When I lose my temper and yell at my children, what I want to say to them afterwards is not "Sweetie, I'm sorry I yelled," but "Sweetie, I'm sorry I scared you. I yelled because I was mad. People yell sometimes. But even if I yelled so loudly that I blew the whole house down, that doesn't mean that I'll hurt you or that I don't love you. I will always love you-- even if you yell at me so loudly you blow the block down."
This isn't about racism, but it is about anger. My mother told me a story recently. She grew up with parents who had met in graduate school, fallen in love, and three months later gotten married—and then, so far as any of their children could see, gone on to have a perfect marriage. They never fought with one another. They never shouted. They never disagreed. Or, if they disagreed, it was over small things and easily resolved and nobody was hurt or upset about it. All of which is, in fact, not the case. My grandparents, like any normal couple, did have arguments and fights and disagreements with one another. But they did it behind closed doors; their children never saw it. (Yay, the 1950's?)
And so my mother talked about how she and her siblings grew up thinking that not only were you supposed to take less than a year to recognize the person you wanted to marry, you were never supposed to get angry with the person you loved. If you were in a relationship and found yourself fighting with the other person, that meant something was totally wrong—with you—and this wasn't the right person besides, because as the paradigm of the parents clearly demonstrated, healthy couples don't shout at one another. Apparently this idea took quite some time to get over.
(And this was instructive for me: I'd never thought about the negative fallout from a happy marriage before.)
So I really agree with this: I want to teach them that anger is okay. That it's okay to yell; that anger doesn't cancel love. Yes.
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This isn't about racism, but it is about anger. My mother told me a story recently. She grew up with parents who had met in graduate school, fallen in love, and three months later gotten married—and then, so far as any of their children could see, gone on to have a perfect marriage. They never fought with one another. They never shouted. They never disagreed. Or, if they disagreed, it was over small things and easily resolved and nobody was hurt or upset about it. All of which is, in fact, not the case. My grandparents, like any normal couple, did have arguments and fights and disagreements with one another. But they did it behind closed doors; their children never saw it. (Yay, the 1950's?)
And so my mother talked about how she and her siblings grew up thinking that not only were you supposed to take less than a year to recognize the person you wanted to marry, you were never supposed to get angry with the person you loved. If you were in a relationship and found yourself fighting with the other person, that meant something was totally wrong—with you—and this wasn't the right person besides, because as the paradigm of the parents clearly demonstrated, healthy couples don't shout at one another. Apparently this idea took quite some time to get over.
(And this was instructive for me: I'd never thought about the negative fallout from a happy marriage before.)
So I really agree with this: I want to teach them that anger is okay. That it's okay to yell; that anger doesn't cancel love. Yes.