The Sweater that told a story

Sometimes we only see the surface

We parents often feel the urge to comment on what our children wear, especially when it is something we don’t feel is appropriate or “right.”

You might recognize it in yourself.
That small irritation, that impulse to correct, to shape, to make it better.

The story that stuck with me.

I once read a story in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series about a mother and her teenage son. And although many of those stories are very cheesy, this one stayed with me while raising my own children. It just shifted something in the way I was raised myself.

Okay. The story.

It is about a boy who had a sweater he loved to wear. It was old, worn out, and full of holes. His mother hated it. Every time he wore it, she would say something about it. “Why are you wearing that again? It looks terrible. Can’t you just wear something decent for once?”

To her, it looked careless, untidy, almost like a sign that he didn’t take life seriously. And so she kept pointing it out, again and again, as parents sometimes do when something bothers them.

But the boy kept wearing it.
And then one day, something happened that no parent ever expects. Her son died  unexpectedly.

In the days after his death, some of his friends came to visit her to talk about the funeral. And then they asked something she did not expect at all. They asked if he could be buried in that old sweater.

The mother felt confused, and even a little embarrassed. Why that sweater? Why that old, worn-out thing? But she agreed.

That was when his friends began to tell her what the sweater had meant to them.

They told her how he had once given his coat to a friend who was cold on a winter night, and how he had worn that sweater instead. They spoke about times he had helped someone move house, wearing that same sweater, or how he had wrapped it around someone’s shoulders while sitting outside talking late into the night. Again and again, the sweater had been there in moments of care, of presence, of generosity.

At last, something really changed in the mother:
Those holes she had disliked so much were not signs of neglect. They were signs of a life that had been lived with others in mind.

Standing there, listening to his friends, she suddenly saw something she had not seen before. While she had been looking at the sweater, others had been seeing her son. His kindness. His loyalty. His big heart.

What irritates us can teach us something

Sometimes the things that irritate us the most, are simply the things we do not yet understand. Sometimes we look at the surface and miss what lives underneath.
And sometimes it takes the eyes of others to show us the quiet goodness that was there all along.

So I don’t care if my husband walks around in his favorite Crocs, or my sons in those shirts with weird texts, or my daughter in the oldest sweater that once belonged to my husband…
No, I love them for who they are!