The stories we tell ourselves

Recently, my youngest experienced a locked knee. Of course, the knee locked on Friday afternoon at the start of a long weekend. Over the three day weekend, we reached out to every resource we had to help resolve the locked knee. We eventually took her to the Emergency Room, with the frustration of knowing the ER wouldn’t be able to resolve anything but feel we’d be negligent if we didn’t go. Out of the hours spent there, we did get a better pair of crutches for her to use.

The following week it took me several calls over several days to get through to our primary care to give us a referral without an in-person visit. You would think with COVID that would be easy, but it wasn’t. Because our daughter is seventeen years old, the doctor’s office insisted on only dealing with her. They also insisted that the referral come through their online portal instead of mailing it to us. This was all to have this vital document in place before our soon approaching appointment with the specialist. I give all this context to support and defend my bad behavior that follows.

This hard to come by appointment was happening on an early Monday morning, so on Friday, I asked my husband to check with our daughter to ensure she was checking her online portal for the referral. We were all busy, so it wasn’t until Saturday morning when I asked my husband if he had checked in with her. He said no, and so I immediately ran up to my poor daughter’s bedroom, woke her out of sleep, and asked f she had looked for the referral. She groggily said no. I am ashamed to say; I lost it: hands flailing, voice raised, why didn’t you follow through lost it.

It was tough to get over the absolute frustration of knowing offices are closed, promised delivery of a document didn’t happen, and I was facing canceling an appointment that took a lot of my time and energy to make happen in the first place. Are you feeling me here?

I spent the better part of an hour sitting in my fuming juice stew. Finally, after an hour of not being able to shake the funk and the “accusing everyone of neglect” story in my head, I thought maybe I should try to understand why my daughter didn’t follow through. So I got curious. I got curious and asked her what was going on. She told me about her school work. She told me about the preparation for the service role she had at an upcoming student event. All good things and all enough to distract a young person unfamiliar with managing their health care appointments, let alone online portals. I could hear in my child’s voice her sadness and shame at not following through. My child wasn’t lazy and careless. She wasn’t in complete disregard for my efforts to solve her knee pain; she was taking care of what she knew to take care of and unable to prioritize due to a lack of clear communication from me.

My problem was that I was trying to solve the problem before validating what was going on for everyone involved. I neglected the truth that relationships are bigger than problems. In the midst of my efforts to solve this issue, I closed myself off to the people involved. Here’s the thing. People are not a problem to solve. They are someone to love.

I am not invalidating my frustration, but it wasn’t helping me get my daughter’s knee issues resolved. Love required going slower, being curious, patient, and kind.

The stories we tell ourselves shape whether we tune into the relationships around us.

The craziest part of this story? On Sunday, my husband handed my daughter a letter addressed to her. Inside? Inside that letter was the referral!!! Oh, my word! The referral came in the mail in time for the appointment. Don’t you wish you knew the end of the story while you are in the middle of it? Here’s the good news! You can tell yourself a do-over story! Stay tuned for mine!

What stories do you tell yourself that would benefit from a do-over?