Yesterday, I had a very difficult moment with my 8-year-old son. He has been very rebellious and doesn’t clean his room, doesn’t protect his brother, doesn’t follow the rules. But the hardest thing is, he has started to lie a lot. I hate lies, I feel they are the gateway to all evils, the root of everything that’s wrong. Yesterday’s lie hurt me a lot because he not only lied about not having done something, but he blamed a smaller child. So instead of spanking him or yelling at him, I told him that I didn’t want to witness the type of person he was becoming and that I would therefore leave the house. By this point in the argument, he was severely upset and didn’t want me to leave. “How can you think it’s okay to blame someone innocent? I mean, explain to me why you decided this, why you did it? Why did you think it was okay? Can you imagine if the little one had gotten into trouble when he actually did nothing wrong? That’s not okay.” I said. “I was afraid you would scold me. I was cowardly. I’m good for nothing, a stupid, and now I’m going to lose my dad because I’m a coward,” he responded. I tried to calm him down and begged him to remember that I had taught him not to degrade himself in such a way. I explained that he and his siblings are the reason why I do everything and that leaving was best to avoid watching him throw his life away. He was making the wrong choices, he was taking the easy way out. Life, at every step, provides two options – the right path and the wrong one – and often, the right path is more difficult. Often, the wrong path seems the easiest but the outcome is worse.
I pause here to clarify that I would never leave my children, but I needed him to understand that this was as important to me as leaving the house would be.
Knowing that he really likes video games, I tried to explain with an analogy what I understand as the right and wrong path. My idea was to show him that the right path, although more difficult, makes you braver and stronger, while the wrong path makes you more cowardly and weaker. So I explained that when we start in life we are like a piece of paper and that each time we take the right path, even if it’s difficult, in the end we get an upgrade and we become cardboard, and then wood, and then metal, and so on until we become unbreakable like diamond. Conversely, every time we take the wrong path or make the wrong decision, if we were wood, we get a downgrade and become cardboard, and then paper and then we are nothing.
All my words and thoughts and good intentions could never have prepared me for his response. “I understood, Dad, if you take the right path many times, you improve until you become a diamond and even turn into water. While if you go the wrong way you deteriorate from being wood to cardboard, and from cardboard to paper, until you burn and become lava.” My face must have baffled him because he stayed quiet as if waiting to see if I understood. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say with the lava and the water, honey,” I said.
To which he replied, “You become water in the end, because that way everyone wants to be near you. You make flowers bloom on everyone’s body. You make everything flourish and quench everyone’s thirst. Plus, you flow and are fast like water, you go everywhere. On the other hand, at the end of the wrong path you become lava because you burn everything, anyone who gets close to you suffers, nothing grows, everything burns, and you are slow and never get anywhere. Do you understand me?”
My head, my heart, all of me was shocked, so impressed, that water has taken on a new understanding in my thought process. My 8-year-old son is evidently more emotionally intelligent than I am and in a minute he had managed to transform me more deeply than I to him. It’s not about being tougher but about being more like water. So, well, I wanted to share with you how yesterday, an 8-year-old boy named Eduardo educated his 48-year-old father. And how my only possible response was “I love you, it’s okay, I’m not going to leave, but I would like you to make better decisions in the future, so that one day you can be like water”. To which he responded “yes, dad, thank you. I promise you.”