Episode 16: Sally Clarkson: Are You Different? Great!
Transcript
Patsy: Hi, this is Patsy Clairmont, and I am a Boomer.
Andrew: And I am Andrew Greer, and I am a Millennial.
Patsy: And you are listening to Bridges.
Andrew: Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations.
Patsy: Andrew, did you know that only you can be you? Did you know that?
Andrew: In theory.
Patsy: I hear ya. Well, good news. We’ve got someone who’s gonna come in and affirm that, Sally Clarkson, and she and her son have written a book by that title.
Andrew: That’s right. Sally and her son, Nathan, have a really unique relationship, and part of what they’re doing through this book, it’s a series of children’s books: Only You Can Be You, subtitled What Makes You Different Makes You Great.
It’s born out of their own experience, their own relationship with one another, and they’re helping families build bridges between parents and children and form a foundation of understanding that is new and exciting. So this is definitely a multi-generational conversation.
Patsy: I was just studying about a bridge in Wales because my people, some of them are from Wales.
Andrew: Via Michigan?
Patsy: Via Michigan, yeah. Well, you have to go back a few generations. I was noticing that they have the longest and the tallest aqua bridge in the world.
Andrew: Aqua bridge?
Patsy: Yes, aqua bridge. It’s divided. One side of the bridge is for walking, and the other side you can take a boat over. Now, it originally was used to transfer iron ore from the mines, and along the way, when the mines closed down, they realized that they had a vantage point right in the center where you could see forever. And Wales is such a beautiful country, and so they started offering an alternative. And our guest today knows about building bridges.
Andrew: She sure does, and things out of the norm, such as these aqueduct bridges. We have Sally Clarkson, a wonderful speaker, author, mother of four children, right, and you have authored a book that is titled Only You Can Be You with one of your son’s, Nathan.
And what I love about the book is, first, the subtitle. That’s what intrigued me first the most. It says: What Makes You Different Makes You Great. And I would love to hear just from you, Sally, what does that subtitle mean to you, to your relationship to your son, Nathan, and to the many people that you guys have begun to speak into their lives through the books you are writing.
Sally: Well, it’s such an honor to be with you today. I just love what you do. I love words. I love all your messages.
The background behind this book is that my son, Nathan — he’s my third child — and he came into my life energetically, loud, fun, bigger than life, so eventually, it took us a long time to figure out… 2 plus 2 never equaled 4. And so it took us a little while to figure out what exactly composed Nathan, his brain, his mind, his heart, everything. And I could see that he was really brilliant. I used to study my children, and I used to think, Oh my goodness, Lord. What is inside of them? What is the genius that I need to draw out?
We eventually learned that Nathan had ADHD, ODD, OCD, dyslexia — lots of things that I think really mean he’s an artist, an out-of-the-box artist. He’s a film producer and he’s written books and he’s an actor, and he came to me a few years ago and he said, “Mom, we need to write a book about how we made it because I think I’m getting more and more letters from people who say, ‘Nathan, you have some issues. So do I.’”
So we wrote a book called Different: The Story of an Out-of-the-Box Kid and the Mom Who Loved Him. I said, “Now, Nathan, if we write this book, I’m going to have to tell the truth and be honest.” There were just some issues. He like me, I realized as I got to know him that I was him when I was a little girl. I would always get in trouble for talking too much, and now I get paid for talking too much.
Andrew: You’re in a safe place.
Sally: Really the main focus of the book was that I really think that God wants parents to love their children for who they are right now, not to wait till they become something that parents think they should be — not to put them in the box, not to make them try to conform. And so we put the book out there and had so much fun with it, and literally hundreds of letters started coming in, emails, messages, all sorts of statements of people saying, “Oh, I’m out of the box.” Or: “My child is.” Or: “This gave me freedom to admit that sometimes my day is really hard.”
And so Nathan came to me, and he said, “I wrote a poem. You can edit it.” So he kind of came up with this idea, and he said, “And the tagline needs to be: what makes you different makes you great.” And so he came up with the tagline, and I said, “Well, talk to me about what you mean by that.” He said, “Well, I want everyone to know that the unique imprint of God on their lives, that everybody has different DNA, everybody has different fingerprints, and that who God made them in a unique sort of way is the platform for where they’re going to flourish.”
And so that’s where the subtitle came from. Very long answer to a very short question.
Andrew: No, a beautiful answer.
Patsy: It was a great answer. I love that experience gives us opportunity for perspective so we can cast a vision for others, and that’s what I hear you saying, that you’ve been able to draw from the experience you and your son had and that from that has come something that will help many people, many parents who are raising children.
