A is for ...

apple and airplane and ambulance and angel ....
Today my 5 year old is starting an alphabet book. She is cutting out pictures from old magazines and gluing them to pages. Today we are doing the letter A. She was bored, I suggested it and she said okay!

Of course I immediately thought A is for anger. That nasty little word. At least, it's a nasty word to me. For whatever reason, anger is bad to me. It's a feeling I generally try not to have. If I start to feel angry about something, I try to talk myself out of it ... tell myself all the reasons I shouldn't be angry. And then I push it down, down, down until it's gone. I suppose what I'm in the process of learning is that it's never really gone. When I do that, I'm not making the anger go away ... I'm just temporarily putting it out of my thoughts. I suppose it's much like having a spare room in your house that becomes the junk room. One day you put just a few things in there, and then a few more, and a few more, until one day you realize you can't even open the door ... the carpet is covered with junk and now it's a BIG problem to have to try to sort through everything in there and put it where it really belongs. I guess that's what has happened to all my anger. I've slowly put a little into my spare room and now the room is full. And now it's become a HUGE problem. When if I had just all those times said, I'm angry, dealt with it and then moved on, I wouldn't have this BIG spot filled with anger.
It's a hard habit to get over. It's hard for me to mentally accept that anger is an okay feeling to have. It's hard to seperate the emotion of anger from the actions that some choose to do while angry (throwing, hitting, screaming, breaking, etc, etc). It's hard to not believe that one can be angry without having all that as well. Slowly, but surely, I'm working on it ... and maybe someday I'll get there. And anger won't seem so bad or scary or wrong to me!