While enjoying a cup of coffee in one of my favorite cafés, I witnessed a family dynamic that ended up saddening me.
A brother and a sister walked up to a table right across from me. The girl appeared to be about nine or ten and the boy looked a few years older. The smiles and the warmth in their interactions were very heartwarming. I was mostly intriged by the very intentional and thoughtful behavior of the brother. He handed his sister a cup of water and placed his unusually large back pack(about 2/3rd of his height) behind the chair then carfully cliped it so that it would not fall off. I was impressed with his seemingly very mindful and mature behavior as he walked away and came back with four more cups of water and carfully placed them on the table for four more people who are going to arrive next.
When his mother walked in with a woman who looked to be a family friend, I was excited to see their intreactions with one another. The friend set down next to the boy who was sitting on a chair where he had cliped his back pack on.
The first thing his mother told him to do was to move to another seat. She must have wanted to sit next to her friend. She pointed to the chair across from her friend. He protested by saying that his drink was already in front of the seat where he was sitting and that he had already drank some out of it. She told him that she is ok with his germs and again told him to move. She impatiently pointed with her index finger. He moved.
I hated seeing the sadness come over his previous smile filled face. I wished I would have seen some tenderness in his mother’s expression. I wished that she would have prevented the sadness in his heart by expressing what she wanted in a more kind and affectionate manner. Instead she just gave him an order that he had to comply with. I continued to watch. What if she had thanked or given him some positive feed back for being so nice to get everyone water (even if she had told him to do it ahead of time) and made him feel appreciated, which she did not do.
When he got himself to forget the event and began studying the display case and asked if he can go and buy something to eat, she harshly answered, “I want the change back!” It wasn’t so much that she asked for her change but it was the tone of her voice which was filled with distrust, that would have easily told him that he was not trust worthy with money. He may steal from her.
When I was a child I was a trouble maker. I got into way too many fights in school. If someone made me angry, I hit them. It wasn’t until when I became an adult that I realized why I was hitting in school. I also realized that I was actually kind of a good kid at home and even at school. I fought physically because I was regularly receiving beatings at home from both my mother and father. I lived in constant fear.
I never received an acknowledgment that I used to get up early mornings to make apple juice for my mother for her health with antiquated tools. It was very tidious and physically tiring. I also did almost all the housework(cooking, dishes, most of the shopping, laundry by hand and the cleaning of the house). Burns on my hands were a reguar part of my childhood.
My positive attributes not being acknowledged as a child lead to my inability to recognize my own self worth. No matter how hard I worked, I found it challengeing to see if I’ve done well enough.
I had been refusing to ask my son to do any thing around the house (due to my own childhood) when he was little. When he was nine years old, he volunteered to help me put the dishes away. I was immensely thankful for his doing it for me and I let him know not only how thankful I was but how much difference he was making in my life. He has never said no to helping me since that day.
Children, like the rest of us enjoy causing happiness for others. When those good things that they do go unnoticed, they usually stop doing them. They may also grow up with a lack of self esteem or self appreciation. And a lack of self appreciation causes many things like attracting less than healthy mates, less than good career choices and, less than what they want in life in most everything.
As I was watching the dynamic between that mother and son, I wanted so much to grab that mother and say, “hey look at your son, do you see how good he is, what a sweet person he is? Notice it and tell him, so that he does not lose that goodness. Give him praise, give him love and give him a chance to show you that he is honest. Don’t cause him to become dishonest by treating him like he’s untrustworthy. Humanbeings are not born theives or liers. Those who become theives are taught to be that.”
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