I recently had a conversation with my eldest daughter about her transition into adult life. After her download about all the pieces that she wanted to be perfect, all I could say was “take a breath and zoom out”. Yes, my “seasoned” adult perspective has a wider breadth versus a 22-year-old working hard to make her mark while earning a small stipend. The infinite number of details she was trying to control were causing overwhelm. My suggestion to “zoom out” was just like the game where you try to guess the item of a hyper-magnified picture, where widening the lens allows us to see. Taking a step back actually permits us to identify purpose and understand how each activity relates. In my advocates’ class with Don’t IEP Alone, Lisa Lightner constantly talks about the lighthouse in the distance, the metaphor she suggests for clarity and focus on what is important.
Since the discussion with my child, other situations involving perspective have bubbled up into my consciousness. Perspective really is everything. With it comes appreciation for more viewpoints and interpretations, which empowers more holistic decisions. This perspective and thus ability to see through the noise often has been earned through challenging experiences such as battling cancer or losing a loved one because what is important becomes clear and the things that are not fall away.
There is such a thing as being too close to a situation; examples of this are not hard to find. Ask any empty nesters about something that they wished that they had spent more time doing and you will inevitably hear that they would have just enjoyed their kids more. When you are “in the weeds” of parenting, it’s easy to get caught in the hustle and bustle of school, activities, feeding them, and teaching our family values, while giving them space to fail. Time to stop and smell the beautiful blooms (our children) is often difficult to manage. I wish I could shrink my girls back to when the giggles were contagious and dress up shoes clapped across the floor. I now understand why older women in the grocery store would see the cute, curious, and silly when I may have been getting frustrated because I just wanted to run in and grab an ingredient for dinner. Perspective.
“Love is blind”
“Rose-Colored Glasses”
I have been known, according to my daughters, to sport “mom-goggles” ever since they were school age when I give them what they see as nonobjective compliments. The glasses we put on, though, are not always rosy – we can also don a pair that shade everything dark. Anxiety, depression, and misophonia paint the world with wide colorless strokes where everything is interpreted as negative. We parents and teachers can do this when we heavily weigh bad behaviors and label kids as “bad”, “a pain”, “exasperating”. Coupled with our innate negativity bias gone unchecked, this can create a harmful cycle. For highly sensitive children, this labeling doesn’t even have to be declared aloud – they feel it in our tone, our words, and our actions. They can and do interpret slight differences, albeit sometimes incorrectly, as adults’ feelings towards them. From their perspective, which includes all of the senses, all communication is very personal.
As I was reflecting on this post, I remembered that I had “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. When it joined my family’s library, I read the introduction where Betty Edwards explains the skills necessary to learn to draw:
“The global skill of drawing something that you see “out there” (a perceived object, person, landscape) requires only five basic component skills, no more. These skills are not drawing skills. They are perceptual skills, …”
Over the next several weeks, I plan to start the creative process of honing my perception of edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows in order for my skill of gestalt (perception of the whole) to become brighter. Consider grabbing a copy of your own and joining me on the journey!
The best thing that we can do as parents (and just as human beings) is to keep awareness on our perspective and ask ourselves:
WHAT LENSES DO I HAVE ON RIGHT NOW?
Sometimes, it’s the hint we need to stop and grab our Groucho Marx’s.
