Sheli Monacchio

Tag: Seeing the Person

  • The Push-Up

    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.

  • The Gold Paint

    My grandfather painted his furniture gold. I never understood it. It turns out I wasn’t supposed to.

    My grandmother’s house was a lot of things.

    Red carpet. Gold couches. Plastic on the gold couches, the kind that stuck to the back of your legs in the summer when you were wearing shorts. My brother and I despised those couches with every fiber of our being. There were also marble tables everywhere. I know this because both my brother and I cracked our heads open on them at separate points in our childhood. He was wearing a Fonzie shirt that said “Aaaaaaaaa” when it happened to him. I wish I were making that up.

    It was French provincial. It was gaudy. It was a lot. And it was entirely, completely hers.

    My grandfather had his own thing going on. He drove a Cadillac and he had taken the time to affix his initials in small gold letters on both doors. On the hood sat what he called a police dog, a German Shepherd hood ornament. And throughout the house, on the ornate carved wood of their bedroom furniture, he had carefully painted the decorative trim. In gold.

    I never understood it. Not once.

    What I understand now is this.

    My grandmother cared deeply about how things looked. Her home, her furniture, her appearance. She dressed to the nines every single day, purse matched to her dress, not a hair out of place. Keeping the plastic on those couches was pride. It was her way of saying: these things matter to me, and I will take care of them.

    My grandfather was an ornamenter. He took plain things and made them his. His initials on the Cadillac. Gold paint in the wood carvings. A German Shepherd on the hood because why not. He was signing them. Claiming them. Saying something about who he was that he may not have had the words for.

    I did not have to understand it. It was never mine to understand.

    It was theirs.

    I think about this nearly every day now.

    I think about it when a daughter tells me she does not understand why her mother keeps folding and refolding the same dish towel. I think about it when a father cannot fathom why his sixteen-year-old cares so much about something that seems to matter so little. I think about it when someone tells me their husband still gets up at five on a Saturday when nobody on earth is making him.

    We spend so much energy trying to decode the people we love. Why do they do that. Why does that matter to them. Why can’t they just.

    But understanding was never the assignment.

    Honor it. Don’t decode it.

    That is the tool. Four words. You can carry it out of here today.

    It matters most when someone is losing things. Meaning and purpose do not disappear with a diagnosis, or with age, or with a hard year. They go quiet. They change shape. They need someone willing to help find them again.

    If your person once loved to paint, we may not be able to hand them a canvas and walk away. But we can put a brush in their hand and sit down beside them. If they always cared about how they looked, helping them choose an outfit is everything. It is the whole person, still in there, still theirs.

    You do not have to understand why something mattered to them. You only have to honor that it did.

    Somewhere in your life right now there is a person doing something you do not understand. A ritual, a habit, a thing they care about far more than seems reasonable.

    This week, try this. Skip the why. Why sounds like a challenge, and people defend themselves against it.

    Ask them to tell you about it instead.

    Then listen to what comes out. It is almost never about the thing.

    My grandmother’s plastic couch covers were never for me. They were very much for her.

    And that was always enough.