You Can Feel More Than One Thing At a Time

Feelings are confusing.

Our children know this, the children inside our 35, 50, 67, 82 year old selves know this.

Some people would rather ignore them, rise above them, but emotions are part of being human, like thunderstorms are part of the created world. If the earth wasn’t spinning, we wouldn’t have weather patterns. If you and I weren’t breathing and taking in sensations and cues from our environment, we wouldn’t be living.

When a child has an emotional response, or just A RESPONSE, as we say when we are babies because babies emote (cry) to communicate, we quickly realize something is not right. The baby is hungry, tired, has a dirty diaper, needs to be held, has a fever, is hitting a growth spurt, comes to the disturbing realization that this is in fact NOT the same as the world inside its mother’s womb. Change is hard. Witnessing another’s adaptation to change is a deep level of love and care. Any mother will tell you, being around an unhappy/emotional child 24/7 is exhausting.

Then we grow older, and the feelings and the causes of those feelings multiply and grow big to match our big grown up bodies. There are all of a sudden MANY things to laugh, cry, and rage about.

Labeling someone as “too emotional” means that their level of attention to the patterns around…