agency

Tonight, I ducked out of the kitchen shortly after dinner to play the piano.  Why?  Well, because I wanted to, first of all.  But second, and this is what I told the kids, so that they wouldn’t retreat to the piano instead of doing their assigned post-dinner chores.

Never mind that I should have been modeling appropriate post-dinner behavior.  But I had made the dinner, after all.  They could clean it up.  It’s actually been the arrangement in our home for at least six years.  But somehow I typically spend all my energy after dinner corralling them into doing what should be habit by now.  Clearing the table, washing the dishes, loading the dishwasher, sweeping the floor and wiping the counters and table.  They make it look like rocket science most days.

So tonight I washed my hands of it, brushed Anna off the piano bench to prevent her from being distracted and played a few tunes myself.  Within minutes, a blow-up of epic proportions ensued.  Having hidden myself away in another room, I was unaware of the origins of this particular argument.  All I knew was that after a yelling match between Tim and Eve, Tim retreated upstairs to bathe Jack (which was apparently necessary due to the nature of the crime Eve had committed involving homemade slime).  The rest of the crew, unable to resolve the situation peaceably, continued the shouting match, leaving me no choice but to intervene.

I run a pretty tight ship.  But unless my kids are physically hurting each other, I really try to steer clear of their contentious interactions.  I don’t want the expectation of resolving all of their differences, nor do I think that facilitates good relationships.  Occasionally, when they get particularly riled up and the interaction degenerates into nuclear warfare, I send them to what we call “Lover’s Landing” (the landing between the two sets of stairs in our house) where I ask them to consider the question:

What could you have done better in this situation?

I don’t point fingers, there’s no blame game to speak of.  I simply ask them to acknowledge their role in how everything went downhill.

Much of the time they retort defensively, saying, “What about her?”  Or, “if she hadn’t done such and such, I wouldn’t have had to do this or that”.  It’s a basic human mechanism, to stew about how we are victims of circumstances, how someone else’s behavior was not only the catalyst but the cause of our own behavior.

It might be nature to do so, but it’s a mechanism founded in a fundamental falsehood.  A falsehood that fuels our rationalization of poor behavior.  And, if we’re really thinking big, the destruction of relationships, and even societies.  We are responsible for our actions and ours alone.  It’s actually quite liberating to believe so, despite how easy it is to blame others.

We have zero control over what others choose.  And we have complete control over what we choose.  At least that’s the goal.

So when I ask my children to consider “What could you have done better in this situation?” they have to dig deep, take a good hard look at themselves and decide where things started to go south and how their actions might have contributed to it.  It’s easier sometimes than others.  It requires humility but is incredibly empowering.

Tonight when I asked one of the two parties (the less “guilty” of the two, in my assessment of the situation) to evaluate what she could have done better, she responded, “Why are you mad at me?  I didn’t do anything.”  Typical.

I repeated myself.  “I’m sure that if you think really hard about it, you can find something you did (or didn’t do) that would have improved the outcome.  When you figure that out, commit yourself to doing it differently next time.”

Because we all know that (in families) there will always be a next time.

Both the girls involved were able to settle down, consider their role and resolve the situation successfully.  And tonight I got a glimpse that my efforts to raise peacemakers are making headway.  While one daughter flew off the handle, two other daughters helped to subdue her.  One gently washed her hair of the slime (that was the real culprit in the whole mess), the other cleaned it off the floor (and the walls and the ceiling).  Without a word of complaint.

That it ended up in those places was not really their fault.  But their resolution to “make the situation better” trumped their tendency to deny their roles in the argument.  It warmed this mother’s heart.