Empathy Times Two

Mama Kat Prompt: If you could magically become any member of your family for just one day, who would you become?

I'm going to cheat on this one and answer, "Both."  I would want to be both my husband and my daughter, but not necessarily at the same time :-D  Why?  The power of empathy.  When I graduated from college, I spent the first two years of my career teaching English in China.  While I was there, I developed a wish I so badly wanted to come true: I wanted to be Chinese for a day.  I knew that if I could just be Chinese for one day I would understand my students so much better.  I wouldn't have the preconceived ideas and ways of feeling about the world that I learned as an American.  I would be able to understand what it was like to come from a poor village with no heat in the winter, what it was like to leave your family at the age of 14 to stay in a boarding school, what it was like to think in Chinese characters.  I would be able to intimately understand a culture founded on the ideas of community, saving face and almost absolute governmental control.  I would have finally understood my students like I never had before.

I never got my wish.  Like it or not, I am me and I am not anyone else.  I can't become another person.  None of us can.  For that reason, we will always run up against friction in relationships.  That's why relationship takes work.  To understand, I have to listen.  To get someone to understand me, I have to use words...and use them again and again...and tweak them...until they make sense to the person I am talking to.  But if I could truly be someone else for a day, I would have so much more understanding and empathy for that person.  So, I would want to be both members of my family.  And since I can't really do that, I'm going to try to get inside each of them, for just a moment, in my mind.

Alexis

I wake up.  I want mama.  I cry out for her immediately.  I hate being alone in this room.  I'm scared of the dark.  I need mama's comfort, now!

Why can't I?  I don't understand!  It doesn't make any sense to me why I can't do what you say I can't do.  I don't see point A leading to point B.  Seriously, I don't get it.  I'm so frustrated!  I need to pout cause I just don't get it.

Please come play with me!  I have no playmates.  I get bored.  I want relationship.  Mama, Daddy, can you just stop for a moment and play with me, please?

Why is the computer so much more important than me?  Why does mama say she always has to work or clean the kitchen or do laundry?  I don't see why any of that is important.

Mama, I love it when you hold me at night.  I just need your arms around me and some singing and reading of books.  I just want to be with you.  Thank you for loving me.


Roger

This one's a lot harder.  I don't want to presume to speak for my husband and I have a feeling his thoughts are more complex than I can get to anyway.  But I do know that he works day in and out and sometimes, that job is just plain boring, yet he goes in anyway.  His loyalty to our family motivates him.

I'd like to understand his introverted nature.  I try as I can to sympathize with him, yet it would be so different if I could be him for a day, if I could feel the frustration when the crowd is overwhelming, when a lack of downtime makes me tired and cranky and in need of being alone.

I'd like to know what it is to have the love language of service so that I stay behind the scenes and I don't need recognition for it.

I'd like to have the stamina to play games all day and see strategy as he sees it, his mind puzzling out how to win.


I'd like to have the ability to save and not buy that new, shiny thing I see in the store.

In short, I'd like to fill my weaknesses with his strengths.  Hum, maybe there's a reason we call our spouse our "better half"?