Hi Friends,
It’s September 1st. Growing up in western Pennsylvania that meant summer was over, school was starting, and social anxiety was peaking. In SoCal, it’s weird. September 1st signals nothing but surprise heatwaves and a long weekend for a holiday celebrating… labor unions. So for today, I’m going to pretend I’m back home in Canonsburg, PA driving out to Brown’s Apple Orchard in my dad’s Oldsmobile. And once we arrive outside the barn holding endless crates of granny smith and jonagold apples, I’m going to share my brown crayon with you to help us dig deeper.
My dad has always made me feel safe. He was honest, kind and reliable, and I felt like I could never get enough time with him. He worked a lot. A lot a lot. He had to. It was the 80’s in a depressed steel town, and he had given up a career path in the CIA to have a family. When I heard his engine rumbling down the driveway, I’d run to the window, throw it open and scream, “Hi, Dad!” He swung open his car door, and before both penny loafers hit the pavement, he’d look up and yell back, “Hi, Huggie!”
All kids want to please their parents. I knew he loved me. I knew I didn’t have to do anything to earn it, but it didn’t stop me from trying really hard anyway to keep his eyes twinkling. By middle school it was one of the reasons I sunk in perfectionism. I gave myself no margin for error on tests or on the basketball court. I held everyone else to impossible standards too. And guess what, other people don’t tend to like that. It worsened my loneliness in two directions: I expected people wouldn’t accept me if I was flawed, and I dismissed nearly everyone on superficial grounds.
That almost-autumn day that my dad and I were on a drive out in the country, he handed me half a stick of Juicy Fruit gum and let me hang my arm out the window like him. “Don’t tell your mother,” he winked.
Four bags of apples sat across the velour backseat, almost spilling around every curve. We pulled into the log cabin restaurant to get lunch before heading home for an apple-pie making bonanza. We waved off the waitress’ offer to look at the laminated menus. Our order never changed: pancakes with black coffee and tons of creamers. The coffee was my dad’s, and I drank the little creamers straight, which I know is kinda gross, but I was compensating for years of skim milk.
We played tic-tac-toe on the back of our placemats while waiting.
“8th grade coming up. How are you feeling about it?” he asked.
I shrugged. But my whole body tensed up. I couldn’t even look at him or I knew I’d cry. I hated school. In 6th grade I had faked sick for two weeks straight just to avoid feeling so alone in the endless rows of slamming lockers.
He made his X on the mat then looked up at me from behind those inch-thick dad glasses. “Honey, I don’t need you to get straight A’s. I just need you to be my daughter.”
It was the sentence my heart had needed to hear my whole life.
The tears rolled big and hot. I just kept looking at him to make sure it was true. That he wasn’t going to take it back.
The pancakes came. He slid me his hankie to dry my eyes. And we kept playing tic-tac-toe with a cheap ballpoint pen. But that day the pen was was serving as the brown crayon that knew how to gently dig deeper to the heart level. To hear behind my quietness for what was too deep for words. For what I didn’t even know I needed to ask my dad to say.
My dad did NOT grow up with parents who knew how to hear what was happening behind his words and behavior. It was a miracle that my dad figured it out in that moment for me. And it was the most important sentence that has ever been said to me.
By “digging deeper” I don’t mean a series of graduated questions that prod towards intimacy. And I don’t mean the methods that help us discover common ground with people who believe differently than us. Those are super great, too.
It’s just so dear to me to be able to name the kind of digging deeper that my dad did that fall day in a cabin over pancakes. The gentle digging deeper that can move aside the dirt that’s covered over the truth of our bare belonging. The root truth that we are loved as we are. Without having to perform, be perfect, or grip tightly to our GPAs and track medals. The digging deeper that says, “I know how hard you’re trying, and you can just stop and flop into my arms. I’m not going anywhere.” I don’t know one heart—from middle-schoolers to CEOs—who doesn’t long to hear this. And I don’t know one heart who isn’t capable of offering the gift of that reassurance.
On the ride back home we floated in the fullest silence of sun and wind and hot apples. I can close my eyes and still smell it.
Practicing Digging Deeper:
What do you most need to hear someone tell you over tic-tac-toe and pancakes? How can you say it to yourself? How can you say it to someone who needs to hear it?
Who can you go on a long drive with for no good reason? Do it. How does “just going together” allow for what’s typically buried under the surface of our words and routines to start to come up?
What are some unexpected ways that you can relieve your family members, friends and co-workers from feeling like they have to perform in order to matter?
Take Care,
Cat
P.S. - Oh what, you need a dig kit?
P.P.S. - Need help?