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Macaroni Dad

'Cause Dads Love Macaroni, Too!

October 17, 2014
A Rough Day...

“I don’t want to talk about it daddy...today was a rough day...and I already told mom.”

Although I struggled with the lesson myself, I used to tell my oldest daughter that there are no such things as rough days. There are fractions and fragments of each day that when added together create the entire sum of what was THIS day. Maybe there are going to be a bunch of difficult parts to this upcoming day, and maybe there won’t be any. Even if 51% of this day ended up in challenges, difficult moments and drama beyond comprehension (See: The Teenage Years, Volumes 5 – 38), how we actually choose to feel and define our day will either make it a success or a loss written in the history of the rest of our lives. A day with too many bad parts might get tossed under the ‘Loss’ category and be lost forever. Maybe a day with only one tough moment is enough to send this entire day to the recycle bin. It seems when something doesn’t fit for our perfect definition for how we expected the sequence of events to unfold, if might affect how we think and feel for the rest of the day...in short, we might just give up.

Once we’ve made the decision to declare a day as a lost cause, we won’t get it back...we have basically already written the day off and it's not something we can recover....or can we?

What kind of commitment and mindset will it take from us if we have had challenges, few or many, to set this day back into the AMAZING category? Can we decide from that moment on, that our day is going to be AWESOME? Maybe it sounds overly simple and silly at the same time, but if we are having a rough day, or maybe only a tiny fraction of one day, we can simply agree to look at what happened, accept it in all its teachable moment glory and decide that the very next moment from here on out is going to be the Best Day Ever!

My 8 year old came home today and felt very embarrassed about something that happened at school. It seems either through pressure from us, or from peers, or from TV, or from some other unknown learning source that guides her, she feels like she is supposed to be perfect and not make any mistakes. When she explained to us what happened, it simply seemed a silly little moment and a misunderstanding in what should be the carefree mind of an 8 year old. Unfortunately, to her it was devastating and enough to call the entire day a ‘rough day.’ 

Oh man...How can I help her? I might not have everything figured out in my own life, but if my little girl needs help, I will find a better way to move this mountain.

She seems to feel like she should be perfect in every way and when she makes a simple mistake or does something that doesn’t play out as perfect in her mind, it really seems to upset her. Once a moment like this has been lived and the emotion of the moment has been locked in, how can I convince her that this is not how we will define this day, but simply something learned along the way to another great day?

Each day is going to throw new curve-balls and moments of concern when we each hold the key to rolling with the challenge, learning from the lesson and growing from the message that has just been thrown our way. At some point it seems like we realize the days we live are finite and we decide that losing an entire day is too great a cost. These days with each other and with our children who grow up right before our eyes can’t be lost to a quick decision and a classification as a lost day. We will get to take another swing at this tomorrow, but that will be – tomorrow. If it was our last day we would find a way to turn it around and make it our best....so that is perhaps what we must do from here on out, and it is absolutely what we must teach our kids.

But for now, above all else, how do we teach our children to understand that they are human? How do we let them know that it is okay to live and learn in each moment and grow in stride with our mistakes and our missteps? How do we as parents, who are really just barely grown up kids, have the insights and the strengths to guide our children to look past the challenges and difficult moments of this day, so that no more days are ever lost as ‘rough ones?’ 


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