It takes strength to be gentle

It took me a while to realise, but I have come to trust that there is great strength in being gentle, sensitive, and even 'too emotional'... Goodness knows it would be easier to pretend I’m normal.

Hello, and thank you for landing here. I’m Ali, and I share about life and parenting as a deeply feeling human in an often unfeeling world. I’m a therapist and coach specialising in matrescence. I’m discovering my voice away from the noise of social media. If what I say is meaningful to you, please subscribe to Tether & Tend - I do a little happy dance when each and every person decides they would like to be a part of this community.

I’ve always been a reflective sort of person. Ponderous and frustratingly slow for some. Quietly proceeding through life, not rushing on in, taking my time, absorbing intense feelings, observing everything, trying to figure stuff out. Thorough, diligent, detailed. Interested in the edges, the corners, the shadows. Looking down the cracks between the pavement slabs. Desperate for a glimpse behind the masks, facades, and shape shifting I observe in others. The different ways we all try to meld with families and friends and society at large. Then squeezing myself in to badly fitting occupations, relationships, identities. I’m fascinated by the unsaid and the unseen. I can read emotional temperatures like a thermometer. I take far too much of the warmth or cool on myself. Maybe it was something I said?

But I never associated my sensitivity with confidence and strength. I was always told I needed to toughen up. So I assumed this way of being was a weakness. That the way to be resilient was to stuff down my emotions.

“To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.”

― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

My daughter taught me about being ‘too emotional’ from day one.

She arrived in the world loudly proclaiming her sensitivity to external stimuli. She cried a lot. She did not sleep.

Her ability to inhabit her feelings was total. Her pain and pleasure expressed in vivid extremes and wildly uninhibited.

All at once I recognised myself, and realised what I must have been doing all these years to pretend otherwise. New to this harsh planet, she screamed out that she was a deeply feeling person. She made no apology for it.

The world and his wife told me I should get tough. Cry it out. Early weaning. Separate rooms. Naughty steps. Time outs.

For once I did not listen. This time the stakes were too high. It wasn’t just about me any more.

And although I have doubted myself EVERY single step of the way (because society is just not set up to validate a gentle responsive approach to anything) I have by and large felt comfortable with my choices. They may not suit everyone, but they suit us.

Let me tell you a story from a few years back …

Clem and I went to a birthday party. One of those bouncy castle in a leisure centre affairs, full of echoing noise, boisterous happy kids, and socially awkward parents sitting round the edge.

We have been to those sort of parties before and I have bent over backwards to try and get C to engage with it all.

I’d be the only adult on the bouncy castle with her and peeing myself in the process (and not with laughter). I’d help set up a mini fort in the soft play equipment. I’d do all the craft activities on offer. I’d play hide and seek.

And, before you think I’m some sort of terrible helicopter parent, this was all the while trying to encourage her to play independently, or to hang out with the other kids, saying ‘I’m just over here if you need me’. It was simply exhausting!

This time I was too tired to make the superhuman effort. So we both just sat at the edge, observing. It was fine, I didn’t stress, I didn’t try to make her more sociable than she wanted to be.

It worked out. Other children came over and said hello. We seemed to offer a little sanctuary to some who really didn’t want to be on the bouncy castle either. We noticed everything going on. We giggled with the girl who made rabbit ears out of balloons. We said ‘no thank you’ when the nice man asked us if we wanted to blow bubbles. It was a complete revelation to me.

Photo by Ana Curcan on Unsplash

I remember so clearly going one of our first group play dates and feeling both resentful of my little cling on and also like I had completely failed as a mother for not producing a child who wants to barrel on in brightly to any social situation.

Even at the tender age of a year or so it was obvious she was different, she hung back, she watched, she was slow to warm up to things.

Then people make comments like ‘well it’s because she's an only child’, all the while I’m watching two of her closest friends who are also only children. One whose party it was wanted the whole class there and was right in the thick of all the action. And the other who happily goes to every after school activity going, volunteers to be on the school council and is a real social butterfly.

So no, it is not necessarily an only child thing. But even though I know that I am highly sensitive and shouldn't be surprised that my daughter is too, I still felt a lot of self judgement. that I had somehow not equipped her with more outwardly visible confidence.

And yet it was a very confident Clem who very clearly said ‘no I do not want to go to the school disco’ a few years further on from that bouncy castle party.

So back to the party, and it was a more confident me who sat with her watching everyone else for a good hour and half, realising she was actually enjoying it, pointing out the funny things, and not feeling bad for her or myself.

From the toddler years right through to being a sassy tween, every time my daughter…

• sat on my lap at a play dates and watched instead of joining in with all the games

• refused to blow out candles on her birthday cake because of a) the fire risk and b) the fact that everyone would look at her

• needed my (or my partner’s) help falling and staying asleep

• did not want to catch the netball because it hurts

• preferred not to wear the scratchy gloves

• could not watch Disney films because they are just too emotionally intense and downright scary

• refused to turn the camera on or say anything in Google Classroom meetings

... she was asserting the independence and confidence that other people think she needs.

Every time you choose a more gentle responsive approach to parenting, to relationships, to yourself, to life itself, you are showing GREAT STRENGTH in the face of a society that is constantly telling you to toughen up and to hurry up.

Don’t toughen up or hurry up.

The world needs sensitive people more than ever.