“Molly,” I turned from my cooking at the stove, facing the young girl I care for. “Are you good at painting nails? Would you paint mine?” I gave her a smile, and told her I’d love to. We sat across from one another at the kitchen table, her petite hands laid out in front of me, and I bent down to paint carefully. “Has anyone ever painted your nails before?” I ask, as I repeat a motion I’ve done hundreds of times. “No, no one ever has – I never had a mother to do it,” she says so casually back to me. My heart lurched in my chest, and even more, I felt a maternal instinct towards this girl. This girl, who not even thirty minutes before was screaming at me, was now sitting still before me. This girl, who could say such crass things, but when chastised by me, went red with embarrassment. This girl, who is almost fifteen years old, but has never had someone paint her fingernails. This girl – who reminds me a lot of me. “Well,” I use my own nail to clean up a line on hers, “thank you for the honor of letting me be your first.”
I’ve been known by a lot of names in my twenty-five years, by a lot of hobbies, by a lot of words. Not just Molly Whitlock, or Molly Shutt, but also ‘psychopath’, ‘CEF missionary’, and – the hardest I’ve found to separate from – ‘blonde.’ Really, it’s hard to grow up being known for having intensely blonde hair, then to watch it slowly dull when you hit your twenties, I’d say it’s even harder than being known as a psychopath. That name, that one still comes up to haunt me sometimes, mainly by people who knew me as a child or in my early adolescence. I was always known to be angry, hot-headed, and temperamental. I was the kind of girl who teased the boy she had a crush on, and threw herself on the floor when people couldn’t understand what she wanted. Looking back now, a lot of my problems with self-regulation point to undiagnosed autism, or some more severe type of neurodivergence, which was still a stigma twenty years ago. Even as an adult, I sometimes get that same sense of being severely overwhelmed, and the only way I can think to get it out is by crying and throwing myself about, hence why I run so often.
It’s because of all this, the identities I’ve been known by, mainly the harsh ones, that I seem to understand and relate to children that have labels tossed on them by other people. Labels like troubled, difficult, or, psychotic. I get what it means to be pushed into a box, to be seen as bad, when you’re really just trying to sort out your own emotions, either because you were born with a brain that was wired differently, or events in your childhood taught you to respond cruelly, even when you maybe don’t want to. I mean, if you’ve only been threatened or yelled at when you mess up, wouldn’t it make sense that you would then respond to others that way? At least, that’s the way I see it. So, when this girl screamed at me yesterday because I’d taken her to a surprise place for a dessert, I knew how I would’ve responded when I was her age. I knew how someone would’ve responded to me. But, I also knew the kind of response I needed instead, and even though I never got it, I wanted to give it to her.
Instead of yelling back at her, meeting her fire, I instead chose to meet her where she was. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, calming and soothing, “I’m sorry that I brought you somewhere you didn’t want to be, but I will also not accept you disrespecting me by yelling.” Somehow, she didn’t yell back, but she still so fiercely told me to take her home. I began driving us home, and a minute or so later, she apologized to me for disrespecting me. I thought back on the initial response we all want to have when this happens, we want to yell back, we want to defend ourselves, we want to fight for the respect we so desperately believe we deserve – but, what if the greatest way we show ourselves respect, is by respecting someone else? I knew in that moment, that I could either blow up at her, or I could control the situation by responding in love, instead of in anger. It wasn’t on my own that I could meet her anger with love, or quell her loud with calm.
There’s another identity that I have that overarches every other name I’ve been given, and that’s being a believer in Jesus. This identity, it should define the way I approach and examine every other facet of my life. My writing, my dating, my running, my job; it should all be done in a way that reflects that. Recently, I’ve been reading 1 Corinthians 13, almost every day. I’ve been reflecting on the fact that, if I live my life doing good things, but I don’t do them with love from the Father, then they are worth nothing; I am nothing without Him. For way, way too long, I’ve strayed from what should have been the core of my identity, and it seems like a battle in itself to try and catch up. But it’s the little things, in the little ways, that’s growing this big part of me back. But still, I struggle so bad. This past Sunday, when I was speaking about someone who wronged me, I said, “They have no mercy from me.” How easy it can be, sometimes, to extend a calming answer to some, and yet not to others.
The bright side is, when we choose that calm, when we choose to be different, it makes a difference. On the drive back, I asked the girl if my choosing to not yell back surprised her. She said yes, she said that anytime she’s ever yelled at an adult, they’ve always yelled back. In that moment, any lingering frustration faded, and all I felt was sadness. Here is a girl who knows no different than anger, and here I am, who knows what that feels like, but has the opportunity to be a change in the story for her. She told me once that she sees me as her mother, and I don’t just see that as kind words, I see it as a standard to uphold, to be what she has never gotten to have. Maybe this, too, gets to form another part of my identity, but I know I’ll be never able to do it right, if I don’t first center my life on Him.
Yours Truly,
the Brightside Blonde