Validation

Last week, as I was going through my daughter’s backpack to retrieve her homework folder along with the empty candy-wrappers and a half-eaten, few days old PBJ sandwich, I came across a note written on a piece of yellow pad paper:

My bro got mad at me, and called me stupid, idiot and dumb! Spelled out in neat, rounded handwriting of my fastidious daughter. Below the sentence, in a different handwriting, with less emphasis on proper spelling and grammar and neatness, read the following:

Your, bro is meam, ! stupib, idiot and dumb.

I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and then to one hundred, and backward, before I called her on the carpet.

What’s this? I glared, the gathering of information not being my primary goal in asking the question.

Oh! She sensed that something might be wrong. M. asked me to write a report on my brother, she answered sheepishly. M. is her second grade classmate.

Ooooh… I responded in the now-I-get-it voice, and continued. And THIS is what you came up with?!!!

I did my best to keep the lid on my fury. Being her parent, I knew full well that the ‘report’, albeit somewhat truthful, was… well, incomplete to say the least. That there was an all-important side conspicuously missing from the meticulous reporting of my budding newscaster. Being the parent of both, I had a unique insight into the particular event that generated those angry words, I knew the instigator, the perpetrator and the so-called victim. I know where they came from and where they were going. I know the WHOLE story. The fact that in order to validate her own point of view she went to a complete stranger, painted her brother in this light and invoked the kind of libelous response from her validating ’friend’ was…well, infuriating. We had already addressed the above situation when it happened, and the apologies were extended on both sides. I thought it was behind us.

Isn’t that called’ gossip’, my blissfully unaware son chimed in, busily working on his latest LEGO project, happy that he doesn’t have to pay for the pro bono services of an in-house defense attorney.

I took another deep breath before I turned to my daughter, and spoke as gently and as forcefully as my heart commanded.

We are family, we belong to each other. When we have problems, we deal with them directly. We solve them among ourselves. We speak the truth – the WHOLE truth - and hear each side. We forgive and learn and move on. We don’t throw old, forgiven offenses into each other’s face. And we don’t go around talking to the outsiders, who neither know us nor care about us, about other members of our family!

The echo of my voice was too loud to miss…I paused to listen and let the words sink in.

Precisely My point, dear child. This is what it feels like for Me, when you and your children – when MY children go deep sea fishing for validation of their bruised feelings… running from one stranger to another, rather than coming to Me with family grievances. I am just as heartbroken and outraged when My children badmouth My other children, skewing the truth if perchance they may gather up a few broken trinkets of stranger’s validation for their injured ego. Forgetting that once for all, My Son paid the ultimate validation price for each of them – for the perpetrator and the victim who, in turn, became a perpetrator… Your validation begins and ends with Me….

The next morning, as we were getting ready for school, I noticed my daughter writing something on the bottom part of the yellow pad paper containing the incriminating message. She tore off that part and threw it into the garbage where it belongs. Then. she carefully folded the note she’d just written and gave it to her brother as they trotted off to school. That afternoon, as I was retrieving homework folder from his backpack, along with the crumbled chocolate chip cookie and empty Nerds container, I found the following note, decorated with beautiful underwater scene, a mother dolphin swimming among the seaweeds with her brood:

Dear C,

I’ sorry I wrote things that hurt your feelings. Will you forgive me?

Your sister,

T