"Professional"

I was at coffee the other day with a new friend I made during the pandemic. She has a kid about Pedro's age and we were comparing notes about teenage boys. This mom is super smart and well educated, just like most of my friends. (I would never say I have dumb friends. Why would I be friends with someone if I thought they were dumb? That makes no sense. I do however, have some friends who never finished college, and that is fine, too.)

Where was I? This woman is also a professional. She has a professional job and is very competent at what she does.

Competent.

You know how sometimes you are sitting across the table with someone for coffee and you realize you are looking in the mirror, and you discover something about yourself that you NEVER saw about yourself until you sat down with them? Recently, I went to dinner with a friend and we had butterscotch pudding for dessert, passing up carrot cake and some decadent chocolate thing. I would never order butterscotch pudding ahead of anything chocolate.

And the butterscotch pudding was delicious. See? I learned I like butterscotch pudding! Who knew? I also realized I like cocktails better than wine! Again, who knew?

Back to the main point. We often learn about ourselves through other people.

This woman was just like 95% of the moms in NE Seattle. There is nothing unique or exceptionally different about her: all women in NE Seattle are exceptional and unique. 

I have had the same conversations with many moms over and over again. Maybe this distance in time and space from the quarantine allowed me to uncover this. Maybe it is because I no longer live in NE Seattle. 

As parents (moms aren't the only ones who do this), how often do we apply a professional approach to dealing with our kids? How often do we treat them like colleagues instead of kids? How often do we connect with our kids head-to-head, and not heart-to-heart? Our children might come crying to us with a broken heart, and we give our kids an intellectual solution?

How much of our professional culture has infected our homes? Kids aren't residents or fellows or interns or Analysts in our families. We aren't there to train them in the ways of the professional world.

I grew up in home where my dad was a professional. He does my taxes (thankfully) every year and he offers me advice on how to manage this long-term care insurance law that is hitting the State of Washington. All of that is well and good, but what I most love about my dad is I can call him when I am happy, sad, frustrated and/or thrilled with the world. (I mostly call about the things I am frustrated, worried, annoyed or sad about, TBH.)

Does he respond to me in a "professional" manner, giving me advice? Nope. He just listens. He meets me heart-to-heart.

Where did me and my friends lose our way? Did we fell like we needed to raise our kids to become professionals, so therefore we must treat them as such?

I need to stop. I need to focus more on being a mom and meeting my kids where their heart is at, not as much their heads. School and work can and will meet them where their heads are, but they won't meet them where their heart is. That is why we have family and friends, people who care about us and want to understand our hearts.