A story for you, gentle reader: A few hours into a road trip, just before lunch, my seven year old announced that he couldn’t wait to eat any longer.
We were about forty-five minutes from the town where we had planned to stop for lunch, which was directly on our route. The closest place to eat from where we were at the time of his plea for food was a twenty minute detour.
I offered him several snacks, but he was decidedly hungry for real food, and the long morning in the car was catching up to all of us. Both my husband and I tried to explain how even though the longer drive was farther away, it was actually better for our schedule if he could just hold out– but if he couldn’t, we’d turn off right then and there and make the detour. The hanger was real: despite our attempts to convince him otherwise, he said he couldn’t wait, so we kept our promise and started the detour.
I was driving; my husband was in the passenger seat. We had only been off the interstate for maybe a minute when my son started crying. I tend to be the parent who handles emotional outbursts, but since I was driving, my husband turned in his seat to figure out what the tears were for.
“I think I made a bad decision,” my son sobbed. “I should have picked lunch at the other place.”
He kept repeating that phrase: I made a bad decision. Though I didn’t say anything out loud, I kind of agreed with him.
But I’m so glad I kept quiet and that my husband was the one handling this moment.
He consoled our son in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to: “You didn’t make a bad decision. Mom and I offered you either option. If we weren’t okay with one of them, we wouldn’t have offered it. We would have said sorry, you have to wait for lunch, and kept going. But we let you make the choice, and that’s just what you did. You didn’t make a good or bad decision. You just made a decision. That’s all it was. And you can always change your mind, and you can always ask us about making a different decision.”
I listened to this conversation with tears streaming down my face. It was a true gift to see this burden lift from my son. This is something I’m still actively learning in my thirties: that not all decisions have to be right or wrong; good or bad. Some decisions simply are. The weight of the world does not have to rest on our shoulders when we decide when and where we want to have lunch. This may come very naturally for some people (like my husband), but for me (and clearly for my son, who gets it honest), many decisions present a moral struggle resulting in guilt and regret. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Now– are there some decisions that do have an inescapable moral component? Of course. There are some things in life we need to view through a particular lens– but this was not one of them. This was a child being offered two neutral options by his parents, who admittedly did have a preference, but who ultimately left the choice up to him. And that should not result in guilt or tears.
I hope this is a lesson he carries with him through his life, to avoid some of the burden of extreme anxiety I went through and am still learning to manage to this day. My son calmed down, took a breath, and asked if we could turn around and get back on track with the drive. I immediately pulled over and headed back to the interstate. No harm, no foul. His choice wasn’t right or wrong. It was just a decision.
