Confessions
For a solid week in the spring of 2022, my 12-year-old daughter Dayli had a spasm of conscience.
Once or twice daily, she would confess to lies she had told over the last year. We’re not sure what kicked off this soul crisis, but we do know that mostly around bedtime, as she lay alone in the dark staring at her ceiling, the weight of guilt for her transgressions sat right behind her sternum and in the pit of her stomach.
She would sometimes come to me, but her primary confessor and priest was her mother. At first, Christa was compassionate and concerned when she saw the timid anxious approach. She’d listen and give the needed absolution. After the first confession, we didn’t expect to hear more, but the next day, she came to us at the breakfast table again, head hung low and timid, “I thought of another lie,” She’d say. For the next several days, this became a pattern. She was confessing some lie she told us every day. When we expected the last lie to be heard, there was more to share, which got annoying. You see, maybe once or twice, the lies were hiding something that really did need to be addressed, but most of them were genuinely harmless mistakes that most people keep secret. We were stuck with the dilemma of wanting her to share with us her secret life so we could bring compassion and grace but also train her to accept a more nuanced and mature posture toward herself that doesn’t need to confess everything.
After a few days of this, we asked her what was going on. Why was she continuing to tell us about these lies after so much time had passed? Her answer was simple. It was the only thing that helped her feel better. Once the thought of the lie came into her memory, she would fixate on it. It would roll around on the roller coaster of her heart and trap her in guilt. The spinning would stop when she dared to contradict the lie, keeping her pinned to the seat.
What’s fascinating to me is that the lie wasn’t really what was creating the pressure; it was the fear of judgment and parental disappointment that kept her stuck. This is what gave the lie sacred power. The lie presents life in a binary. Black and white. Good and bad. She was convinced she had to be one or the other, which is, of course, impossible for humans, so she hid. She lied. She pretended to be “good” like everyone else and suffered. Confession is the rejection of the binary. It’s pure courage. It is the will to end a relationship, whether a relationship with a punitive deity or an immature version of yourself. It is doubt in your identity and leap in the direction of a hope that you can be fully known and not rejected.
As far as I can tell, a significant part of parenting provides the space for this crisis. I don’t want to protect my daughter from this moment, even though I can see it is anguish for her. My role is to struggle with the temptation to rescue and remove all obstacles from her path; it is to watch closely and know when my hand is needed. There is a lot of confessing I need to do. Rejecting my own binaries of “savior” vs. “coward” is the rollercoaster I’m trying to get off. Letting go of these identities is slow, painful work, but I do it because it’s the only way to feel better.