how to be a friend to yourself

My girls are growing up fast. For years, we have poured into them all the love, values, and habits we hope they will adopt as their own. Now, in their tweens, we're finally getting a little feedback. And I have to tell you, it's a mixed bag. What I appreciate in them most are the qualities they came to us with--their sweet, complex personalities and big hearts for the world around them. The one with the quick and easy and loud laugh and a million questions a day. The one with quiet, watchful eyes that soaks the world like a sponge until she can't hold anymore and pours it all out again in joy or frustration, depending on the day. Their imaginations that expand my world every day. Their love for beauty and their compassion for broken.

The other stuff? I'm realizing all those agonizing hours of teaching them table manners and how to get along with others and their times tables and their Bible memory verses and, and, and....the list that's at least a mile long....is so strangely unimportant. The things that seemed to matter so much, the things that would make them civilized human beings, those things are far from my mind lately, while I watch these girls become. Then there are the things we didn't mean to do. The passive aggressive ways of handling conflict that they inherited from us. The brooding and ruminating spirits we seem to have given them. The attention to detail, maybe a little too much attention. The inclination toward sharp anger when the world and its burdens presses in too close. There are others. But to save face, we'll stop there.

Now, while I watch them grow into themselves, who they are underneath all the training and lessons and mistakes, I find myself wanting to pour a different kind of message into them. It's not about how to live right or be right or act right. In fact, part of me wishes I could undo those loud, strong messages a bit and replace them with something I'm only just learning myself now: be a friend to yourself.

Even as I type that phrase, it smacks a bit of the self-esteem movement we mamas grew up with. You should love yourself, we were taught. You should just feel good about who you are. That mentality proved a little vacuous, at least to me. I didn't know how to just like myself. I knew how to act like I did in front of others, and it came off as a little stand-offish, like if people stepped inside the gates of my self hood, they might see what I didn't want them to see, so if I kept them outside the gates, they'd go on thinking I really did like myself, thank you very much. Self esteem was just another quality you were supposed to naturally possess and if you didn't, well, fake it until you make it.

But friendship. That's different. Friendship is relational, built on mutuality and reciprocity and shared experiences. It's always being worked out and it grows deeper and more beautiful with time. How do you befriend yourself? Maybe it starts with extending the same grace toward your own imperfections that you extend toward the friends whose presence in your life add up to something rich and lovely and right.

Parenting kids in the middle, blogger Kelle Hampton wrote a week ago, feels a lot like friendship. It's this beautiful, painful process of slowing releasing your precious littles into the lives they are creating for themselves, into the people they are now choosing to become. You've spent their whole lives together--they came from your body, and so you are scarily alike. You laugh at the same jokes with the same barking seal snorts, and you look a lot alike, and you're good at the same things, but you're also not allowed to forget (heaven help you if you do!) that they are their own people doing their own thing. The hours and hours they spend away from you every day now are not bookmarks until you meet up again at dinner time, but in fact, a working out of who they are in a world that does not contain you.

Oh my. We are not the same people? When did that happen? 

When you do get to hang out together, to meet up again at the end of the day over dinner and dessert and homework and baths and all the rest of it, good, bad and ugly, there's more mutuality, more sharing, more "you should take your own advice, Mom" moments where my girls have to set me straight on occasion.

So now I'm thinking there are some good words to get intentional about sharing, and that is to be a friend to yourself. To worry less about what others think, what impression you give, whether you did that project or ran that race like you're leaving your heart and soul on the pavement, but instead to be gracious and kind and gentle with yourself, because you have permission to live fully human. I'm listening to Amy Grant (a childhood hero) talk about her big dreams on a podcast I enjoy and I'm expecting her to talk about her career, that big dream that must have felt like nothing more than that at one time. But she's talking about a farm she's revamping for kids to come out and enjoy and learn from and a community garden she's established there. She's had to go back on tour to fund it, and someone suggested maybe she was being used, having to go back to work this way. But it brings her joy and purpose to do it. I thought she was going to talk about how she got famous, but instead she talks about how she got dirty. And there's this deep grace in that process. When we are gracious to ourselves, only then can we get to the places our hearts are leading. When we are a friend to ourselves, only then are we willing to take risks that might make us look a little weird or a little like failures. Because we don't judge our friends the way we harshly judge ourselves. If a friend doesn't take first place in the race, we don't stop being her friend. But sometimes when we don't meet our own expectations for ourselves, we can be pros at beating ourselves up.

Be the best friend you can be to yourself.

That is the message. Those are the words. This is the season. And I hope. I hope that I have not swung the pendulum too far in my parenting perfectionism for that message not to ring like a beautiful bell every day in my girls' heads and hearts while the culture around them bombards them with all the things it thinks they should be or shouldn't be. It has to start with me.

On Mother's Day I am keenly aware that how I treat myself, what I give myself permission to do and to feel and to forgive, that is what they will see and hear loudest of all. They may chew with their mouths closed (or open) and shower every other day (or not) and pass all their homework in on time (or forget to), but that's just all show. Can I spend as much time pouring the gift of friendship into my girls, permission to see themselves as beautiful creations who are free to live into their own beautiful brokenness?

Girls, on Mother's Day, this is what I wish for you: that you will know you are worthy simply because you are here, and you are free to take risks and fail, and you are free to laugh your loud laugh and hang upside down from the trees and play your guitar as loud as you want and sing at the top of your lungs in the shower and fail a test and lose a race and forget to shower and wear the same outfit with holes in the knees two days in a row. You are free to take up space in this world. You are free to live into all that God has made you to be and you are freely and fully loved with a BIG love under THIS roof and inside OUR arms.