One of the things I love is the interpretation of your illustrator. I feel like sometimes an illustrator climbs right inside our dream for what we want and makes it come to life for us. So I love the fact that in the book you have children in different kinds of costumes representing something that may not be the norm but needs to be an expansive thought that children are not wrong for wanting to be, say, a little girl a construction worker.
“Experience gives us opportunity for perspective.”
Andrew: It is interesting. I am not a parent myself. Patsy, of course, is a parent of two and a grandparent of two. My peers who are parents who are now just parents of toddlers and youngins, it seems there’s a new trend of actually stepping back a little bit, like you’re talking about, to actually observe your children and say, okay, instead of this is what I want you to be, who do you want to be and begin to still be a guide and shape to that. Did you experience, when you were raising your children — and Nathan is now 30-years-old, is that correct?
Sally: 30-years-old
Andrew: Okay, so in the era that you were raising your children, did you feel like your peer parents were encouraging of that kind of step back and watch and look and pay attention to our children, or was it still more of the parenting by behavior?
Sally: Well, I think even your generation, the Millennials, which most of my children are, I think that there’s so much on social media, and it was different in my time because there wasn’t as much social media, but there were definitely all sorts of foundations of expectations. And so physicians say things like, “The normal child will walk at 9-months-old.” And then if your child walks at 7 months or 17 months, you think, Oh no, they’re not normal. The same thing from the beginning — potty training, and their vocabulary should be, and da da da da da.
My husband and I are both way out of the box, so I began to realize, with four children, none of them spoke, potty trained, whatever that is, crawled, or walked at the right time. I think that people tend to take social media, or any kind of person who they think is an expert, and instead of having confidence to say, “This is my life. This is my child. I’m gonna just observe them and cultivate health in them and watch them for who they are supposed to be.”
But you’re right. We lived a very non-conformist life in a world that wanted us to have our children, and poor little Nathan, to sit in a row, not ask questions, and get in trouble if he was too loud, and he did.
Patsy: Of course he did. We kind of set him up, didn’t we, in a way, which is sad that we set up our children not to be able to fit in. Not that we purpose it, but it does tend to be the result if you take a freewheeling child and put them in constraints that they just can’t handle emotionally.
I was thinking one of my favorite sayings is “normal’s just a setting on the dryer.” We’re still trying to make normal fit a certain list of rules, and it’s so lovely and refreshing to be able to pick up something like your book and your son’s book and be able to invest those words in a young child’s heart because words continue to speak to us, don’t they?
Sally: Oh yeah. I think one of the best gifts a parent can give to a child is those early years, when the brain patterns are forming and the brain highways are connecting, to have this repetitive voice in their head: “Only you can be you, and the Maker of all things made you that way.” To give a child that gift of unconditional love and acceptance from the beginning, to have that be a voice that speaks in their mind.
And as you know, our voices from early childhood speak to us the rest of our lives. And so we were hoping with the book to give parents a tool that they could use to begin, even at a young age, shaping those messages that come to the mind of their children: You are amazing. You are special. I love how different you are. I love that you are unique.
So I totally agree with you that those messages speak to yourself the rest of your life, and we wanted to give parents something they could use to affirm the wonderful uniqueness of their children. It’s not to say that there aren’t areas where children have to conform. We want to give them the capacity of spiritual and emotional and mental muscle so that they can learn when to really be highly disciplined and when to be free. It’s kind of a both/and.
Andrew: What you’re saying, that’s controlling your children; that’s resourcing. That’s giving them resources. And it seems, too, as you’re taking it into a spiritual context, this kind of idea of normal or this is where the child needs to fit in if they’re at the right stage of development, that almost doesn’t make sense if you think about who God is and if we truly believe that we are made in the image of God. And God is, at least I’m growing to experience him as this kind of wild vast frontier that is beyond my full…
Sally: He’s transcendent.
Andrew: Right. If we have the imprint of that, wouldn’t it only make sense that we’re going to have a lot of different angles and areas of interest and ways of interacting.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: “Where would I be if I did not believe I would experience the Lord’s favor in the land of the living? Rely on the Lord! Be strong and confident! Rely on the Lord!” Those are the last two verses of Psalm 27 from the Abide Bible. It is a new Bible that has been in my home now for several months, so I’ve had time to work with it and it to work inside of me. It offers beautiful, old art that is associated with verses, so it helps it to become a bigger picture in our mind and our retention is improved. It has places for us to journal on the side as we read. It also has instructions on how to pray this Scripture, how to meditate on it, how to contemplate it so we can sit and soak in God’s Word and allow it to dwell richly within us.
