“Bye, Daddy!” My preschooler excitedly waved her boarding pass from the airport security line, the thrill of a new adventure sparkling in her eyes. I did my best to follow her positive lead, but my anxiety had been building for weeks. I had pictured my toddler son charging through airplane aisles and my daughter wandering away from the stroller into crowded airports. Yet, there I was, embarking on my first solo flight with two kids. I took a few deep breaths, looked at my eager kiddos, and mustered up the thought, This is going to be fun. Every time things got dicey, I came back to it. This is going to be fun. This is going to be fun. Over and over (and over and over and over).
And you know what? It wasn’t smooth or perfect, but it was fun. We survived it all.
From this I learned that I can do hard things. No, flying with my kids was not the first hard thing I’ve ever done. That’s silly. But I think that for most of my life, I’ve been resisting hard things rather than leaning in to experience them. The last few years have taught me that you can’t do that forever. Life will get you on the struggle bus at one point or another, no matter how much you’ve prepared or strategized to be elsewhere. Once I find myself on that bus, I usually try to do everything in my power to get the h-e-double-hockey-sticks off: yell, cry, manipulate, bribe—just get me out of there at all costs! And you know what? It never works. It’s not one of those red sightseeing buses you can hop on or off whenever you’d like.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that we had a few rides on the struggle bus during the flight with my kids. At one such point, my toddler got super tired and had an extremely loud meltdown (during which he may or may not have assaulted our seatmate with his tablet). I hugged him as tightly as I could and whispered in his ear, “This is hard, but you can do it.” He eventually calmed down and fell asleep. Aren’t we all the same? When we are in the midst of a hard thing, sometimes we just need to hear “Yes this is hard. But yes, you can do it.”
It’s normal and part of the human experience for things to be hard. Now that I’m getting older and wiser (is this when I look in the mirror and realize I’ve turned into my mother?), I’m learning that we can’t be our best selves without doing hard things. Remember when swinging across the monkey bars on the playground by yourself was the hardest thing in your whole life? What about when your BFF sat at a different lunch table in the middle school cafeteria? Or when you were trying to excel at your first job? Now that you’ve created, birthed, and raised humans, that’s all a piece of cake. Look how far you’ve come, mama! With each test you’ve struggled, survived, and grown. And I’m confident that our battle scars make us more “us” than our beauty marks.
So whatever hard thing you are tackling right now, you can do it. Maybe it’s a level one hard thing like your kid dumping his entire bag of popcorn on the floor in Target. Maybe it’s a level ten hard thing like loss, betrayal, or sickness. Either way, you’re ready. Not ready like, “This is going to be fun.” But ready like, “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but that’s OK. Because I can do hard things.”
