The Sooner Your Kids See You as Human, the Better | Field Notes

Somewhere along the way, each at different times and ages, my kids stopped seeing me as superhuman/supermom and started seeing me as a real person. I won't pretend there wasn't some judgment and tears involved. I also won't pretend I wasn't, underneath all of it, a little relieved that the cat was out of the bag.

For years, and I think this might be by design in some way we don't fully understand, children see their parents as something close to infallible. We’re not exactly perfect, but operating on a plane slightly above the ordinary human messiness. And then they get older, and the curtain drops, and there you are. EXPOSED. Just a person. A person who gets annoyed and says so, a person who has opinions about sight lines and the view from the staircase window that used to be nothing but skies and green. The mom who drops the f-bomb on occasion. The exhausted, frazzled one who has yelled at the top of her lungs in her SUV to get her point across. The mom with the serious sugar addiction. The one who can be moody and judgmental, and oh so annoying. Yep, that mom.

There's actually something developmental happening when the curtain drops. Young children need their parents to be capable and steady. Then adolescence arrives and something shifts. Part of growing up is realizing your parents are people, not just parents. The horror and judgment your kids show in those moments is actually healthy. It means they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. It means the relationship was solid enough to survive a little disappointment.

I am an interior designer, which means I have a particular and admittedly intense relationship with space and light and what you see when you look out a window. I am deeply affected by visual chaos. I can't say it's always convenient, this relationship with space and light, but I'm also a work in progress over here.

So when some construction began near our home and landed directly in the sight line of a wall of windows I had specifically oriented toward the open space of trees and sky, I had feelings about it. And they were strong ones. I had these feelings out loud, in my home, in what I understood to be the privacy of my own walls. My then eleven year old understood it a little differently.

First, I should tell you something about this child. He is, and has always been, a natural born button pusher, a pot stirrer, someone who can read a room just well enough to know exactly where the line is and then step enthusiastically and cheerfully over it. Usually sporting a big sly grin beneath his glasses.

He would also never hurt anyone intentionally. But completely innocent he was not, either. He's still this way at fifteen, and honestly, I wouldn't change it, most of the time. It's part of what makes him, well, him and so lovable.

One afternoon the people involved were nearby, just the four of us pleasantly chatting in our front yard with my youngest son in earshot. My son decided this was the exact right moment to share that his mother had been, and I'm reconstructing here, raging about the whole addition project. Yes, raging was his term, and he wasn't entirely wrong. He kept going, adding little details of what I'd said, even as I was looking at him sideways with every signal a human face can muster short of actual flames.

What seemed like ten minutes was probably sixty seconds. They stood there, almost speechless. I mean, what do you say to that? Time stood excruciatingly still. We all wanted the ground to open up and swallow us whole. I quietly, and with an angry death stare, leaned down to tell my younger one through clenched teeth that was enough. It was truly not my finest moment on several levels simultaneously.

Did he fully understand the repercussions of what he was doing? No. Did he sense that something significant was happening in that front yard? Probably. Did he stop? He did not. We apologized and then I crawled inside with my tail between my legs. But some things are hard to put back once they're out, and that one was out, in front of everyone. My private self had officially made it into the front yard.

My older son, who was fifteen or sixteen at the time, thankfully inside and already possessed of a fully functioning moral compass and an acute sensitivity to social catastrophe, was mortified to learn what had transpired in his absence.

What I keep coming back to, though, is not the embarrassment. Or not only the embarrassment. How can you fully escape that? It's that my son at eleven was just being honest in the way children are honest before the world teaches them that honesty has context. That what's true and what's useful to say out loud are not always the same thing. That our homes are containers and the walls are supposed to hold our private conversations. He learned that. He knows it now in a way that I suspect he'll carry into his own life and his own private conversations. Which I'm sure exist, because he is also human. I'm not sure any of us will ever fully forget. And that's the thing, really.

I vent about sight lines and get worked up about things that might seem insignificant or ridiculous to someone else. My kids are still figuring out what stays inside and what goes out. My middle son notices everything and will sometimes look at me with an expression that contains an entire moral position. I know that expression. I have earned it more times than I can count. And honestly, somewhere in me I know he has his own private conversations too, verbalized or not, ones he'd probably prefer stayed contained.

Because that's what humans do as we're processing life and our feelings. All of us, in every house. We say things behind closed doors. We express, vent, complain, work things out in real time. Sometimes gracefully and other times... well.

And yet the people closest to us inevitably see beyond that outline. They see the whole person. My kids know who I am. It’s not the idea of me or the mother shaped outline. It’s no longer some perfect version. The actual me, opinions and all. Maybe this is what happens in every close relationship eventually. The people we love stop being ideas and become people. Flawed, complicated, occasionally annoying people. Maybe that's not a failure of the relationship. Maybe it IS the relationship. I find, more and more, that I am just plain relieved. Mostly.

xx,

Michel