We never ask the lion to be a tiger. We don’t scold the owl for sleeping when the sparrows are awake. We don’t sit a salmon down and say, gently, that it really must learn to climb. And yet, somewhere along the way, we asked a specific girl to be a slightly different girl. Quieter when she was loud. Calmer when she was electric. Smaller when she was, in fact, exactly her size.
We didn’t mean cruelty. We meant safety. We had been handed a world with narrow doorways and we were trying to help her fit. We had been handed a vocabulary that called certain animals difficult, and we used it because it was the only one in the cupboard.
The animal she actually is
The diagnosis, when it arrived, was not new information. It was old information, finally written down. She had been this animal all along. The roar, the stillness, the long focus, the sudden retreat — these were never symptoms. They were traits. A taxonomy you had been guessing at for thirty years was suddenly named.
She is not a tiger doing a poor job of being a lion. She is a lion. The job was never hers.
What you were doing, kindly, that didn’t work
Translating her into a more acceptable creature
Explaining her, in advance, to teachers and aunts and strangers. Smoothing the edges of who she was, hoping the world would be kinder to a softer outline.
Coaching the noises out of her
Asking her to use her indoor voice, her inside body, her smaller stim, her quieter joy. None of those were neutral requests. Each one cost something.
Believing the doorway
Trusting the world’s narrow doorways more than your own daughter’s shape. Sanding her down instead of asking why the doorway was that narrow in the first place.
What changes when you stop
When you stop asking the lion to be a tiger, three things happen, more or less at once. The first is that she relaxes, in a way you can almost see across a room. The second is that you grieve, briefly, for all the years of the asking. The third is that the asking stops being the shape of your relationship. The shape becomes something else: curiosity, mostly. About who she actually is.
You stop trying to make her smaller for the doorway. You start, instead, to notice the doorway. You start to notice which rooms are built for lions and which are built for something else. You start, slowly, to widen the doorways you have any say over — the kitchen, the conversation, the Sunday, the visit, the plan.
The mother you turn out to have been
Here is the second thing that comes back. You were never the wrong mother. You were the mother of a different animal, using the only manual the world had given you. The manual was wrong. You were not.
This is not absolution; it is accuracy. You did some things that hurt. You also did a thousand things that held. Both can be true. The work now is not to flagellate the old mother, but to retire her, kindly, and meet the daughter you actually have. Lion, owl, salmon — whichever creature, finally, she turns out to be.
We never ask the lion to be a tiger. We can stop, now, asking her to be anyone but herself.
Lisa Rose Jackson
Trainee Transactional Analysis Counsellor