The Pillow Over Both Ears

The tummy ache started arriving at about ten past seven.

Not in the mornings. Not at school, where somebody would have telephoned. Only at bedtime, and now that anyone was paying attention, only on certain evenings, which were the evenings when the house downstairs was loud.

She lay very still under the blanket with both hands flat on her stomach and said, in the small careful voice a child uses when they think a thing might be their fault, that her tummy hurt again.

Her mother sat down on the edge of the bed. And she knew, in the way you know things you would rather not, that nothing was actually wrong with the tummy. A body that is six years old has no other vocabulary. It cannot say the evening frightened me. It says my tummy hurts, and it means it, and the ache is entirely real.

There was a pillow next to her head. At some point in the last few weeks she had started sleeping with it half over one ear, and nobody had said anything about it either way.

Now, if you are the one on the edge of that bed, this next part is for you, and it is short.

You do not have to explain the evening to her. You do not have to defend it, account for it, or promise anything about tomorrow. Not tonight, not at ten past seven, not to a six year old with her hands on her stomach.

There are three things to give her instead, and they take about twenty seconds. It is not your fault. It is not yours to fix. You are allowed to be small.

The tummy is telling the truth

Take the ache seriously and take it plainly. A child's stomach is where a loud evening gets stored, and the pain is not naughtiness, not attention seeking and not something to be argued out of her. It is a real feeling in a real body, and it is telling the truth about how loud the house was.

So say that. Your tummy is telling me it was loud tonight, and that makes sense, and you are not in trouble for it. Then leave it there. She does not need it explained and she certainly does not need it fixed at this hour.

And you are not being marked on how that evening sounded from the stairs. Scripture says God is a safe place and a very present help when trouble comes, and the Holy Spirit is in that upstairs room tonight regardless of what the downstairs of any house sounded like.

Now the three sentences, and the order of them matters more than the wording.

It was not your fault. Say it first and say it without a condition attached. Children run their own private investigation into whose fault a loud house is, and small people always find themselves guilty, because they were in the room, or they asked for something, or they exist. Nothing she did began it.

It is not yours to fix. This is the one parents miss. A child who is not blaming herself will very often appoint herself instead: the peacekeeper, the good one, the one who keeps everybody calm. That is a heavy job for someone who cannot reach the top shelf, and it is not hers. She does not carry a message. She does not smooth anybody over. She goes to bed.

Being small is allowed. That is the release, and it is the sentence she keeps. Being small is not a failure to be brave. It is simply the truth about her age, and it means somebody else is carrying this house.

Who the safe place actually is

God is our safe place and our strength, a very present help when trouble comes.Psalm 46:1

That word present is doing the work. Not a safe place somewhere else that she has to reach. A safe place that is already in the room she is lying in.

And you have a present help in that room, not a distant one. Psalm 46 says He is right there when trouble comes, and the Holy Spirit is with a small person under a blanket at ten past seven whether or not anybody managed to pray properly first.

And here is a sentence that gets said in every house, every time, and is said in this one too. If anything anywhere ever hurts her or frightens her, telling a grown up she trusts is the right thing to do, and it is always right, and she never has to work out first whether it is big enough to count. A child cannot judge that and should never be asked to. She tells somebody, and the grown ups sort out what it means.

That line belongs in every bedtime, in the calm houses as much as the loud ones, precisely so that no child anywhere has to decide whether her own house qualifies.

And you were the one entrusted with this child, and that has not changed tonight. His word gives the care of children to the grown ups and never to the children, and it is the Holy Spirit who steadies a house, not a six year old lying very still upstairs.