Last sunday we went to a creativity workshop and open day with the girls and they loved the freedom to get really creative with their painting … and not have me worrying about getting paint on the floor. (Remember Monica in Friends? yeah, sometimes I’m like that “I want to control the fun”, keep it tidy. Shaking my head in shame).

On her way back from washing her hands F ran into a wall (in a straight, empty, corridor. I mean, how is that even possible?).

Turns out she thought she had reached the studio, turned left, her shoe flew off and she kicked the concrete wall. Hard. With her big toe. (is it wrong that I had a moment of relief at this point? the fact that she meant to turn means a lot to me)

It’s not broken. We got it checked out in the way that parents of chronically sick kids do: 4 days later. Don’t judge. The last thing we want is another trip to hospital. We do enough of that already. And it’s the last thing our kids want too. But that’s another story.

She rested up for the whole afternoon. Noone could touch it or sit on the same sofa as her, just in case they touched her (not just her toe, we couldn’t come within 1m of her).

Bedtime: the obstacle of skinny jeans

“I’ll help you with your jeans. We’ll be careful when we take them off” I said, thinking that this was a good thing. Oh, how can I still keep on forgetting who I’m talking to?

She processed this and realised straight away that this might hurt. She started crying. Really hard. This lead to one of the most beautiful moments I’ve had with her; the two of us sitting in the bathroom, she on the toilet, me on a stool.

“It’s time to take off your trousers. While you’re sitting, I’ll pull them off” I said.

“No!” she cried. And cried. “I’m scared!”

I tried to calm her down:

“I haven’t done anything yet. Please calm down. You can cry if it hurts but please don’t cry because you think it’s going to hurt.

You don’t have to be afraid. Do you know that you can choose to be afraid or not?”

She said “Yes”. (So she does listen to what I say to her).

“Do you want to be afraid?” I asked. And this is when I saw her at her most beautiful: honest, open and accepting of herself

“Yes, I want to be afraid” she replied.

So I let her. I put my arms around her and let her be afraid.

She cried some more. Then she started talking, laughing.

She let me take the jeans off her uninjured foot. Then she let me take them off her other foot. There was a lot of pausing and checking in. She was still scared, but much less so.

It hurt a little.

I carried her to bed. She slept on her back the whole night, not turning like she normally does. She told me how she was able to do it: “I kept telling myself, don’t turn, don’t turn. And I didn’t”.

This experience taught me a couple of things:

1. Just how amazing she is. I know it, but now I see her even more deeply.
2. We don’t need to make our children happy all the time.

Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to make our kids happy that we forget that they want to feel other emotions too. She wanted to feel scared. When we honour their feelings and their choices, we honour them. We tell them that they matter.