A few weeks ago I was talking to an old friend, giving her an update on my operation and my family. I talked about my daughter and how she was not patient with me, and yelled at me from time to time. It is frustrating, but I know this is the teen years talking. My friend responded with the telling of the tale about my teen years and how mean I was to my mother. How I yelled at my mother. How badly she felt for my mom. This story had been retold in every conversation for 40 years. It gets old, especially the part about how I am getting back what I deserve.
That comment is not funny. This is a difficult time and it is not about me. It is about my daughter. She is going through an extremely hard time in her life. Is she struggling now because I yelled at my mother 40 years ago? That doesn't punish me, that punishes her. Is God that callous? If I had known that would be the result, to cause my daughter such intense pain, then I would have succumbed to humility.
She yells at me because she knows that she can. She gets desperate inside. She gets frustrated. Sometimes she really is frustrated with me and angry with me. But my sense is that she doesn't know where these feelings are coming from and it gets bottled up inside. She yells at me because she knows that I will still love her.
Go ahead baby, yell at me now. This doesn't last forever. It gets better. And the only people hanging onto it are the people who cannot understand, who are not in our world.
