As a parent coach, maybe I shouldn’t be telling this story. It’s one of those stories that
parents are embarrassed to tell….but here goes! (please don’t judge me!!)
My almost 4 year old has been getting more and more confident walking into gan, and
yesterday he told me he wants to walk into gan BY HIMSELF. Yes, completely by
himself- I can’t even come down the stairs with him….
Of course, I was a little bit nervous to do so, but when we got to gan, I saw a mother I
knew walking ahead of us, and she saw my son, so I let him walk in behind her. As I
stood there, anxiously watching him walk down the steps, he waves me away, “Go,
Ema!” he calls out. I dutifully left, ensured that he was safely walking behind his friend’s
mother.
Thirty minutes later, as I am leisurely picking out apples in Best Market, internally
patting myself on the back for raising such an independent, confident kid, the gan calls.
Apparently, Tzvi never made it in the gan! The other mother must have not seen him
and closed the door behind her, and my son walked all the way back up the stairs and
made it halfway down the block looking for me, until, Baruch hashem, someone saw
him and brought him back to the Gan. He had the presence of mind to tell them his
name and the name of his Gan, but he was crying for a long time….
I spoke to him on the phone, soothed him, and went on with my day, with terrible pangs
of Mommy-guilt surfacing throughout the day.
Then I remembered what I had read in one of Dan Segal’s books, about “telling the
story.” Trauma only makes an impact when it isn’t worked through, and when the story
is retold, it takes that trauma out of the child’s implicit memory so it won’t surface later.
Telling the story also connects the right brain emotions with the language of the left
brain, and can help a child work through a trauma so it doesn’t sit there and have an
impact on them at a later date.
When I picked up Tzvi from gan, he ran to me and I hugged him tight. He seemed okay
and most parents would probably not want to bring up the negative feelings from this
morning. But I knew better. I asked him what happened and he didn’t want to (or
couldn’t) express what happened. But then I started to tell HIM the story, and we went
through it together, and he even showed me where he ran to on the street and where
the lady found him. We discussed it a little more that night and even the next morning.
I made sure to end with the “happily ever after” ending….”it was scary, but in the end,
you went back to the gan, the Morah found you and you calmed down and played and
had a great day. And then in the end Ema came and picked you up and now you are
safe with Ema.”
The next day, he walked into gan a little hesitantly (with me of course). I reminded him
that he is safe, that he will be okay. I felt secure and confident and I sensed that feeling
in him. And I think it was because I told the story, I opened up the emotion, connected it
to logic, and helped him to realize that he can get through hard time and come out okay.
I was thinking about how so much of Torah is made up of stories: Hashem writes stories
in the Torah to help us connect to the lives of our leaders, and really learn and
incorporate the lessons from them. The Torah Sheba’al Peh is full of Aggadata in the
form of stories to help us connect to the deeper messages of Chazal. Stories really
connect the heart and the mind, and help us process things in a real way. And for our
children, telling the stories that happened to them or others can really help them
process the events in their lives in a real meaningful and healthy way.
And the ending is so important, because it helps kids realize that yes, they will go
through difficult times in life (even parents who mess up!), but they can be resilient.
Things can be okay in the end. No, life isn’t always “happily ever after,” but when kids
are resilient, a happy ending can be possible.
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