The ruffles of my toddler’s skirt undulate around her in a wide fan as she twirls until she collapses, too dizzy to continue spinning. Her smile is wide as she giggles, and her honey blond hair falls across her crystal-blue eyes.
“You are so beautiful,” I say in awe, more for my benefit than her own.
“I know, Mama,” she says unselfconsciously, plucking the petals off a wilting flower one by one. For her, her beauty is nothing to brag about. It simply is.
….
The little one trips over her feet, upsetting her glass of orange juice as she topples, drenching herself in stickiness and wailing over fresh humiliation and the sting of loss.
My son, two years her senior, is at her side in a flash, administering condolences and sopping up the spill with the tablecloth. Before I can cross the kitchen to reach them, she is all smiles again, racing away and begging him to catch her.
“You are such a good boy,” I smile down at my son, eager to affirm any sign of positive behavior.
“I know,” he says with a one-shouldered shrug before racing after his sister. I marvel at the sheer nonchalance with which he receives this compliment as a simple statement of fact.
…
“You are so beautiful,” my husband declares with an appreciative glance and perfunctory peck before we are out the door to Mass.
I feel my lips draw back into a tight smile, the kind you reflexively offer to strangers at the grocery store—meant to acknowledge their presence while simultaneously deflecting any attempt at interaction. There’s a tightness in my chest, a desperation to deflect the compliment. I rush out the door before I can ask myself why.
…
I draw my veil around my face and look towards the floor as we rush out of the vestibule. I draw a deep breath of the fresh air and sigh, hoping to cleanse myself of the humiliations of the last hour. A man I do not recognize catches my eye as I shuffle wayward children towards the parking lot. “Good job, mama,” he says with a quiet confidence and warm smile. Clearly, he had borne witness to the weekly chaos I like to call “The Taming of the Pews.”
I mutter the obligatory, “Thank you,” in response before quickening my step, turning my head to hide the tears welling up in my eyes.
…
Where do the walls come from?
“You’re beautiful,” I say to my daughter.
“I know,” she replies.
“You’re good,” I remind me son.
“I know,” he assures me.
Without an ounce of conceit, my little ones receive the affirmations of their worthiness as simple reflections of the truth.
Presumably, I was once little enough to find my own goodness self-evident. But these days, a kind reminder from a stranger that I am, in fact, a good mother, completely undoes me.
There is a line in that old 80’s movie, The Breakfast Club, in which teenagers commiserate, wondering why parents seem to be creatures so far removed from the children they presumably once were. “When you grow old, your heart dies,” Ally Sheedy’s character whispers.
Is this what happens to us as we grow, that leads us to keep everyone, even those closest to us, at arm’s length? Is this why we build our walls – to hide the decaying core of our being from view?
Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe we erect the walls not to obscure the decrepit remains of our childhood idealism, but to protect what is demonstrably alive, beating, and exposed? Growing old isn’t the death of our hearts as much as it is the wounding of them. At some point, someone comes along who reflects something to us about ourselves other than “You’re good,” or “You’re beautiful” and we have to choose whether we continue to allow those external messages to have purchase on us.
Some of this is a good thing; we have to be able to denounce the lies we’re told about ourselves. But at some point, to one degree or another, we also lose the ability to accept the good things others reflect back to us.
Such a posture might keep us from being prideful, but it really isn’t humble either. Humility is being able to stand before God and see ourselves as He sees us: imperfect but loved, so that, like my children, we can stand before the Creator who desires us into being, whose intricate handiwork is etched into every facet of our souls, and respond to the One who declares us “very good” with faith that His architecture is larger than our near-sighted perspective of ourselves.
Our walls have their purpose, but the best walls are not solid like steel or brick, but, like the cells that make us up, selectively permeable. Barriers are necessary for our protection, but that same protection threatens to kill us off when it refuses to let love in. That is when our hearts begin to die.
The alternative to this spiritual death is to allow ourselves to receive the love of Christ, and not purely in a spiritual sense. Christ’s love is embodied in His Church, in the imperfect creatures He has chosen to become His hands and feet on earth. To become His love, we must first receive it.
Despite all our faults and failures, we are chosen, wanted, and loved. Like my children, we are shining in the eyes of our Father not because we have earned it, but because of the light of His sight. As St. Paul declares to the Corinthians, when we turn to the Lord, our veils are lifted. The walls are broken down, and it is in this raw, unfiltered, and vulnerable place that the glory of the Lord transforms us with ever-increasing glory.
As it turns out, letting ourselves be loved remakes us into the image of Love Itself.
Only then can we receive the truth about our own goodness and say simply, “I know.”