Three years of jujutsu, twice a week. The kid still cannot do a single one.
I was standing on the sideline at soccer practice talking to a friend when he said something that stopped me cold.
He was frustrated. Really frustrated. His son has been doing jujutsu twice a week for three years. Three years of showing up, paying for classes, driving across town. And the kid still cannot do one push-up.
I laughed a little, because I recognized that feeling immediately.
My son cannot wake up in the morning without me asking him thirty times. Thirty. I have counted. And in that moment, standing in the doorway for the fifteenth time with my voice rising and my patience entirely gone, I feel like I am failing. Like he is failing. Like something is fundamentally broken.
His son, on that soccer field, holds his own against kids twice his size. He is strong. He is kind. He has a great heart and a great game. Every single week.
My son is thirteen. He plays music. He is athletic and thoughtful and genuinely one of the most interesting humans I know.
We were each taking one small, maddening moment and using it to define the entire person standing in front of us.
The second I said that out loud, we both went quiet.
Because we do this constantly. And not only with our children.
We do it with the coworker who was short with us in one meeting. With the friend who forgot to call. With the spouse who left the same cabinet door open for the nine hundredth time. One moment gets promoted to the whole story, and the person disappears behind it.
The moment is not the person.
That is the tool. Six words.
It matters most where the moments are hardest. If you are caring for someone living with dementia, you know exactly what I am describing. The repeated question. The resistance at bath time. The afternoon they did not recognize you. Dementia has a way of making one hard moment feel like the entire truth of a person.
It is not.
The one who raised you is still in there. The one who built a career, or had a laugh that filled a room, or made the best pie you have ever tasted. Still there, underneath the moment.
Just like my friend’s son is not a push-up, and mine is not an unheard alarm clock.
So here is what I would ask you to do this week.
Think of the person you love who is testing your patience most right now, the one currently driving you up a wall.
Write down three true things about them that have nothing whatsoever to do with the thing that is bothering you.
Then say one of them out loud. To them.
You will be surprised what that does to a room. And to you.