Category: parenting

Shaped By Our Suffering

When we lived in Colorado, I would see trees on the edge of cliffs as we drove through the mountains. The wind and weather at that elevation could be brutal. But these trees would grow thick roots to ground themselves into the earth, even as their trunk and branches were bent and battered and grew angled towards the sky to withstand the constant pressure from the wind.

I recently came across the phrase “shaped by our suffering,” which speaks to how difficult experiences can shape a person’s character, perspective, or life path. While painful and often unwanted, the idea is that suffering can lead to personal growth, resilience, and a deeper understanding of life.

For as long as my son can remember, he has had challenges. He has had seizures, memory, attention, and learning difficulties. He was isolated even before the pandemic and, even now, is often on the outside of many social situations. He had so many dreams taken away from him before he could try to achieve them.

Through it all, though, his challenges and struggles shaped him into a sweet, empathetic, resilient, and big-hearted person. Those are his roots, which ground him as a person and to this family and keep him from getting blown away by what he endures every day to be in the world.

His struggles have also shaped me, forcing me to reflect on myself, my life, and my choices and develop a greater self-awareness. The months in the hospital while the doctors, nurses, and support staff kept him alive and rebuilt what he had lost changed my view on life, gratitude, and presence. The strength and grace he shows daily in the face of his challenges guide how I think about and approach challenges in my day.

The hardship we endured as a family, which tried to tear us apart, formed deeper, stronger connections between my wife and me and in our family. Today, those roots continue to strengthen, ground us, and make us more resilient against whatever comes our way.

Like the trees I saw in Colorado, we are shaped by the winds of our struggles. The storms we face may bend and scar us, but they also deepen our roots, making us more resilient and grounded in the things that truly matter. My son’s suffering has shaped him into a remarkable person with an incredible capacity for empathy, strength, and love. It’s taught me to live with more gratitude, to be more present, and to face my challenges with the same strength as my son.

The hardships we endure don’t define us, but they shape us—and sometimes, they make us stronger than we ever imagined possible.

All the Feels

Well, that happened.

I hoped we were better. I hoped we could be compassionate and selfless enough to think beyond the issues that impact us individually and vote for the issues that affect our country. I hoped we could see past the tactics of anger and fear that have polarized us against each other. I hoped that the close-minded view that the country was meant only for people who looked, spoke, and prayed like us would bend to consider the segments of the population at risk of losing their rights and identity.

But the results spoke for all of us. Unlike the last election, there were no claims of a stolen election. There is no debate that the Electoral College doesn’t represent what the country believes like the popular vote does because, this year, they both overwhelmingly showed what our country has become.

The past week has been filled with armchair analysis and retroactive criticism about what went wrong for the Democratic Party. Each clip tries to encapsulate a soundbite to explain the rationally irrational human brain, often contradicting another clip that uses the opposite justification.

I’m not sure we will ever know the answer. It certainly won’t change what is about to happen. But I think people want change but don’t want to change. We don’t seek information that could change us because our minds and hearts are not open to change, and we bury ourselves deep into echo chambers that reaffirm our righteousness.

What I do know is that this week, I felt all the feels. As a husband, the father of a special needs child, the godfather of a teenage girl, a veteran, and a friend of beautiful humans from different countries with different beliefs and identities, I was shocked by the result, angry at who we have become, and afraid of what the world will look like for the people who I care about in the next few years and for my son when he grows up.

We may not recognize it because we’re so caught up in our feelings, but our kids have a lot of feelings about this, too. They see what is happening and hear our conversations even if they don’t understand the details. They’re trying to make sense of what is happening, too, and if we can’t do it, how can we expect them to do it?

What we can do is help them with their feelings. We can encourage them to say their feelings out loud and to ask for help when their feelings are confusing or too big. We can demonstrate this behavior by sharing our feelings with them in an age-appropriate way. We can be present, listen, and demonstrate sympathy and empathy for them and everyone who needs it now more than ever.

Last year, my wife published a children’s book called “And” about feelings and the permission to feel multiple, conflicting feelings all at once. We use AND a lot in our house, as do our friends and readers. I think it’s such an important message, especially in these challenging times, and especially for our children, that we’re offering a 50% discount on the book to share the message and help as many children and families as possible.

To claim the discount, visit our store and use the code “ALLTHEFEELS2024” for 50% off through November 2024 when you order directly from kettlepot press.

kerri monnerat and social emotional childrens book

Take care of yourself and your family. And let’s take care of each other.

Repeating History

In case you haven’t heard, we have a big election coming up in the United States. To be fair, many countries are seeing their politics follow the same loud, divisive, truth-adjacent bullying trend that was made popular by the success of one of our “candidates” in 2016.

It’s even worse this year.

It’s also terrifying to think this is the world my son will grow up in.

Candidates are being elected and staying in power by peddling fear and hate for the “other.” The easy group to target is immigrants. Falsehoods about their choice of protein and taking over small towns across the country continued to spread long after they were disproved. But it’s a slippery slope to go from immigrants to those who support immigrants to any group that is different or believes differently. History has not been kind to people like my son, for example. People with disabilities were lumped into the “other,” the inferior, and the unworthy of life.

Too many people believe and repeat the blatant lies coming from these candidates, either because they align with the way they want the world to be or because we have lost the ability to think critically, question what we are told, and discover the truth for ourselves. Even when all the data and science support a particular fact, if it goes against what they want to be true, they’ll lean into their doubt. They’ll claim the other side and media are biased for saying the same thing (e.g., facts), and they’ll listen to the pundits in their echo chamber because surfacing “alternative facts” makes them “unbiased.” They think their doubt makes them clever. They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.

They think their doubt makes them clever.
They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.

Single-issue voters are willing to look the other way and ignore the unpalatable aspects of a candidate as long as the candidate holds (or says they hold) the same position on a specific issue. “Sure, this candidate is a felon, racist, sexist, fascist dictator, but they’re pro-life, which is the only thing that matters.” Worse, they’ll combine their logic with the doubters above and try to justify their position by convincing themselves that the other labels are misunderstood, out of context, or “just politics.” They can’t believe someone who agrees with their position on a key issue could be a monster, even if the candidate only claims to agree to get enough votes to push a much more dystopian, self-serving agenda.

This includes people who believe that our political system is broken and that bringing in an outsider is the way to fix it. If one candidate represents the establishment, regardless of their policies or fitness to lead, they won’t get the vote. Even in a crisis where the country would benefit from someone who understands the system, and even if the non-establishment candidate is unqualified, a criminal, incompetent, and dangerous, they believe that voting for and electing an outsider will make the country better.

When I was in history class, we read about World War II and asked how a country could elect a party and a person who would ultimately commit such atrocities on the world. I couldn’t understand how millions of people could minimize or normalize the extreme rhetoric, the hate, and the violence. It seemed so unfathomable that anyone could look the other way or fully support their country’s direction.

But here we are, nearly a century later, repeating history. People are spreading the idea that our country has lost its way and that we need to go back, that outsiders are a threat to our national identity, and that the other side is what will cause our country’s collapse. Fear, hate, us versus them—it’s the same playbook. And the party and its people are going along with it because it’s more important to win and be in control than to be good and do good. When you’re willing to win at any cost, humanity loses.

It makes me wonder if, 100 years from now, students will sit in a history class wondering how we let this happen. They’ll have the benefits of time and hindsight to see the similarities between parties trying to make their countries great again at any cost because they were too focused on looking back at what they thought their country was instead of looking forward to what it could become.