Prince Charming and the White Trash Fit

 

What if you were a damsel who came from a poor White family where there was a great deal of distress for generations, and you were having none of it? If you were like Cinderella, and worked from morning until night to care for your family home without a kind word or any help, I imagine you could use some rest. Doing everything a person in your situation could ever be expected to do for your family and more, you would deserve it. Your persistent efforts to elevate your family and care for its future is befitting of royalty, if royalty was the product of profound love and every day hard work. 

What if your mother, whatever her faults may have been, taught you how to present yourself to the world so that people have to respect you, regardless of the circumstances you come from. You dress well, act right, and honor the depth of your experience and the quality of your intelligence by handling life and death situations in a way that most people think only happens in fairy tales.

Let's say you met someone from a family who was not as poor as yours was in material things, but who was a perfect match for you in their respect for the spirit. Someone who was willing to see beyond appearances, with a deep desire to heal the trauma experienced in your families for generations. Someone you could count on to handle anything, no matter how dire the situation might be. Maybe even somebody who was an expert in helping warriors and their families care for their children through the constant vicissitudes and uncertainties of covert special operations and deployments for battle. A real Prince Charming.

The only problem might be if your Prince Charming didn't have a clear understanding of what he wanted, but fell in love with the idea of being with someone who told him he could have what he wanted when he figured it out. What if, when you told him, "You can have whatever you want" he believed you? Is life made of wishes that we can say a thing and it can come to pass? If not, what other reasons could there be to say such things? What is the real story? These are questions of faith and work. They can be neither proved nor disproved except by our actions and failures to act.

I believe that what happens in our family Learning Stories is real. They may have the appearance of fairy tales, but underneath it all is the real deal. We may deceive ourselves, and deceive each other by acting out different parts for the sake of figuring out what matters. We still have to figure it out. We have to follow through with our questions and risk everything to reveal how we have deceived ourselves. 

In the past, when you encountered a situation where you didn't like the way things were going, you could call upon lessons learned in watching the performance of actors who came on stage just before you in the family drama. With a wink perhaps, you could say, "watch this, I'm going to throw a white trash fit" and observe how quickly most people would act to avoid a scene. Prince Charming would want to avoid a scene. For all of being royalty, the prince is so middle class. So concerned about how things might be perceived. But perceptions are not everything. What is real actually matters. It is time for something different.

Sorting through the evidence of my interactions as a father, I notice familiar patterns emerge in my behavior. From what I can tell so far, I did not follow through in my efforts to affirm the good for our children and our family until now. Family life is inherently challenging. Our family has challenges that I was hoping would work themselves out if I was nice about it and avoided making a scene as much as possible. I look at how predictably weak my efforts were to help compared to what was called for now and I understand why our children were not talking to me. Until now, I haven't followed through no matter what.

What kind of a Learning Story is this? If your story is anything like mine, consider what might be possible when you start showing up in a different way, body and soul.

Notice what is real. Who are the living members of your family? Where do they live? Now is the time for children. They have a day-to-day existence. If you cannot be with them in person every day, find a way that you can be with them every day. Prayer is one way to focus your energy on being there for your children, no matter what.

Recognize that you belong to your family forever, but you have to be clear about what that means. If you started a family by "accident," everyone's lives are going to change when you begin to follow through, and start showing up for your family on purpose.

Respond by coming up with a new plan for how you want to be, and do the thing that you didn't do yet. What got you this far has been done already. To get somewhere else, you have got to go for it. There is no trick to get people to do something real. You have to do that yourself. Letting someone else tell you what to do isn't going to help your family move forward. Nobody else knows your purpose in life. 

When you figure out what your real purpose is, you will have the help you need to follow through with it. Everything that needs to be known will be revealed.

* GODSPEED stands for “Gather Only Data in Sync with the Purpose of Every Excellent Deed.”