I’m trying to set consequences. Fair ones. To set them and follow through with them in regulated, relationally attuned ways.
The sprinkler heads are spraying. First comes the air-being-let-out-of-a-tire whoosh, followed by the water blasting through like it’s coming from a fire hydrant.
The dry ground needs it. More so, I need it. When things get too dry, I get constricted. It feels unhealthy. Deprived. I set the boundary intensely. I needed her to hear me. Right then. It mattered.
And she walked away.
So when she opened the door to the back porch, I took away the fruit gummies, just like I said I would.
Internally, this feels messy. Like a storm of debris swirling around so thickly I can’t tell what’s what.
Is it okay to get heard by demanding it? By intensifying the need until you push another person away?
It’s a four-egg day.
Of the eight chickens, four eggs is maximum output. Most days it’s two. Some days it’s three or one. And then there are days like today, when a little magic spreads over our budding homestead and four eggs appear.
I told Evelyn my superstition about four-egg days, and she didn’t quite see it the same way. During that conversation, I also apologized. She teared up and told me, “It’s impossible to do two things at once.” Which helped. me better understood the bind my request had put her in.
It dawned on me that I need to be more mindful of what’s already on her plate when I ask something of her. Maybe the thing I’m asking isn’t unreasonable, but the timing of it might be.
Later, Dave, Evelyn, and I took a deep dive into slavery after both Dave and I reacted negatively to Evelyn saying, “I want” and “Give me.” As we talked about what slavery actually meant—that a person was forced to do what someone else wanted, whenever they wanted it—it led Evelyn to say, “Well, then everybody would want a slave.”
She wasn’t necessarily wrong.
But when we talked about the cost of that—the inability to play when you wanted, stop when you wanted, rest when you wanted, or make choices about your own life—she began to understand the cost of slavery differently.
Now, whether that history lesson translates into a softer entry when she’s requesting things from us, time will tell.
Unrelated: the sunflower is bowing toward the ground like it has the worst case of scoliosis I’ve ever seen. To harvest or not to harvest weighs heavily on my mind. I hear the leaves need to brown first. So I guess we’ll wait.
Love, Jaclynn