themed trinkets to sell at a fair.
I do not want to scour through the ins and outs of what happened next but the very brief synopsis is that one member of the group informed me that my crafting ‘standard’ was not high enough, not acceptable enough for sale. There are so many ways in which this could have been received, processed, handled and I can imagine there even could be a time when I might let it roll of my proverbial duck’s back; instead I was utterly crushed.
Somehow, and I genuinely don’t know quite how, I managed to stay an hour and give a vague air of togetherness. I left as soon as was polite (please note still needing to please in some form or other) and came home to cry, a lot.
I have cried so much today that it has not been something that I have been able to hide from my kids, even if I wanted to, so I gave them my story. I told them that I was really sad because the crafts I had been making weren’t ‘good enough’ for this woman and she had told me in a way that felt unkind to me. My son (3) has told me that he will hit this woman next time for being naughty to me (!) and my daughter (6) has suggested more tactful ways she could have framed her message.
But one other thing did happen at supper. Both children decided to cut up their scrambled eggs (why not?) and my daughter started to speak to her little brother and then stopped. She turned to me and said, ‘I almost told him he was doing it wrong’….
A gift, the gift…. my husband always reminds me that there is a gift somewhere in a difficult situation… I have asked my daughter so many times to let her brother learn in his own way, I have explained how she got to experience all her firsts without anyone telling her she was ‘wrong’ and how wonderful it would be for her brother to have that too. And my words haven’t resonated and she has continued, until today, until she saw how crushed I have been by someone telling me I’m doing it wrong.
So thank you to that woman for the gift you have brought to my family; it’s felt hard, but totally worthwhile if it helps us to remember to let us each find our own way.