Why I Talked About Coasters in Therapy

Happy Friday, and thank you for joining this week’s installment of Raising Children, Lowering Confidence. I’ll be your host, emotionally outmatched by my own child.

Please, have a seat.

Earlier this week, I was alone in the kitchen, giving a Grammy-worthy performance of “Shaking That Ass” when my daughter walked in. Naturally, I smiled. She stared at me like someone witnessing public indecency.

I continued dancing and asked if she knew how to shake her booty too. She looked me dead in the soul and muttered, “No, but clearly neither do you.” And then proceeded to walk away with the devastating calm of someone aware they’d just delivered a fatal blow.

I don’t know what hurt more, the comment or the accuracy.

Anyway, so how’s everyone else’s week going?

Smiles in “annoying morning person.”

I’ve seen a few people post: to conduct an orchestra, you must turn your back on the audience, which I’ve since Googled and learned that the original quote was, “A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd,” by Max Lucado.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m working on this in therapy, or because my job involves creating things and sending them out into the world, but this feels like such a beautiful metaphor for confidence and trusting yourself.

From the book, Love For Imperfect Things:

"What distresses us is less the circumstances we find ourselves in, and more the energy we spend in resisting them."

Off Campus: The internet has been raving about this so of course I had to watch. Saw the first episode last night—a little cheesy but cute.

The Pursuit of Happyness: Saw this 20 years ago and watched it again with my kids—loved it. Will Smith really is such a great actor.

The fact that I recently brought a designer’s opinions about coasters into therapy should probably concern me more than it does, but I’ll get to that emotional spiral in a minute.

But first, some context.

I was scrolling Instagram, minding my own damn business, when an interior designer popped up on my feed and the first words out of her mouth were, “I HATE COASTERS, because it suggests you have to be careful.”

Which was shocking because I had previously understood a coaster to be a small circular object designed to absorb condensation and not a psychological weapon.

She went on to explain that she has boys and she doesn’t want to “have rooms where you can’t go in there,” and “can you imagine my kids growing up and saying, ‘my mother didn’t let me do this because of the furniture’?”

At this point, I became genuinely confused about what people think a coaster is.

Because in my experience, using a coaster has never prevented anyone from entering a room, sitting on a couch, expressing emotion, or reaching their full human potential. Nobody has ever arrived at my house and whispered, “I wanted to relax, but then I saw the West Elm cork round and knew this home was governed by fear.”

Naturally, like any mildly nosy but spiritually curious person with access to Instagram Stories, I did what I always do: I immediately turned this into a public survey.

I asked my community a few extremely serious, academically rigorous questions like:

What house rule have you had that someone else thought was ridiculous?
What makes you feel comfortable and relaxed in someone else’s home?
What makes you feel uncomfortable, or like a home is rigid?

And it became a very heated debate between the “careful” crowd and the “relaxed” crowd, who, as it turns out, have very different ideas of what a home is supposed to feel like.