Today, my three-year-old was not feeling well. She had a headache, so I gave her some medicine and settled her on the couch.
“KK, what is sore?”
“My head, Mommy.”
“What can Mommy do to make it better?”
“I need a plaster on my head.”
Of course she did.
I knew a plaster was not going to fix a headache. But this did not feel like the moment to explain that. I found one, stuck it on her forehead and asked whether she felt better.
“Yes.”
And that was that.
What the plaster did
I have thought about the plaster more than I expected to.
It did not cure her headache. The medicine still had to do its work. I do not know whether the plaster made her feel looked after, whether she liked having something visible where it hurt, or whether three-year-old logic simply made perfect sense to her.
What I do know is that she asked for something small and specific, and I nearly dismissed it because I knew it would not solve the problem.
I spend a lot of my working life thinking about people moving through change. I can reach for the explanation, the plan or the solution before I have properly understood what someone is worried about.
Sitting beside KK, there was no strategy. I asked what she needed and took the answer seriously, even though it was not what I expected.
I am wary of turning everything my children do into a lesson. They are children, not convenient little metaphors. Still, this moment stayed with me because I could so easily have said, “That will not help.”
That afternoon made me wonder whether I sometimes dismiss the workplace equivalent of a plaster because it cannot solve the whole problem. A conversation will not remove uncertainty or reverse a difficult decision. But perhaps not everything that helps has to fix.
The medicine still had to do its job. The plaster stayed on her forehead.
I am still wondering how often, in the middle of change, I reach for the cure when someone is asking for a plaster.