Strength and Faltering
If you know me in real life, you know that I get on the yoga mat every morning. It’s a key part of my ADD management and makes me a better human for my wife and child to live with. This morning, as I was twisting myself into a familiar posture with a slight variation, I started to keel left and had to shuffle to get my weight back under me.
My first thought was “Jeez, Jordan, how many times have you held yourself here? You do this every day — you’re strong — that one little change shouldn’t knock you over.” Thankfully, I caught myself before I was too far down the self-flagellation path and realized:
Just because I am strong does not mean I won’t falter.
Just because I will falter, does not mean I should not become strong.
My strength and my breath are what keep the faltering from becoming crashing. And when I do crash, they are what help me rise.
This is the truth of life. It is the truth of parenting, and it is the truth of education. And now, with so many of us finding our children’s educations thrust into our laps (“homeschooling without consent,” as my friend Tamara calls it) it is the truth of the overlay of education on parenting on education.
In parenting, each day we are gifted with the next rung on the challenge ladder. Whether it is the wildly different development stages of our only child, or the fact that child two is absolutely nothing like child one, or wanting to have conversations about race you have no model for, it’s easy to feel out of our comfort zone. Each day is a different variation on the asana, and some days it’s an entirely new pose. And yet, we are not unequipped to handle it. We may wobble, bang an elbow, fall unceremoniously on our asses, but we’ve done this, or something like it before. The muscles are there; we may just have to use them differently.
This doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes we have to look back up at the instructor a few times (Which leg am I supposed to step with? She wants me to put my big toe where?!), and sometimes we have to actually go into class and get the adjustments from someone who can see the angles that we can’t. Even with help, it’s coming back to the mat consistently every day — falling, until we don’t anymore.
Likewise, we stay on the journey with our kids. We ask for help — we start with our friends, and their teachers. If we need to, we pull out the stops: therapist, OT, ed consultant, coach. But every day we get better. We figure out that our kid really needs their alone time, or a lot of social time, or they flop into a tantrum-throwing hot mess every two hours if they don’t eat. And supporting those acts become part of our routine. We get better, stronger. We breathe.
And then we do it all again tomorrow.