You can’t let something go if you don’t know you have it.

On fear, anxiety, dreams, and parenting | Castles in the Sky #9

Protecting Baby Bird (Courtesy of Ray Hennessy)

Becoming a father has given me so much perspective. Finding out my wife and I were having a daughter made me begin to think about problems in terms of decades, as lifelong story arcs, rather than daily or monthly concerns. I feel compelled to better understand the world, to be more effective, and to have clearer ideas of right and wrong because someday I will need to teach my daughter about these things. 

One of the biggest questions I have is how do I protect her from pain, and teach her to protect herself when I cannot?  

My daughter is almost seven months old. She has just started making faces and laughing in a way that lets you know that she’s “in on the joke.” Although, childcare is still pretty straightforward in her case. When she cries I can usually find the source after a minute of investigating. So far, she’s only cried from being tired, or being hungry, or getting her nose cleaned, or having a wet diaper. To my knowledge, she has yet to cry from disappointment or shame or loneliness. 

A lot of the “parenting literature” and advice I’ve consumed has been about protecting her physically, but things like disappointment, shame, and loneliness are what I worry about most. I know that negative feelings and experiences are unavoidable, but how do I teach my daughter to recognize and deal with these feelings? 

My friend Simone Silverstein wrote about her kids going away to camp recently. She said:

When a feeling is felt all the way through, it leaves your body as if you’ve gone to the bathroom.

My Mom raised me with a similar idea about the importance of feeling things through. It was how she taught me to deal with negative feelings. Once when I was seven years old at school, I found a small bird on the sidewalk that was injured. It was squawking but couldn’t fly and I didn’t know what to do. It was the end of the day, and before I had a chance to say anything to anyone else, a boy four grades older than me saw it and stomped it to death to gross out some girls his age.

When I got home from school, I was crying uncontrollably. My Mom told me that it was OK to be sad. I should feel it all the way through. But once it had run its course, I needed to let it go. The boy’s name was Aaron. And after I cried a bit more, we wrote, “Aaron killed the bird” on a piece of paper and burned it in the backyard to “let it go.” It’s been a while since I wrote something down to burn it, but I still try to remember that lesson. Feel things all the way and then let them go on. 

In the same week Simone sent out her newsletter, another of my friends, Michael Ashcroft, made a YouTube video called it’s safe to be who I am now. He talks about how, when he was younger, he learned to hide parts of himself to protect himself from bullying and pain. Now as an adult, he is learning to be himself which means discarding these disguises and breaking down the walls he built.

His video reminded me of a dream I had just before my daughter was born. In the dream, my pregnant wife and I were at a banquet. Across from us were a man and his wife. The man was an adult version of Sam, a kid I was in school with for the eight years before high school. Sam was a little older than everyone else in the grade, got straight A’s, excelled at sports, and was popular. He also teased me quite a bit. 

Back in the dream banquet, we made polite small talk, but Sam being there made me anxious and afraid. The conversation got around to our school days, and I confessed that Sam picked on me a lot and seeing him made me nervous. He apologized, then did something that would be weird in real life but made perfect sense in the dream. He made a hand waving motion over my chest like he was drawing something out and said, “why don’t you let all that go?” Then he gently waved his hands toward my wife’s pregnant stomach like he was resting something on her and said, “and save only what’s good for her,” talking about my baby daughter.

The morning after the dream I woke up feeling refreshed, lighter. Something about naming the shame and loneliness of being picked on did a lot to diminish its power. In the emotional landscape of my mind, Sam was still a popular leader who was seemingly good at everything, even though I had not seen him in twenty years. To have him tell me that I needed to let go of some of these feelings and save only what’s good for my daughter was cathartic, and relieving. It felt a lot like it did when I would write negative feelings down and burn them with my Mom in the backyard. 

I am not an expert in mental health, parenting, or dream interpretation. However, the more I learn and the older I get, the more I understand the cleansing power of naming my thoughts and feelings. It seems paradoxical that by diving in and “feeling every feeling,” I would gain insight on how they are inherently transitory, but that has been my experience. The things that stick with me the longest and bother me the most are the things I try to avoid or ignore, when what I really want the most is to just let them go. After all, you can’t let something go if you don’t know you have it. Maybe that’s what I’ll try to teach my daughter.