Andrew: What I love about the Abide Bible is that it’s invitational, not just informational. It’s inviting us not to just exercise the Word of God in our head but to really invite it to dwell in our hearts, which to me reminds me of John 15:4: “Abide in me and I in you.” So you can order your copy of the Abide Bible today at bridgesshow.com/abide.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: I’m excited about Food for the Hungry because they know how to get to the need of people. If you meet their needs, then their heart is open to anything else you say, so they’re feeding the children not only to nurture them and prepare them for real life but to hear about Jesus. And one of the ways that they’re able to help these families and it be sustainable is by chickens, Andrew.
Andrew: That’s right. It’s incredible. For just $14, you can provide a family with a chicken, and if you want to multiply that blessing, you can provide them with two chickens for just $28. And we know that chickens multiply, so that’s more eggs for the children to have the protein that they need, for them to sell the extras at market, and those chickens last eight to 10 years. It’s a huge blessing. All you have to do is go to fh.org/bridges.
Andrew: But take me back to, I heard you when you were mentioning some of what as you discovered about Nathan when he was a child, some of the kind of more medical diagnoses. ODD, I’m not familiar. What’s ODD?
Sally: It’s oppositional defiance disorder.
Andrew: Wow, even saying that…
Patsy: You have that.
Sally: I kind of think now, and I know I’ll probably get a lot of letters about this, as I look at Nathan now, he’s an incredibly articulate defender of truth. And I think when he was sitting at our dinner table every night, because we would discuss things every single night, he would always be the odd man out. “Well, what about this?” And I think in an immature little boy, he wasn’t trying to be difficult; I think he was trying to get at the root of things. “But have you thought about this? Have you looked at it from this angle?”
So sometimes I think that people give that diagnosis too soon because I think it actually reflects kind of a brilliant mind that isn’t just going to accept answers. They’re going to dissect the answers and look at it in and out and question it. He is just one of the most profound thinkers to me today when he’s interviewed. He really kind of makes you think and inspires you. And as an immature child sitting at my table…
I had three children, three miscarriages, and then at 42, Nathan said, “Mommy, I think you need to have another little girl.” And I said, “Well, I’m kind of getting old, and my body’s falling apart.” So he said, “But do you believe in prayer? You told me you did.” So he prayed, and then I had Joy, who is six and a half years younger than everyone else. And Joy would sometimes put her hand on her head and go, “Oh, do we have to listen to those teenagers discuss something one more night at the dinner table, or can we just sit here and eat?”
I look back, and he was debating from the time he was a little boy. That’s why he’s quite intelligent. But from the point of view of a diagnosis, sometimes people actually give limited parameters on what might become a really wonderful strength some day.
I don’t know if that makes sense or not.
Patsy: It absolutely does.
Sally: All that to say, he wasn’t really trying to be defiant. He was just trying to get to the bottom of whatever we were talking about.
Patsy: Well, I was agoraphobic in my 20s, so I was emotionally and physically housebound. I did not know that my condition had a name, and I’m so glad because I would’ve thought I had to live up to the limitations it set. But instead I believed that God was breaking me free, and I was able to make my way out of that very hard place. So I couldn’t agree with you more that it’s not that we don’t want the insights that come with a certain diagnosis, but we don’t want the limitations that we can’t be well or that it might not have a side to it that’s of great value.
Sally: Exactly, exactly.
Patsy: It could be announcing that later on, as maturity comes and refinement, that that very thing that looked like it could be a negative is one of our greatest assets.
Sally: Well, I totally agree. I remember I discovered who Nathan was little by little, but I was kind of exhausted one night. You know, four kids — I’m not always natural at all the demands, if anyone is.
Andrew: You weren’t effervescent all the time?
Sally: Well, I attempted to be but wasn’t. But anyway, my husband had taken the other three kids to some kind of thing at church, and Nathan had a little cold, so he stayed home with me. So I sat down with him in this overstuffed chair exhausted, and I said, “Well, honey, tell me what’s on your little heart.” He talked 30 minutes without stopping. “And I did this, and I dreamed that, and I saw this.” And I thought, Oh my goodness, this is an extrovert caught in the middle of a crowd of people, and he has a lot going on. He has a lot to say.
That was the beginning of me realizing that he wasn’t trying to talk too much. He just had a whole lot bubbling up and going on. His brain was firing all the time. And so because I feel like I got in trouble for talking too much, though I liked silence too, the Lord just really gave me this sense of, Wow, I wonder how I can unpack that in a way that will make him feel affirmed, in a way that will make him feel like he has sparkle, instead of making him feel guilty for having so much to say. Because I used to feel like I was too much for people my whole life, and I thought, He’ll probably feel like that way too.
