It's All in the Repair
Feeling anxious about school? I am. Soooo anxious. I’ve been thinking a lot about how September is a time that engenders a lot of conflict. I often feel like we are taught so little about how to repair after fighting – with one another, with our children – with people who think differently than us or even people who don’t think exactly the same as we do. (Which is to say: everyone). In her brilliant book High Conflict: Why we get trapped and how we get out, Amanda Ripley investigates the devalued conflict-resolution skills of working people. She reminds us that so many jobs require finely honed conflict-resolution skills that all of us can learn from. Ripley continually shows the Nobel peace prize-deserving abilities that bus drivers, retail workers and community organizers have – and how rather than devaluing these jobs, we need to center working class knowledge as so key to understanding the repair (with thanks to my sister Shanta Varma for introducing me to High Conflict). So many thinkers have reflected on how to learn how to repair with one another so that, in the words of bell hooks/James Baldwin: “we are always more than our pain.”
This beautiful world – full of systemically meted out pain and misery. This world also is full - at *all times* - of the possibility of the repair. The repair being undoing these systems and repairing our points of disconnection – one fight at a time.
I say avoid getting into “high conflicts” like it’s easy. It’s so hard to do, so hard for me anyway. I was driving with two kids in the car as they struggled over which migraine-inducing song to play next. We were all taking turns, and it was my turn. After my song played, the algorithm played another song of that genre, a tune I adore, and I silently prayed the kids wouldn’t notice as Tracy Chapman belted out the words “I’m ready... to let the rivers wash over me.” Which I clearly wasn’t. With zero sense of irony and an apparently limitless capacity for cognitive dissonance, when the kids did notice and protested I delayed, saying, "Just wait! I really love this song!" They were outraged, the unfairness! The conniving! The refusal to signal the end of the song! I got mad myself and ended up in a high conflict (defined by no winners/all losers) fight about whether I really was an unfair person or not. Meanwhile, Tracy Chapman continued to implore us all that we were indeed “ready” to let the love flow freely as we all screamed to be heard and seen in the car.
It is in this spirit of the conflict of how to be a good person in this impossible world – one whose peaks I so often fail to climb myself – that I offer these three books aimed at the repair when we have disconnection - good for kids and grownups. I have provided the french translation where it exists and the links to the Ottawa Public Library.
(en français Comment Aidan est devenu un grand-frère)
By Kyle Lukoff, illustrated by Kaylani Juanita
My favourite book on the repair features Aidan, a trans boy. Aidan's mom is pregnant, and Aidan is worried about welcoming this new sibling to their home. The book looks at the history of Aidan’s coming out as trans: starting with “when Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl.” It explains clearly that his name and clothes quickly come to be despised by him as he grows, and that even though “it was hard to tell his parents, it was even harder not to.” His parents “take some time to adjust” and “learn a lot from other families.” These parents learn how to support Aidan, and Aidan settles comfortably into his life – while also at times struggling with transphobia from the outside world. Aidan feels super anxious about the upcoming baby – what name will it like? What clothes? How should they decorate the baby’s room? And Aidan really worries about the baby’s name: “Every baby needs a name. Aidan loved getting to choose his own, but he remembered that it had been hard for his parents to let go of the one they gave him.” He finally expresses these deep-seated anxieties to his parents – “maybe he should have picked different clothes. The blue walls might be too bright. He wished he could ask the baby which name they liked best.” Finally, Aidan can hold it in no longer:
"Do you think the baby will be happy with everything" he whispered. "I don’t want them to feel like I did when I was little. But what if I get everything wrong? What if I don’t know how to be a good big brother."
Mom hugged him tight. "When you were born, we didn’t know you were going to be our son. We made some mistakes. But you helped us fix them. And you taught us how important it is to love someone for exactly who they are. This baby is so lucky to have you, and so are we.”
Maybe everything wouldn’t be perfect for this baby. Maybe he would have to fix mistakes he didn’t even know he was making. And maybe that was ok. Aidan knew how to love someone, and that was the most important part of being a brother.
