Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction. – Anne Sullivan

A few years ago, I stumbled across this quote uttered by the woman who taught Helen Keller to communicate. A woman who clearly had endless patience and optimism.

I am not that woman.

However, the words struck an intuitive cord with me. Sympathy. I never really thought about the idea of sympathizing with my children. I typed the quote up and propped it up on my desk as a reminder.

Fast forward to today. In the last 24 hours, my daughter has forgotten to turn in her completed biology homework sitting in her backpack, forgotten to bring in her algebra homework, dashed off an honors English assignment in literally five minutes, barely begun a history project which is due tomorrow, and last night, remembered that she had committed to perform tonight in a one-act play at school with a classmate from her drama class. As a result, I needed to reschedule her singing lessons scheduled for tonight and, more importantly, she’ll arrive home at 9 p.m. to essentially begin her history project, the project she’s known about for a month.

Because I’m not a saint (as clearly Anne Sullivan must have been) – all this chaos pisses me off.

The good news is that I resisted the pull to become a raving and lecturing lunatic (“What do you mean you just remembered about the play?!?!? See this is exactly why you shouldn’t leave things to the last minute. Things come up! Why didn’t you do more work over the weekend, when you had loads of free time?” These and many more ‘I-told-you-so’ thoughts raced through my head, but did not come out of my lips.)

I quickly moved into sympathy mode and became much calmer. You see, I’ve had lots of opportunity to practice Anne Sullivan’s words of wisdom. I now can view the fact that my daughter backed herself into a corner (yet again) with the sense of compassion I had when watching co-workers procrastinate and then scramble. (“Poor thing. It stinks to be you right now,” I think).

So, tonight, I will say a few encouraging words to Caitlin as she slumps in front of the computer working and then I’ll go to bed. I will side-step her frantic and exhausted push to finish the assignment after she’s been at school since 7 a.m., gone to basketball practice and performed on stage.

But, while I’m letting her experience the consequences of her decisions, my heart genuinely hurts. I wish life didn’t have to be so difficult for her. I guess that’s what sympathy’s all about.