My Child’s Truth Telling is My Shining Example

She speaks her truth, and I am reminded to speak mine.

“Mom, I need to tell you my truth.”

This is how my daughter starts all her confessions. It’s how she tells me about the mess she made or the thing she broke. She comes to me with a quiet voice and firm resolve, unsure of how her truth will be received but committed to telling it anyway.

She is my shining example of who and what I want to be.

Too often, we water down our truth. We learn to adapt to our surroundings. I know that I have become far too adaptable, sometimes turning off my light so that I don’t have to deal with anyone else’s discomfort with it. But every single time my daughter comes to me to tell me her truth, it is a reminder that I need to do a better job telling mine.

Telling our truth is easy when it aligns with where we want to be in life. A couple of years ago, I had everything I ever wanted. My first book was published. I fell in love with someone amazing. I even started traveling, a lifelong dream of mine. It was oh-so-easy to tell my truth that year. It bubbled out of me like pink champagne and lit up my eyes like starry nights.

I’m finding this year’s truth to be a harder one to tell. On one level, I am more committed to my goals than ever. I’m releasing more books this year. The life I’ve worked so hard to create is beautiful. But travel has been indefinitely delayed by a global pandemic, and the relationship I thought was the one that would last just ended. Add in layers of single motherhood with children on the spectrum, and right now, my truth is complicated.

So, I don’t focus on trying to compress my entire life into one truth. Instead, I practice telling one truth at a time.

It starts with honesty. It’s too easy to gloss over lives on social media the way we so often filter our pictures. We just give them a little shine, throw a little light on them. It covers up all manner of blemishes.

The need to seem outwardly perfect isn’t living in our truth. While it may make our lives seem like ones to be envied, it doesn’t make the truth of them any better, and it certainly doesn’t help anyone else feel seen in their own struggle. Truth-telling breaks through the idea that we are supposed to live perfect lives and lets other people see that they aren’t alone in the messy lives they’re living.

Truth telling is more than just being honest about the lives we’re living. It’s also about how honest we are within our relationships. Within the last week, I had to put a firm boundary into place. When I spoke my truth, I said that I welcome healthy relationships, but I am done tolerating toxic ones. It was a truth a long time in coming, but I felt the relief when I told it.

Sometimes, speaking truth means admitting that what we want and what we need might be two different things. This is true of my relationship coming to an end. It wasn’t what I wanted, but if the way I feel isn’t reciprocated, it’s what I needed. I may not like it, but there’s a certain level of peace that comes from accepting that what we wanted isn’t what’s for us.

On a smaller scale, this acknowledgement of truth sometimes applies to something as simple as how we spend our free time. We might want to binge-watch Bridgerton, but we need to do the laundry — or, conversely, we might want our homes to be orderly, but we need to get more rest. Figuring out our truth at any moment means clearing out what we think we’re supposed to do to get at how we truly feel — and then we honor that.

It also means acknowledging that how we feel is just as important as how anyone else around us may feel. When we hold in our truth for someone else’s comfort, we are communicating that their feelings hold more value than our own. It’s the idea we convey to them, but it’s also the thing that we’re telling ourselves every time we do it.

My daughter usually doesn’t boast about her truth. She just tells it gently. She’s never confident about how it will be received. She tells it anyway. She knows it may get her into trouble, but still, she says what she needs to say. She already knows the value of her truth, and it helps me remember the value of mine.

It’s a lesson for us all.