As I type these lines, I find myself crying all over again. We caregivers make so many mistakes. Sooo many. And they cause hurt and pain and disconnection. And yet, our children are there – right there – to share their wisdom with us about what is going wrong. Isn’t Aidan right, after all? Isn’t the most important part of having a child knowing how to love someone and repairing mistakes as they happen? Isn't life really about learning how to love with more and more skill over the course of our lives?
By bell hooks, illustrated by Shane W. Evans
The incomparable bell hooks’s book Homemade Love does so many things skillfully and well. It centers Black girl magic/Black girl brilliance, it reminds us just how wonderful children are and what joy they bring and it also demonstrates the importance of the repair. This book is bursting with how to care for children with overflowing love: "my mother says I am her sweet sweet, daddy’s honey bun chocolate dewdrop." All of this adoring talk of their girl is part of this family's "homemade love." And yet, there is no “all the time right.” Even though “My mama calls me her sweet sweet. All good good. But not everything I do can be right because there is no all the time right. But all the time any hurt can be healed. All wrongs forgiven. And all the world made peace again.” Which is to say, a repair can do so much good – it can bring two people closer than they were before things went awry. Repairs contribute to peace in individuals, in family systems, and in the world. This beautiful book does a spectacular job of visualizing that "nobody's perfect" and that children are made to love.
One particularly grievous evening, I noticed that a wall in our house had incurred some new holes at random from a screwdriver used in a surprising way. "I'm terrible, I'm horrible" wailed one of my sons. "No, no," I said. Drawing deep on wells of love and with the memory of my own mistakes in mind - I channeled bell hooks and Dr. Becky and said "you are a good kid. A great kid. A good kid having a hard time."
(en français Oh, hé, ma tête!)
By Shinsuke Yoshitake
Ostensibly about getting in the bath, Still Stuck (by the author and illustrator of my favourite book about anxiety, There Must Be More Than That) delivers a meditation on what it means to be stuck, and how these in-between places are a great curiosity: neither here nor there, not having left or arrived. Ostensibly, “It all started when Mom said it was time for a bath. She wanted to help me get ready, but I told her I could do it all by myself.” This boy “tried and tried to get my shirt off. But I was stuck.” A series of philosophical questions arise: what if he’s stuck forever? Does he even need to get unstuck? It can’t be that bad, although being thirsty might be tough. But there’s probably others who are stuck, and “I bet we would have fun together.”
As we are poised, not quite in summer but not yet in fall, in-between school and play, warm and cool, too much time to fill and rush rush all the time, I hope these books help you on your way.
Like all parents, like all people, all I want for my children is to be happy 100% of the time. And yet, as a conversation between Arthur Brooks and Dr. Becky Kennedy reminds us, happiness-as-destination is a trap. According to Brooks, the three main ingredients of happiness are
"enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need to have kind of a balanced diet that can lead us to getting happier without trying to be perfectly happy. And by the way all three of those things have unhappiness and discomfort embedded in them. Which is one of the great ironies of happiness is you can’t get happier without also being unhappy a good deal at the time.”
I find this so relieving – that means when our children struggle, when we inevitably fail them, when they feel lonely and different and uncomfortable, there can be growth and meaning in this sedimented pile. Rather than hard times condemning our kids to a life of unhappiness, it is instead their human condition. And when things go wrong, it can bring the growth, discomfort, and the wisdom of the repair.
I say all this, and yet I have been and so often remain stuck. Early on I learned about growth mindset and the power of yet, and said this until I was blue in the face. I was stuck on it – saying it at the most inopportune times. Probably the true absurdity hit when one of my sons said – "now I’ll never be able to go back to [that unreachable time and forever gone place]". And I said that’s the power of yet – you can’t go back yet. (Did I think time travel was around the corner?) And he said sweetly, accurately, and with great wisdom: "mom, that’s literally not helpful at all."
Until Soon,
Shoshana