#1 - Let Love Land

It's early morning and this particular morning is different. I'm doing breakfast and lunches for the kids. Something that John does every morning - except this morning he has taken the car for service.

I'm not the best in the kitchen. I find it quiet overwhelming. I can only do one thing at a time. The idea of multi-tasking is completely foreign to me. I might be the only woman in the world that has this perception. That and my relationship to the kitchen.

Breakfast is served. I'm winning. I'm now standing behind the kitchen bench preparing their school lunch. Repeating each step out loud to myself so I don't forget. Very elementary.

And then it starts.

The boys are at it.

"AVERY!! You're a POO POO!"

Avery sneers at him, and uses his fingers to represent a gun. Knowing this gets on his brother's nerves.

Brooklyn gets extra mad and then starts stepping onto the table and wanting to go over and attack him.

I run over and bring Brooklyn down from the table.

"AVERY! WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO DO THAT! I DIDN'T ASK YOU!!!" Brooklyn screams. A combination of desperation, pleading, and heartbreak.

So what happened?

Brooklyn was talking to me as I was preparing lunch. Asking questions and sharing about something he heard.

Avery intercepts by correcting him. He pronounced something incorrectly.

For Avery – he was helping Brooklyn.
For Brooklyn – Avery is correcting him. Again.

In Brooklyn's body, the "help" lands as correction that is metabolised and digested as:

“You’re wrong.”
“You’re stupid.”
“You never get it right.”
"I know better than you..."

It hits his nerve of inadequacy - So he explodes.

There I am, stuck between a furious six‑year‑old and a ten‑year‑old who is pretending not to care but is clearly hurt.

My mind wants to do the efficient thing...

“Stop it, both of you.”
“Avery, don’t correct him.”
“Brooklyn, don’t call your brother names.”

In other words - manage the behaviour and get through breakfast so I can get on with making their lunch.

Instead, I do something different.

I take a breath. I make sure no one’s going to hurt themselves. I observe.

“Avery, are you open to hearing what Mummy sees?
Brooklyn, are you open to hearing what Mummy sees?”

They go quiet.

So I start with Avery.

“Avery, every time you try to help Brooklyn, and he gets angry at you, you feel rejected. You really are trying to help him, and when he pushes you away, it hurts. You want to help him and he doesn't want your help... and you feel rejected.”

He starts to cry.

“I just want to help him,” he says. “I just want to help him.”

Then I turn to Brooklyn.

“Brooklyn, when Avery corrects you, you don’t hear help. You hear that you’re wrong. You feel like he’s always telling you what to do, like he’s better than you. You feel… not good enough around him. And you feel you're inadequate and can't do anything right.”

He looks down at his breakfast, goes quiet.

Two boys. Misplaced love. No place for it to land.

On the surface - shouting, name‑calling, little bodies wanting to attack each other.

Underneath - two hearts that just want to love and be loved.

So I say....

“Boys, you forget that you love each other. Avery, you try to love Brooklyn by helping him. Brooklyn, show love to Avery by wanting to play with him and share with him. Underneath all this shouting – it’s just that your love isn’t landing.”

No one apologises. It's stealthy quiet and tense.
They’re still grumpy.

What's present is that the internal is no longer confusing and there is language for what is happening. Not always necessary - and for this moment it was.

Avery’s fear of being rejected is named.

Brooklyn’s fear of not being enough is named.

The chaos inside them has language now. It's no longer a threat.

And it manifests itself through screaming, yelling, one trying to dominate the other. Name calling.

And this is one of the many faces of fear.

Fear that....

“If my love is rejected, I am rejected.”
“If I get it wrong, maybe I’m not worthy of love at all.”

When we only look at the behaviour, we fight the “poo poo” and the gun‑fingers.

When we look underneath, we see what I’ve spent 20 years understanding about Fear...

Fear is love unexpressed. Love that missed its landing place. A suspicion about Love.

When you can build a relationship to fear like this –
When you can ask, “What is the love here that doesn’t know how to land?”...

You don’t have to fight fear or fix it.
Because it was never about the Fear in the first place.

Instead, you become the one who looks for evidence of where Love lives – and you become the kind of person who knows themself as someone where Love can land.