When my first son was 3 years old, we moved from Los Angeles to the mountains of a small town in California. I was eight months pregnant with our second child and on a modified bedrest, but I did my best to entertain my son from the confines of a chair.
Our first night in the mountains, he looked up at the sunset in awe and asked why the sky was changing colors: red, purple, now orange. I told him that the sky was dancing, and he began dancing, too.
“Look, Mom!” he said. “I’m orange dancing!” He twirled and declared that he was “red dancing” and “purple dancing.”
I lifted my arms and danced along with him in my chair.
“Look, Mom,” he said. “We are all the colors!”
I sat there with one hand on my belly, the other hand waving in the air, amazed at how little difference my 3-year-old son saw between himself and the sky. He could feel the reality that he was majestic and vast. He wasn’t just one thing, black or white, good or bad, this or that. He was all the colors.
I thought of this moment again several years later, when I found my father’s kindergarten report card from 1959. A blue piece of cardstock folded in half indicated that Dad had performed well academically, with excellent marks in reading and math, but on the back of it, his teacher wrote: “Jeffrey is over-anxious to please his teacher and … often asks how to do things he already knows how to do. He would probably be a much happier child if he could learn to be a little less serious.”
I knew what his teacher was saying, behind her polite cursive. My father believed he needed to be perfect to be loved. He was ruthlessly hard on himself all the way until the end. Harsh self-talk covered up the reality of my father’s inherent worth, blinding him to the fact that he, too, was all the colors.
My first word was “Dada.” My father’s last word was “water.” He pointed to a jar of small pink swabs. I took one and dipped it into a cup of ice-cold water and placed it in his mouth and moved it from one side to the other and let it rest on the inside of his right cheek. He closed his eyes and never spoke again.
He was 69 years old when he died due to the consequences of addiction, and I was 39. Many years earlier, when I was a kid, he took our family to Hawaii on a business trip. He held the hands of my sister and me as he guided us to the resort lagoon where we swam with dolphins. At one point, a dolphin jumped over us and hundreds of sparkling droplets reflected in the sun like a million shards of gold, and suddenly she dove back into the water behind us and swam into deeper and darker blues.
When we came home, my father framed pictures of my sister and me swimming with the dolphins and placed them on his desk alongside the other pictures of us in beautiful places: Hawaii, Costa Rica, Marco Island, New York City. During my late teens, when his drinking began to wreak havoc on our family, the promise of his sobriety became like a place on his desk, tropical blue water, a dream we wanted to make real.
Until the final decade of his life, I stayed close to him. Dad visited a total of 23 different drug and alcohol treatment centers over the years, staying for weeks or sometimes months before checking himself out. My sister, mother and I visited him at most of the centers, where the voice of his self-criticism was 10 times louder than any words of love and forgiveness that we — or anyone — could ever say.
Two months after Dad died, I dropped my children off at school and returned home, where my dog, a Terrier mix named Bella, greeted me with her normal celebratory dance. Bella never tried to remove any of my struggles. Instead, she made it possible for me to struggle — madly struggle in ways I never would never let another person see or know about — because her love was so pure.
I held Bella under one arm and walked into the living room and to the bookshelf where we kept our family’s most precious items: three bullet casings from my father-in-law’s military funeral, books of poetry, photos of our children, and a small glass jar with a lock of my father’s hair inside. I sat in the corner of the room with Bella nestled into my lap and opened the wooden cap of the tiny glass jar and turned it upside down. My father’s lock of hair fell into my fingers. How soft it was! I thought it might be dry, like straw, but it was softer than a feather.
Then, I reached beside the bookshelf and pulled out the box of my father’s belongings mailed to me after he passed. All that he owned fit into a cardboard box no bigger than four shoeboxes. The top layer of the box was filled with clothes: black sweatpants I was almost positive he wore while homeless on the streets. There was a Discman and CDs I’d given him, and below that, an old Timex in a plastic Ziploc bag. The watch was broken in three pieces and had a camel-colored leather strap, the leather scraped up and fraying all over so that you could see a darker layer of brown underneath. The face of the clock and its stainless frame was still intact. The seconds hand still moved. I watched the hand tick and the time change.
I held this broken watch in one hand, his soft hair in the other, and sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe. A part of me blamed myself for not having done more. Maybe the boundaries I set against his addiction were too rigid. Maybe we should have elected to do the feeding tube. Maybe …
Just then, I felt Bella’s tongue on my cheek. She licked my tears and leaned closer into me. I set down the watch and put the lock of hair back into the jar, but the sensation of its softness on my pinky finger remained.
A voice inside said that it was time to get up, time to go to work, time to get it together. But I didn’t move. I held Bella closer to my chest and lifted my gaze from my father’s things on the floor to outside the window. The sky was baby blue with wisps of clouds and sun. There was a thin layer of snow on top of the grass, white, glistening dust I imagined was the same texture as my father’s ashes.
Later that night, I wrote in my journal, “Gave myself space to grieve.” A few days later I wrote, “Made a mistake at work, told myself it was OK.” A few days after that I wrote, “Sent out an essay even though a voice said it wasn’t good enough.” I soon realized that I was tracking moments in which I was kind to myself or rebelling against an inner voice that told me I wasn’t good enough — the same harsh voice my father’s kindergarten teacher had noted back in 1959.
Perhaps I was jotting down these moments of self-compassion to heal my own heart, but also, certainly, for my children. Nothing seemed more important than teaching them to include themselves in the circle of kindness they extended, and that meant I needed to learn how to do so, too.
Nothing seemed more important than teaching them to include themselves in the circle of kindness they extended, and that meant I needed to learn how to do so, too.
One night at the dinner table when my husband was away on a work trip, my two sons and I played a game I’d seen on Instagram, “High, low, buffalo,” where we talked about the best, worst and silliest (buffalo) part of our day. I announced that my high was filling up an entire page of my journal with moments in which I was kind to myself.
“Wet us see it!” my youngest said, just 3 years old and still adorably pronouncing his L’s as W’s.
I grabbed my journal and showed them the list. My eldest son, the one who danced with the sky and said we were all the colors, was now 6. He studied the page like a treasure map, tracking the words with his fingers.
“Wow, Mom. You were really kind to yourself,” he said.
“Thanks, honey,” I said. “I’m learning to do it more and more.”
