you’re too hard on yourself
“At least I’m doing something,” Zoe says, shadow-mumbling, making reckless half-spins in my office chair, turned to face Kevin and me, coffee mug cradled in her hands. “I mean, I’m trying.” I wait for a wave of hot coffee to crest and spill over the side of her mug, wait for it to drip from her fingers, but I say nothing, knowing the erratic demonstration expresses unrest she has otherwise kept carefully hidden. Her thoughts, suddenly and mysteriously defensive, rise beneath unpredictable anxiety. For a moment, the pretense of imperturbable nonchalance falls.
Kevin and I glance at one another, and mentally I search the conversation for triggers, sorting words said, words now diffused into silence. Somewhere, she’s conjured displeasure we don’t feel; she’s made up some assessment and judged herself wanting. Is this is self-bullying? She’s an expert on her own imperfections.
“You are too hard on yourself,” I say, getting straight to the point. The words come out aching, forged in the caverns of my heart, where she began as part of me. This I know: we have more grace for her than she has for herself. “We love you. We’re proud of you. We’re not looking at you thinking I wish, I wish, I wish.” Tears slowly slide from the corners of my eyes. What happens to us that we so easily lose track of the truth?
I think of Jesus, of the way he was with broken people. They were always surprised that he could know about their messy lives and still love them. “Go and sin no more” never came out as a lecture.
“Are you crying?” Zoe asks me now, disbelieving, planting her legs on the floor.
I nod, rubbing away the tears with the side of my hand.
“Why?” Her eyes glisten and she flicks her gaze toward the window, that sprawling tree, the wide-open street.
“Because I love you. And you beat yourself up.” Because for some strange reason you imagine us sitting here thinking that you don’t measure up.
“I do,” she agrees. “I shouldn’t. Oh don’t cry; you’re making me cry. It’s just that if Riley and Adam were different they’d have already made all the mistakes. But they don’t screw up the same way I will, the same way I do…” She turns again to the window, shifting her gaze outside, letting the words hang, open-ended.
“And that feels like a lot of pressure,” I say, and she nods, gluing her gaze to the world beyond. For the first time I understand that when God said, “there’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9),” he meant it for comfort.
“Is there something we could do differently to make it feel less so?” Kevin asks, and Zoe shakes her head, still looking away.
“No, it’s nothing you do,” she says to the window. “I just feel that way.”
I can’t help it; the tears spill. Wasn’t it just moments ago, as the three of us reminisced about our week with God, that Kevin shared the impression that we aren’t meant to beat ourselves up over our chronic and inevitable imperfection? “We’re meant to celebrate Jesus, who He is, what He’s done, His perfection, more than we focus on what we’re not,” he’d said. It’s subtle, but the latter, that self-condemnation, can still amount to self-centeredness. Transformational growth comes as a product of love, as Christ loves us and we love and believe in him, not the denial of sin, but in honest recognition, the grace-bought freedom from it. Kevin said as much and I wrapped it tight, a belt of truth holding broken-me together. I can’t throw a single stone. And now I sit grieving my daughter’s instant disapproval of herself, a disapproval she seems to have transferred to us. I’m trying, she said, as if she doesn’t know we see.
“I see you,” I say to her, only it comes out as a whisper, and she inhales sharply, as though I’ve suddenly gripped her arm and my touch has come as a surprise. “I mean, I see the truth of you.”
“I know,” she says simply, and I hear what she does not say, that this clear fact brings her both great comfort and uneasy vulnerability. If I know her well, if I can see, how much more does God, whose view is limitless, see and know of her? David wrote, “Where can I go from your Spirit? …If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you (Psalm 139:7-12).”
“And do you also know that even when you make mistakes we love you?” I ask because there’s no fear in love, because the critical difference between self-reproach and self-discipline comes in view of love and grace.
“Yes,” she says without hesitation, quickly turning back from the window to meet our eyes. We fall silent, Kevin, Zoe, and me, sitting in that certainty, sipping coffee from mugs, steam curling over our fingers. “You made me cry,” she says finally, a mock sulk, her mouth curling up at the edges, but I am still drifting back from contemplation.
“If it breaks my heart to know you beat yourself up,” I say at last, setting the coffee aside to press my thumbs into the leaky corners of my eyes, “don’t you think it grieves God to see us be so hard on ourselves?”
However well we love; God loves better.
