We’re all just clanging cymbals without love behind our words
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 26, 2019
- 1219
When my kids were small, they didn’t always get along. Our oldest was four and a half years older than the middle and five and a half years older than the youngest. There was chaos for many years as the younger two figured out how to infiltrate the day-to-day life of the oldest. They became ninjas of the highest order.
Our oldest had an extensive collection of Barbie dolls that she would arrange in a wooden doll house my dad made. There was carpeting and wallpaper, tiny beds and coverlets that my mom had stitched up for her, and tons of shoes and clothing that she arranged just so.
She’d play for hours with her Barbies, combing their hair and making sure everything was neat as a pin for the scenarios she would have them play out. The Malibu convertible was parked outside the little doll house, awaiting trips around the living room, wind blowing in their hair. She had it all. That is until her little siblings came along.
Bang! Crash! The younger two would toddle in, and within five seconds screams that could make glass shatter filtered into my eardrums. We tried endless solutions, like moving the entire enterprise into her room, then into a playroom with a locked door where they couldn’t get in.
Nothing worked, until one day I suggested having her sit down and show them how she played with them, why she loved them as she did. Maybe a truce could be made. It wasn’t easy. Many fights were had. She wanted to give up and so did I. I know she wanted to put those Barbies away and never look at them again if she couldn’t enjoy them as she had before her little sister and brother intruded on her only-child status.
But teaching a child to give up and walk away wasn’t the answer.
It wasn’t an easy path, and there were many fights along the way, but they were her sister and brother, and she loved them. She made room for their differences and annoyances because that’s what you learn to do when you live under one roof.
Wishing no one comes in and changes the dynamic, the smooth-sailing, never shaking up a long-held belief system (or well-appointed Barbie dream house), well, it just wishes people away. It wishes away those — by whose very presence — makes you face the fact others exist who live lives that are affected because of the very belief system you don’t want messed up.
Our eldest wanted smooth waters; she didn’t want to have to change. She’d been alone and had everything her way for a very long time. New babies in the house made her mad when they wanted to mess up her things. We allowed her to wallow in her defensiveness for a bit, then reminded her she couldn’t stay that way forever.
When someone speaks that we don’t agree with, it’s a clanging symbol to our ears. We don’t want to listen, to resolve. It’s also the setting aside of those we may not wish to hear. Their words become sharp knives because we want to stay in our rigidity, our comfort. But if we don’t progress, listen to the ideas of a new way or thought — a way that seems strange or alien or even wrong to us — we’re simply sinking deeper inside our stubbornness where nothing penetrates.
We become set in our ways: no other cultures, no other interpretations, nothing to make electric waves that shock us out of our sedentary patterns.
I am guilty of this. I’ve had much conversation with myself and others, especially over the past 10 years. My belief system has morphed fluidly, sometimes brutally, into a new thing. I’ve let it rub up against me, burn me and soothe me while I allowed it to mold me anew, to rise from ashes I buried myself in. I allowed the change I fought for so long because of long-held belief patterns, the setting aside of things that made me uncomfortable, the deniability of things I didn’t feel like facing.
I’ve let the new baby into the house, and I’ve allowed its presence to change me. Had I not accepted conflict and change, I would’ve never learned to speak Spanish, to allow the scales to drop from my eyes as I examined my stubborn beliefs, and to accept new cultures — along with people and ideas — without seeing them as an intrusion.
Our kids are adults now. They love each other throughout differing beliefs and ideas, ways of doing things and notions on living. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they want to flee, but in the end love remains. Without it we’re just clanging cymbals dangling in the wind.