Vachon Imagined

Whenever my son does something that ultimately hurts him—even something as simple as putting a folder away in the wrong place and being corrected by a teacher—it can feel like a devastating cut.

He carries it with him all day until he sees me and delivers the familiar line:

“Mom, we need to talk.”

And I know immediately.

I know the face. The slumped shoulders. The heaviness. I know something has bruised his sense of being, his sense of self.

You know the feeling too.

A comment hits a nerve. A criticism lands a little too close to home. Suddenly your whole day is hijacked. Before long you’re retelling the story to someone else because, well, you need to vent.

Humans do this.

We all want to get something off our chest.

And sometimes it helps.

But I’ve often wondered about the logic of it. If the same wound keeps returning, are we really releasing it, or are we simply rehearsing it? If it keeps finding its way back into our thoughts, are we solving it, or perpetuating it?

The answer becomes easier to see when we know ourselves.

Because we don’t always have a book nearby to soothe us. We don’t always have a pastor available to reassure us. We don’t always have a friend to call, a distraction to reach for, or a glass of something strong waiting at the end of the day.

So what do we use?

Our own mind.

We use our own mind to save our own mind.

Not through force. Not through pretending the hurt isn’t there. But through learning to sit with it long enough to discover that the criticism, the mistake, the embarrassment, the fear—none of it has the power to define who we are unless we hand it that authority.

That doesn’t happen somewhere outside of us.

It happens within us.

It happens in the quiet place where I can look at my son after one of these difficult days and wholeheartedly tell him:

“I love you. All the time. No matter what.”

And then teach him something even more important.

To say the same thing to himself.

Because I won’t always be here.

And one day the voice that steadies him will need to be his own.