Humbled by a Six Year Old

Recently we dog-sat for some friends of ours who were taking their kids to an amusement park, and as they were dropping the dog off, their 6-year-old pointed to a spot in my living room reserved for the record/cd player with some scattered mail and asked why it was “always messy” every time he came over. He also pointed out some markings on the wall made by my son, which we haven’t bothered to cover up yet. And while I know he didn’t mean anything real by it – kids say the darndest things, after all – my feelings were still hurt a little. Not because I take the comments of a child as gospel but because I am someone who struggles to maintain a clean house and I actually thought my living room looked fine. It looked lived in, like two adults and a child (plus four cats and two dogs) inhabit the space, because we do! I’ve never been someone who decorated her home to look like a hotel room or kept it pristine. I keep it clean and tidy and when company is coming over, I want the house to feel and be clean. These friends in particular are more like family to us, so I wasn’t particularly worried that they’d see our house at 85% clean and take offense lol. (And I know the child wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings – he’s just being a kid!)

What kept bothering me, however, was the fact that my brain held onto the comment and my feelings remained stung. I wanted to sit with that discomfort to figure out why I felt the way I did. Was I letting a child’s comments make me feel bad about myself, at the ripe age  of 43? Surely I know better. So what was it? Why did it bother me so much?

Then I remembered something from my own childhood. When I was somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 my grandma was friends with a woman named Billie Jean, who had been one of the original Mouseketeers in the Mickey Mouse Club. At the time, she lived in a senior living community in the Santa Clarita Valley where I grew up and sometimes my grandma would take me over to her house to swim in the community pool (which was giant!). Side note: many many many years later I would revisit the same housing community as an adult to meet my now-husband’s (then boyfriend’s) Grandmom, who also lived there. Small world! Billie Jean had a dog, one of those kinds that barks a lot and gets carried around like a child (maybe it was a small poodle? I don’t recall). The dog had kinky white curly hair and one day I proclaimed in front of both my grandma and Billie Jean that Billie Jean’s hair matched her dog’s hair.

Needless to say, she did not appreciate my candor.

Second side note (but this time in bold): If you’re old do you recall a story years ago about a former Mouseketeer who sued Disney because while taking her grandchildren to a backstage area, one or more cast members removed their character costumes and ~traumatized~ her grandchildren? That was Billie Jean.

What have I learned from this experience? First, that Karma can take years to come back at you. Even decades. Even if it’s tiny lol. Second, as a mother to a 5-year-old myself, I have had a taste of what’s to come. A sampling of the truly unfiltered mindset of a growing human being who will say what he thinks out loud because he doesn’t know yet what’s socially acceptable and what’s not, or where the lines blur in between. And third, when confronted with a feeling you don’t understand or like, it’s okay to take your time and simply sit with it. Allow yourself to be impacted by whatever emotion has struck you, and then examine why you feel the way you do.

Oh,  and when they came back to pick up their dog, the scattered mail was cleaned up.  Just in case… (they never came inside lol)