Living It: My Children

My anxiety will not shape their future — my trust will.

If you want to know whether I really believe any of this, watch me with my kids. That is where the philosophy stops being words and becomes a test I either pass or fail, day after day.

I have two children, and I want the same thing for both of them that I have been trying to say in this whole book: I want them to be free. Not free of me — free to become who they actually are, instead of some idea I had about who they should be. It is the same lesson as everything else. A child is not a project to control. They are their own person, on loan to me for a short and precious while.

The hardest part is my own fear. When I am scared they will get hurt, the fear wants to come out as control, or as a raised voice. I have done it. I have yelled when I was really just frightened. And the thing I am proudest of is not that I never lose my temper — it is that I have learned to go back and say so. "I was wrong to yell earlier. I was scared you'd get hurt, but I should have spoken kindly." That is the whole thing right there. They do not learn how to be human by watching me be perfect. They learn it by watching me get it wrong and make it right.

The goal is to raise children who can one day walk away from me with confidence and never look back in fear. My anxiety will not shape their future — my trust will. Everything in this book gets tested in this one relationship. And if I can live it here, with the people I love most, it can spread out from there, one relationship at a time, into the world.