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Steph gets to the heart of the matter

I recently wrote a story for a doctor’s office magazine about teen dating. The expert advice provided therein was to talk to your kids about what good relationships look like and, moreover, to make sure you model a good relationship.

As I wrote this advice, I immediately felt guilty. How bad would readers feel if they didn’t know what advice to give their teen on how to achieve “good” relationships, let alone be able to show one? How did I feel when faced with such advice?

Sure, I try desperately to communicate openly and honestly. But I still sometimes sulk and tantrum and passively-aggressively try to say I don’t even care about things I actually care a lot about, like the attentions of my husband or children.

Sure, I try to listen and be understanding of my husband and kids. But sometimes I’m too self-centered or frazzled or annoyed to lend an ear.

Sure, I want to spend quality time with my family. But part of me craves to curl up with a book or at the piano, everyone else be damned.

So, do I know exactly what advice to give on good relationships? Am I modeling a good relationship?

I will say that one of the things I am most proud of is that my children have witnessed my husband and I go down a very rocky road — and survive. Along the way, we learned that we truly care about one another and want what is best for both of us and our kids. Of course, it is hard to know exactly what “the best” is, just as defining a “good” relationship is nebulous.

For better or worse, we show our kids our warts. We are definitely not perfect, nor do we expect our children to be, but we try to assume best intentions, forgive, and move on. Modeling forgiveness, to me, is probably the most important thing. When I see my kids lock horns and hold on to the inane details of a fight, I shake my head and wag my finger.

“No!” I say. “The details of whatever stupid thing you were fighting over don’t matter, what matters is that you love each other and that you forgive each other and move on.”

Getting stuck on things, even big hurtful things, doesn’t really get anybody anywhere but, like a little illustrated self-help book my sister once gave me termed it, “Grudge Island.”

It isn’t a great place to live.

The important thing to tell my kids is that grudges mostly hurt the person holding them — not the other person — so we might as well get over them for our own benefit.

Relationships are not at all easy, and getting to that elusive feeling of love after someone has hurt you is certainly hard.

But that love is hard but still so, so worth it is the most important lesson to learn, and teach. By “showing our work,” so to speak, especially at the hardest times, I hope my husband and I have given our kids a sense of what is in store.

Yikes.

So I’m happy when I hear they hope to get married.

“Really?” I say when they say something about a future wife or kids. “We haven’t scared you from wanting that?”

Apparently not.

Read Fearless Parenting every other Thursday on BrooklynPaper.com.