I CAN

Nicole Dyer
Nov 1 · 4 min read
  • The words “I can’t” were words that were gently replaced with “I need help so that I can” while raising my children.
Photo by Nicole Dyer

It was a state of being that I found to be incredibly beneficial on a soul level. I would take what looked like an enormous amount of time teaching my children how to do things for themselves any time that they would ask for help.


When one of my daughters was three years old she had developed the beautiful skill of asking for help in putting on her shoes. Each time I would patiently help her, always with the intent that she would eventually, find within the dexterity of her little fingers, the ability to take on this daily task by herself and feel good about it. My other children had somehow gotten the gist of this much sooner, but her and I never gave up on one another. One day she came downstairs after my prompting her to prepare to leave the house for an outing. She met me with her shoes already on. The left shoe was on the right foot and the right shoe was on the left foot, but they were on her feet and she was gleaming with pure joy. We engaged in a victory dance with several high fives and went on our way. While we were out and standing in line waiting to be served a women approached me and said “Oh wow! Did she put her shoes on by herself?” I responded, full of primal resonance of a mama lioness after her cub’s first kill, “Yes, and she did a wonderful job. Those feet will take her anywhere now.” The woman looked at me with the same tears that are swelling in my eyes as I’m writing and she said, “I bet you’re a great mama.” We smiled at one another and the woman journeyed on, as did we.

Photo by Jakcob Owens on Unsplash

This was a dominant theme in the lives of my children and I.

I was very cognizant of encouraging the disuse of the words “I can’t”. And the word “help” always led to self-sufficiency.

Help me until I can do it on my own. I watched as another daughter sat comfortably on the couch staring off into space for quite some time. She had decided that she was not going to talk until she was about three or four. Up to that point we rarely understood what she was saying. She would babble out a sentence, frown lines would inevitably grow deeper and deeper into our foreheads as her father and I would desperately try to figure out what she was saying. But no — it wasn’t happening. We would turn to her sister who was seventeen months older than her and she would repeat the babble with clarity. Like two high school calculus students we would smack our foreheads with the inside palm of our hands and say, “Ahhhhhhh, I kinda thought that was what she was saying, but I wasn’t sure, and…”. We would go on and on while both girls watched and waited for our reply to the newly understood statement or question. And forget about talking to strangers. After a routine health checkup the doctor asked me if she was ever verbal. My daughter would sit and stare. The doctors and nurses would pull every trick out of their bag, silly puppets, funny faces, obnoxious sounds, candy — and nope. Not a word. I would just stand by and watch, wondering what in the world she could have been thinking. Patiently I would wait, listen to the recommendation of a speech therapist, and then bundle my quiet one up and take her home while she babbled with her older sister all the way home — both of them chuckling and periodically bursting out in laughter. I never did take her to a speech therapist.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Well, she was five now, and deep in thought snuggled in the corner of the couch. She looks up and catches my watchful eye and says, “If you say I can’t, you won’t.”

Wait a minute! What???

Nicole Dyer

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The emotional body is insightful & the imagination is limitless. Doorways to the SOUL...

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