Everyone else got a piece of mail. Except her (and Timmy, but oddly enough, he didn’t count into her equation). So she was howling. Head tipped back, mouth open, letting loose an ear-splitting, can’t-be-heard-over-it, stream of sound.
Now this is not an unusual sound for my four-year-old to make these days. It typically results from being kicked in the head on the trampoline, and thus, expecting me to punish the one who committed the atrocious crime.
But this time, she really was heartbroken. Alex & Erin got thank-you cards, and we got a card congratulating us on the new house. And she got nothing. She felt left-out, ignored. In her world where, so often, things have to be “fair,” she had run into a situation which was not. And nothing could be done to change it. She didn’t get a card.
Howl. Howl. Howl.
I didn’t really have any answers for her. I hugged her. I didn’t promise it would be okay. It wasn’t okay, and sometimes life isn’t fair. But I told her that I heard her, that I understood, that I was sorry.
And really, isn’t that all we can do?
As we grow up, we discover so much unfairness and the reality that no one is going to ‘fix’ everything for us. We face illness, loss, frustration, other people’s selfishness, our own selfishness, job dissatisfaction, death. And even though it all hurts, most of us learn that throwing our heads back and letting rip an ear-splitting sound does not really help. So we leave that to the children.
But that’s why we don’t always hear the howls all around us. Our grown-up version of howling often looks very different from Megan’s wails. Grown-up howling might be a deep sigh from the lady next to us on the bus. The quiet sobs of our spouse after all the lights go out at night. The silent, longing look of a husband who wishes his wife would stop and sit and hear him. The angry, wild looting of a frustrated crowd.
It’s all the same thing. A howl. A wail from the soul. A cry from the heart for someone to listen closely enough to hear. Someone who is not too busy to stop, to make eye contact, to smile.
And the thing is, all around us, every day, are the howls of people in need. Some we can hear. Others are totally silent.
But if we pay attention, we can choose, in those odd moments when we lose sight of our own issues long enough to see someone else’s, to listen for the howls. And we can stop and respond. We can’t fix it, of course, and we should never promise that we will. But we can listen. We can offer a hug, a cup of coffee, a few moments of uninterrupted silence. We can tell them that we hear them, we understand, and we are sorry.
In the end, most people just want to hear someone say, “I’m sorry for your loss, your pain.” They need to hear someone say, “I may not understand, but I am sorry.” And when we shut off our own stream of “poor me” long enough to sit with someone under their burden, we discover a sense of community, a compassion that can sometimes heal our own hearts and soothe our own howls.
At least that’s what has often helped me.
