You Don’t Even Realize How Much You Say It

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite? Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they’re bothering us, that they’re a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonnell writes in her fascinating book The World According to Joan Didion, Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo once wrote down a list of her mother’s sayings. They were: “Brush your teeth,” “Brush your hair,” and “Shush, I'm working.”

Only later do we realize what we’re saying to them—as Didion did tragically in her haunting book Blue Nights—how this hurt them, how it contradicted what we felt deep down inside. We were just busy in that moment! We just needed to finish something real quick! We didn’t mean anything by it!

Of course, we have to make a living. Sometimes we do have to finish things. Some things are important. We just have to make sure that we value what really is important, that we remember, as we say in the March 22nd entry in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, our kids aren’t a distraction from our work, they are our work.

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