Fragile Things
“Mama, we have a fragile friendship.”
This is what my son said to me on the walk home from school yesterday. My heart broke a little as he described a moment in his day. His first experience of friendship failure. I complimented him on his bravery in sharing his hurt feelings with his friends. Then we tried to celebrate the wins that came with their healthy reactions—an apology here, a quiet acknowledgement there. Later that evening I heard him talking to our cat, giving himself a pep talk of sorts, saying something wise about forgiveness and tomorrow being a new day. Trying to make sense of his little world, off kilter for a moment in time.
My own learning showed up in the echo of his opening salvo. The incisive eight-year-old insight that under the weight of hurt feelings some friendships are fragile. I knew I needed to write about it. I blame two decades spent in an English Literature classroom for my proclivity to search for life lessons when faced with relational pain. I always want suffering to be worth something! Poets do it. Playwrights do it. Essayists writing about philosophers do it. My reframing habit is to try and make sense of painful encounters at work or with loved ones, whatever exchange has gone wrong, in a meaning-making effort to navigate hurt. I want some sort of takeaway. A summary to make it make sense.
A graduate seminar I’ve been teaching for the last two months on research in the realm of education is just now wrapping up. My head is swimming in the language of ethics and bias and interpretation, all of which are terms that bleed into our everyday as we live in relation to others. I wonder if our various fragile friendships may actually provide us with the scaffolding to build out a sort of personal research project. A self-study to consider our reactions to the problems (and solutions!) that our relationships in and with the world present.
If my eight-year-old can do it…