Andrew: Unless, I mean, what you’re talking about there, sitting in an overstuffed chair. You got this gift of time alone. When you have four children, to have time alone with one of them, even just you to have time alone, not both you and your husband, just you, so you were giving yourself permission in the gift of that space and time to then give himself permission.
But what I love about that is I remember growing up with my parents, of course, that there were three of us — I have two older brothers — and they would often take… I say often, maybe it was once a quarter or twice a year or something. But where dad and I would go out on our own and do things that we were interested in, including things that he was interested in and that he wanted to show me. And then my mom and I would do the same thing.
I think that gave us time because when we were at the dinner table, all five of us, and all of us have a bit of the gab thing like I do, although mine didn’t develop till later because they had to leave home first and then I started talking. But we were all probably like y’all at the dinner table. It just was a constant carousel of conversation. But then when we were able to be alone with our parents, I just think that’s an encouragement to parents, too, to seek out not only date night with each other but, in a way, date night with your children. And I don’t know if, as parents, you all can affirm really the grace and the gift of having individual solo time with your children.
Patsy: We had set up at our home that the first 30 minutes when Jason would get home from school, we would do nothing but talk about his day.
Sally: Oh wow, that's wonderful.
Patsy: And one of the reasons I did that was it was coming home and when I would go in for parent-teacher conferences: “We find him so delightful, but he never stops talking.” And I thought, And that’s a problem? Because I love words.
So I gave him that 30 minutes to kind of help him clear his mind of everything that had transpired through the day. But he would say, “Will you help me get going?” And I would say, “Okay. You woke up this morning. You got ready. You said, ‘Bye,’ and the first person you saw when you went to the bus stop was…” And then he would start, who he saw, what they did, how the day went, and so we would do that on a daily basis.
Sally: What a gift you gave to them. That is wonderful.
Andrew: Yeah, it is. One that’s kept giving, knowing Jason today.
Patsy: Well, I think it’s miraculous that I knew enough to be quiet for 30 minutes.
Andrew: You had talked earlier that this book, Only You Can Be You written with Nathan, is the second book that y’all have co-authored together, though you all have written many books individually, the first one being called Different.
I was reading a review of Different, and the reviewer was saying something to the degree that this was, out of all your years having a public profile, speaking, et cetera, that this was really the first time you had, on paper, told this story, some of these more personal stories, and giving yourself the permission and Nathan saying that’s okay too.
I’d love for you to talk about why, at that point in time, did it feel like it was the right time to begin talking about some of these personal aspects of y’all’s family life.
Sally: Well, actually, Patsy probably understands this too, but when you’re in the public eye and when people walk up to your children off the street and say, “I know you,” I realized over the years that wanted to have a private life, that they didn’t want me to tell every story about every one of them. And the funny thing is is I often tell people, “Oh, I failed and I yelled, and I did this, that, and the other.” But there is something about me writing this book with Nathan that touched people’s hearts and made them feel like I was more vulnerable than I’ve ever been, but I think that it was because Nathan came to me and said, “Mom, I want to write this book.”
I feel like one of the reasons I didn’t before that time is that I do have four children, they live all over the world, and I just am very kind of protective about some of the personal details of their life. And I think that it was very brave and bold of Nathan to want to come out and say, “I have this. I have this. This was hard for me. I got in trouble.”
I know that vulnerability and humility helps people a lot, so he is not the only child in my family who has some issues. Half of my kids are very introverted, and half of them are very extroverted, so I kind of let them help me define into the world what persona they want to become, if that makes sense.
Patsy: Absolute wisdom. I too am protective of my children because I know that it has taken me years to get my boundaries straight.
Sally: It’s so true. It’s so hard to know.
Patsy: Yes. And so what is very comfortable for me to share would not be for them, so I have to always make sure I’m in the bounds of maintaining their dignity and their self-respect. So I love that you put vulnerability and humility in the same sentence because they are definitely kissing cousins.
Sally: It’s so true.
Andrew: Patsy, I hear that you have a book club.
Patsy: I do. Books are what God used to help heal me, so it delights me to offer that service to others, that they could sign up, anybody. All y’alls, come on in. We want you to join in the book club, and we will read ourselves silly and sane. We’ll have different selections, one every month with a bonus. You can check it out: patsyclairmont.com. And also on that page, you’ll see that I do cheerleading for people. I coach them in helping them stir up their creativity to tell their story. But here’s what I know: You’re into a different kind of storytelling, and you’ve been set up to win awards for what you’ve done.
