Dear Jaquetta,

You might be too fixated on things going right/correctly in your life that you’ve developed anxiety over things going wrong. Well, that’s perfectly normal since no human on earth likes it when they mess up or when life just can’t seem to get any worse than what happening to you. No one wants the curve ball life throw at you which is why people try as much as possible to avoid bad things, but bad things will happen. When bad things happen, you could get burnt so badly that you’ve developed trauma or it reminds you your worth as a person that you begin to worry about when it might happen again. Then you begin to fixate on things being okay vs things going bad. Right now your situation is the latter and it’s really bearing down on your self-esteem because you might be the cause of its beginning.

But this bad situation can be a good starting point on the lesson of letting go of certain fears for you, one of which seems to be the fear of the future (and maybe the fear of being a bad parent).

First of all, you will mess up. You’re human, it’s difficult not to mess up in life. But you can mess up with grace.

Now, it might seem like a bad thing to let your children see you mess up, but it’s actually a good thing because you can model for your children that it’s okay to fail at something, that it’s okay to make mistakes. If they do not have a good model of failure, they will go onward to their adult life thinking they can’t fail because they will disappoint everyone they know so they will try to be the perfect student, the perfect worker bee, the perfect romantic partner, the perfect friend, the perfect child, etc., until they completely burnt themselves out, develop depression then turn to something that will take away the pain temporarily, usually alcohol and drugs.

So, exaggerated situation above, but your children does need a good model of failure. For if they were told their whole childhood that messing up is not okay, then they will try very hard to never fail. And when they fail, will probably develop the fear of failure because they failed the first time which probably means that they are a failure because they learned that they cannot mess up when they were a kid which means they cannot fail again. But that fear is very tiring to carry around because then your children will constantly tell themselves they cannot fail which means they either set out to fail before they can even fail or work themselves to the bone to never fail yet still fail so doesn’t that mean they are a failure?

See how that work?

So if this situation does involve legal work, it would be best to be honest with your children that something is happening, you don’t need to tell them the details, and that it might affect some things in the house so you will need your children to work with you when you think you might need help. Your children will be confuse, but they will also be happy to know that you trust them as their parent to tell them what is going on, even if they aren’t involved in the procedures. Because even if you try to hide it, children have the uncanny ability to know/feel when the parents are stress about something, but they don’t know what is happening so can only walk on eggshells around you while you deal with what it is that is stressing you and your husband. That would only cause THEM anxiety, even when you finalized things. Because by not saying anything, you left your children to speculate just who or what is stressing you out and then the house is just a depressing place to be because you’re going around stressed so your children has to be careful not to stress you out further and it continues and continues and continues. That is not the best scenario for anyone.

So be a model for your children in that every human being will make some kind of mistake, big and small, in their life, but it does not define them. Your mistake does not make you a failure unless you tell yourself you are a failure. So now that you did something wrong, tell your children that something is happening, again no need for details, but since you are responsible and accountable for your actions, you will deal with it gracefully. That is the kind of lesson that your children need now because if you try to protect them from making mistakes now, when they do make mistakes after leaving your house, it might cost them a very heavy price. At least now, when your children does mess up, you can be there to help them realize that it’s not the end of the world, they will get through it, that it does not make them a failure, while having them take responsibility for their actions to finding their own solutions to their mistakes.

So the best thing to do now is work on accepting the fact that you are human. Since you fear messing up, you fear the future and doing things that will bring bad things to your life so you try to avoid bad things. That kind of thinking is very heavy, it would be best to look into examining those thoughts. After all, the more you tell yourself that you have no strength, no courage, no resilience, it does mean that you have no strength, no courage, no resilience because you’ve already decided for yourself that you don’t have any of that. Only YOU yourself can decide whether you have any of that, regardless of what the world tries to tell you, so you decide, do you have no resilience?

You will mess up, that’s a fact, but that doesn’t mean it has to end there.