You guys,
My friend Gina has been living with us for a month and I’ve learned I’m not only horrible at confrontations with my family, I’m also horrible at confrontations with my friends.
I worry that by telling her to do something differently than the way she’s doing it, she will feel like we don’t want her here. But you can’t leave towels outside overnight because sometimes it rains, and you definitely can’t leave empty food wrappers and crumbs on our couch because ew, and can you please leave our car key downstairs so that every time we need the car we don’t have to ask you for it??
We were in the backyard about to go swimming when Gina walked inside. Sam noticed a piece of plastic from a food container she was using had blown from the table onto the deck. He huffed and glared towards the back door as he picked it up and brought it to the recycle bin on the side of the house.
Sam isn’t good at confrontation either.
But while telling someone, “Hey, can you make sure you throw out your garbage?” seems innocent and easy, to actually say the words out loud feels micro-manag-y and uptight.
Sometimes I think, Next time I see Gina I’m going to tell her about this thing. And then she comes downstairs and I can’t bring myself to say it.
Coincidentally, I’ve been having bad anxiety lately. It’s always difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of it. It could be productivity shame, or because field hockey practices have started up again, or the anticipation of seeing my family at our upcoming “vacation” in the Outer Banks.
This tweet made me think it might have more to do with Gina:
I responded, “Easier said than done!” To which Nick tweeted back, “Awareness is Step 0.”
Well said, Nick. The awareness is there. Now I just need to do the hard part of setting those boundaries.
And I have, with some of the aforementioned examples. Like the empty food wrappers and crumbs on the couch. It took me three days to address it, but after I finally did I felt lighter and less stressed.
Every single confrontation is scary. But hopefully the more I force myself to do it, the easier it will get.
Essay of the Week
How do parents decide which values are the most important for their kids? And how do they go about instilling those values?
As a parent I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’ve been asking lots of parents about the values they want to instill in their kids and feel like they must know what they’re doing while I have no clue. They’ll say a value I wasn’t even thinking of and then I think I need to instill that value in my son. “Oh, resiliency, that’s a good one. I want my kid to be resilient, too. How do I make him resilient??”
It’s made me second-guess my own gut instincts and doubt my abilities as a parent.
But it’s okay to not have all the answers. What I can do is focus on my strengths and what is really important to me. So I’m going to focus on one thing at a time. And one value I care a lot about and can instill in George right now is a love of reading.
I wrote about the importance of books and how I plan to instill a love of reading in George.
36 Years Old
Sam went away for a long weekend with seven of his college buddies. They stayed at a lake house, went wakeboarding during the day, and grilled at night.
They also played beer pong and when my husband didn’t immediately drink his losing cups, his friend told him he had to chug or he couldn’t play. (Seriously.) And when three of his friends “hit a wall” as was inevitable from drinking beers on a boat all day, they did cocaine.
This type of behavior used to make sense to me. Now I just think, if you’ve hit a wall you should probably go to sleep. Or if you don’t want to hit a wall, don’t drink so much?
But this trip was an escape for these guys. They did everything in excess and felt like shit when it was over. And they called it a fun weekend. For Sam, it was a realization that his idea of a fun weekend no longer matched theirs.
So I’m wondering, can “friend trips” evolve over time? Or is it that as you evolve, you might have to ditch your old friends and make room for people who align with your values?
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Until next week,
Charlie