You can be tired but you can’t be mean

In our family, we have a certain rule that has become something closer to a motto over the years, one of those quiet lodestones that orients us when things get hard. It goes like this:

You can be _________, but you can't be mean.

You can be tired, but you can't be mean. You can be hungry, but you can't be mean. You can feel frustrated or overwhelmed or completely at the end of yourself, but you can't be mean.

Charlotte Mason believed that habits are the great lever of education, and that the habits formed in the home, in the middle of ordinary days, shape the whole of a child's character over time. She was not concerned that children could perform virtue when it was convenient or when others were looking. She was concerned that children had so thoroughly practiced self-governance that it became the natural current of their lives. This little family motto of ours is, in its small way, an attempt at exactly that kind of formation.

The blank in the middle is the important part, because it fills in differently for each person and each day. It holds space for every legitimate human feeling, every real and valid struggle, every moment when the body or the heart is genuinely depleted. What it does not hold space for is allowing that feeling to move outward unchecked toward someone else in the room. And this distinction, between honoring a feeling and governing what we do with it, sits very near the heart of what Charlotte Mason called the education of the will.

Mason wrote with great tenderness about the atmosphere of the home, that invisible but powerful thing that a mother creates and sustains simply by the way she moves through her days. A home where feelings are named but not weaponized, where each person is regarded with dignity even on the hard days, is one kind of atmosphere a mother can work to build. This rule, for our family, is one small tool toward that end. 

It is also, if I am honest, as much for me as it is for my children. There are days when I am the one who is tired, when I am the one who is depleted and short and running on very little, and the rule applies to me just as much as it applies to them. Perhaps more. Because the as the mother, I  set the tone of the home in ways that are almost impossible to overstate, and if I am practicing self-governance in front of my children, if I am naming my own exhaustion honestly and still choosing to speak with gentleness, I am doing something that no lesson plan could replicate.

This is part of the slow, unspectacular work of Charlotte Mason philosophy. Not the nature journals or the living books or the artist studies, though those things matter too, but the ordinary governance of self that happens in kitchens and hallways, in the ten thousand small moments that no one is watching and no one will remember. The blank in the motto holds space for all of it, for every hard feeling that is real and deserves to be acknowledged, while the second half of the sentence holds the line that keeps us kind to one another through all of it.