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I used to be one of those people who blamed themselves when bad things happened.  If one of the kids got sick, if someone was unhappy, my first thought used to be, “maybe it’s my fault”.

It’s certainly not a pleasant way to live life, but I clung on to the thinking for many years, perhaps out of some misguided sense that I was being humble or responsible in my guilt and angst.

What I didn’t realise though, was that I was actually being egocentric.  That didn’t twig until one day, fed up with my moaning and self-flagellation, Pete finally said, “Yes, this is your fault, because you’re the centre of the universe and everything that happens is because of you!”

After a moment of stunned silence, it suddenly dawned on me.  It wasn’t about me.  Sometimes it is, but most of the time, it really has nothing to do with me at all.  In the grand scheme of things, I’m just not that important.  I was behaving like a martyr out of pride and self-importance, not humility.

Big Boy (Pete’s clone) followed this lesson up for me a few years later.  We’d been at parent-teacher interviews at school, and one of his teachers had given him a hard time about a decision he’d made not to be a school officer.

At the end of that week, I asked him how everything was going with Mrs J.

“What do you mean, Mum?”

“Well, she let you have it on Tuesday night, so I was wondering if things were ok between you two?”

And I’ll never forget what he said.

“Oh that.  Everything’s fine.  It was late and she was tired and it just came out wrong…she didn’t mean anything by it.”

My son had learnt at fourteen a lesson that I’d taken decades to master – it’s not about me.   He’d been able to listen respectfully to his teacher’s comments, hold firm to his decision, but also not take it as a personal attack.  He came out of the incident with his self-esteem intact, and his relationship with his teacher unaffected.

Understanding this has changed my life.  Now, when someone is terse on the phone, or short-tempered with me, I stop and ask myself, “Is this really about me?”  And often the answer is no, it’s not about me at all, something is troubling them and there’s nothing I can do about it.   If Small Man comes home complaining that someone has been mean to him at school, I’ll often say, “Sweetie, it probably has nothing to do with you – maybe they were just having a bad day”.

I’m not for a second suggesting that we should allow ourselves to be bullied or persecuted, nor am I advocating a lack of personal responsibility for our actions.

But what I am saying is this: when the person at the checkout is snarky with you, when your boss comes in to work grumpy and won’t say good morning, or when one of the mums at school doesn’t want to chat – don’t waste your time trying to figure out what you’ve done to offend them.

It probably has nothing to do with you.

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When Big Boy was just a Little Boy (from memory, he was ten at the time), I used to drop him off at the school bus.

Every morning, in the car, I’d drill him.

“What are the two things you need to remember today?”

He would roll his eyes, sigh, and reply.

“Life doesn’t owe me a living…”

“Yes…and?”

“Sh*t happens, and I just have to deal with it.”

I always figured that if he had those two thoughts well and truly entrenched, then he could deal with whatever the world was going to throw at him that day.

Life doesn’t owe us a living – as Mark Twain once said, it was here first.  I want my children to really take that to heart, and to be grateful for all the good things that come their way. More importantly, I want them to understand that, blessed as our lives are, it isn’t because we’re in some way deserving, we’re not entitled to anything, nor are we allowed to whinge when things don’t all go as we planned.

Secondly, stuff is going to happen. Life occasionally throws curve balls.  When the unpredictable, the unpleasant and the downright difficult happen, then we just have to pick ourselves up, dust off, and get on with it. I can’t prepare my children for specific problems they might encounter, but I can try to teach them that unexpected hiccups are a part of life. Hopefully, if they know it’s coming, then they’re better placed to bounce back from whatever the difficulty might be.

Parenting is such a tricky, constantly evolving process. I’ve been blessed with amazing role models in my own parents, but life has changed so much in the last thirty years that Pete and I often have to figure it out as we go along. Thankfully, we have boys with gentle, kind dispositions which just makes everything so much easier.

Do you have a funny story to share about your kids?

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. . . . .

Did you know that we’re all made of stardust?

The molecules within us, the basic atoms that make up our bodies, are the residue of exploding stars millenia ago.

Here’s how David the geologist and astronomer explained it to me:

In the original big bang, the elements hydrogen and helium were created. Clouds of these elements eventually coalesced to form stars, where nuclear fusion took place, like in our Sun.

Fusion reactions eventually create “heavy elements”, that is, anything other than H (hydrogen) or He (helium). These sink into the centre of the star due to their greater density.

When the star goes supernova, which they all do sooner or later, these heavy elements are expelled into the void, where they eventually form planets, meteorites , comets and so forth. Since we are a product of our planet (Earth) and every atom in us comes from the planet, we are made out of once stellar material.

Look at it this way.

You get atoms from a carrot. The carrots atoms were once dirt. The dirt was once rock, the rock is made of heavy elements, all of which were once in the centre of a star.

Regardless of your “living” age, the atoms in your body are billions of years old.  When life is wearing me down and the day to day seems overwhelming, I find this thought comforting.

It reminds me of the enormousness and complexity of life, and of how little control I have over any of it.  It makes the things that I worry about seem trivial.

It reminds me to view the world with awe and wonder, and to ponder on our connectedness to all things.  I often wonder where the atoms that are me have been recycled from.

It reminds me to give thanks for the gift of being alive – and for the brief use of this stardust for the time I’m here.   And to focus on enjoying the time I’ve been given!

. . . . .

We are stardust…we are golden…billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves…back to the garden

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock 1969

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