Get Out the Bucket: Appreciating Each Other's Strengths
I have recently realized that I may have a bit of a phobia about stomach illnesses. When one of my children throws up, I may completely shut down and get really quiet and download a Nora Roberts book and freak out completely silently (silence which is so unusual that alone scares my family). I may also avoid other people like the plague if I’ve heard there’s been a vomiting illness anywhere in their vicinity.
To be fair, having a kid with Type 1 diabetes changes puke from a nuisance to a potential hospital visit. If she throws up carbs that we have given her insulin for, she needs to get more in her body right away. Which has led to such unhappy moments as holding her down giving her honey via medicine syringe while she screams and cries. The early days of diabetes were not kind to our family.
(Short PSA: If your kid is sick, please, please keep them home. It may be mild to you, but it could literally give my kid a seizure if she can’t keep stuff down. It’s even worse for kids on immunosuppressants or other severe immune system complications.)
All that to say, I…don’t deal well with puke. It’s an area where my only choice is to be vulnerable with my family – to say, I’m sorry, I’m not okay and I’m working on it. Luckily for me, Forrest has no problem at all with it. He grew up playing in the dirt alongside sheep and goats and so has the world’s best immune system, plus he lives in this moment, without his brain going into all the “what ifs”. He likes situations where the next step is clear and with puke, there’s a pretty clear next step. Clean it up. Get out the bucket. Drape every soft surface in the house with old towels.
We’re both pretty good at the vulnerability thing here – I let him know that I’m trying and he accepts that I am doing what I can. But my openness about my phobia doesn’t help him understand me better. In fact, I think it makes me even more incomprehensible. I know I can’t fathom how he can stay focused and in control when there’s a kid puking all over him. To me, he might as well be an alien.
All of our vulnerability makes us closer but what happens when the more we know, the more confused we get? Vulnerability can be something we honor in another but there’s sometimes a next step. When I am frozen in the face of something as simple as a minor illness, Forrest has to choose to appreciate our differences. My future-thinking self means our summer plans are already booked and he just has to show up. My future-thinking self means that when the girls have dentist appointments, the dinner that night is easy to chew. My future-thinking self means that we have a lot of slack in our life – the exact thing we need when a kid pukes and we need to drop everything.
Our differences, while truly strange to each other, make us work well together. How much more true will that be in a community where more people bring more gifts? But first, we have to get past the misunderstandings and accept the complexity of a connected life. We have to choose appreciation.
How do you deal with people who are very different from you? How does that help you connect with them?