Andrew: I love music, and I have a new record out called Tune My Heart, and it includes some of my really close friends, some of your friends, like Sandra McCracken and Cindy Morgan and Buddy Greene. And you can find that record anywhere you stream or download, or at andrew-greer.com. You know what else, Patsy?
Patsy: What?
Andrew: I’ve got another podcast. It’s not my favorite podcast, but if you like listening to Bridges, then you might like listening to and viewing Dinner Conversations with our pal Mark Lowry and myself. You can find it on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Prime, or simply go to dinner-conversations.com.
Bridges Sponsorship Message
Patsy: We’d love to sit down, Andrew and I, with each one of you and have a meal and a conversation. That’s not possible, but because of this contest, it is possible for us to sit down with someone and their friend.
Andrew: That’s right. For every one of you who purchase a chicken to help families in need through our friends at Food for the Hungry, you will be entered into our Bridges Flyaway Giveaway, where one lucky winner and their friend will be able to fly in to Franklin, Tennessee, have dinner with us, and explore our quaint hometown.
So go to fh.org/bridges today to get your chicken and enter to win.
Andrew: Raising four children and raising children with very different personalities, where did you begin to understand your boundary as a parent?
Sally: Well, it’s funny because when I wrote my first books many years ago, of course I did have lots of little stories about them and everything, and then as they all grew up, they said, “I don’t want everyone to know every story about my life.” So it was a learning process for me.
Some of them love being in our arena. I think all of them, thank the Lord, love us and love what we do, but some of them say, “I want to do my own thing.”
We are very fortunate. We love our audience. We love our people who walk along beside us. They’ve been very wonderful to us.
Patsy: You’ve got quite a following on Facebook. We just encourage all of our listeners to just follow along and see what you’re up to.
Sally: Oh, you’re so sweet. Well, that whole social media area’s kind of hard, isn’t it? But we do feel like we have kindred spirits out there. We’re very, very fortunate.
Andrew: Connectivity’s always been an important part of any kind of communication. That is communication.
There’s something about your communication. Again, I want to go back to talking about kind of your vocabulary, your word choices, around talking about Nathan. And maybe these are self-descriptors, but talking about a son with an out-of-the-box personality. You really keep the language upbeat. Was that part of you beginning to shape or reshape your perspective, even as a younger mother, and discovering the personality that Nathan was both dealing with and growing into. Because it’s easy to get into the ODD, OCD, and disorder. Instead, you’re kind of reshaping it as an order, an order of interest.
Sally: Yeah. I think sometimes, especially as you look at social media and the proliferation of knowledge that there is out there sometimes today, I think you would agree with this: All children are hard. They want to eat and wear reasonably clean clothes, and they make messes every single day. And so I feel like if you are overly sensitive to, Well, my children are so hard for me, so they must have a disorder, I think that, no, they’re children. God made them to be loud.
“All children are hard.”
Andrew: They’re all disordered.
Sally: Yeah, exactly. They’re moving total dependence, immaturity, hopefully in the direction of maturity, and there are stages they go through. But I feel like I’m a little bit of a pollyanna, and also, the more I wrote the book I was thinking, This is me. Oh my goodness. This was me too. Well, I've got this issue too. It was interesting writing it because I had never been given permission. I always felt guilty for the way I was.
Andrew: As a child.
Sally: As a child. Because I can remember that I would always be bouncing in church, and my mom would put her long arm over and grab my knee and hold onto it and look at me like, Can you just sit still? You are rocking the whole bench. I didn’t even know I was popping up and down.
I was very sensitive to not wanting to give my children a sense of negativity for being exactly who they were. I’ll go into a little bit of the book because the funny thing was is our illustrator wanted to do it all animals.
Andrew: Oh, no children.
Sally: Yeah, no children. He said, “That’s not my skill set in general.” And so he wanted to do bears and dinosaurs and giraffes and this and that, which shows, again, the variety, the diversity, in God’s mind. But Nathan said, “I always wanted a book with a little freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy like me.” And we thought it would be more fun if they had children that every child could look at the book and say, “Oh, that’s me. Oh no, that’s me.”
Patsy: You even have twins.
Sally: I know. Isn’t that fun?
So he said, “Well, I’ll try.” And so he came up with animals and children in every possible walk of life because I think that both Nathan and I wanted kids not to feel guilty for being who they were and not to suppress the abounding joy and life and love, but we wanted to give them permission to love who they were.
But we also wanted to say to parents: Chill. Your children might not be controllable. Our goal isn’t to control people. Our goal is to help them be healthy, to grow strong inside, to do all sorts of things, but our goal is also to really say, They have a story to tell, unique story, in their lifetime for the kingdom of God. It’ll be different than anyone else’s. How can we as parents read this book and say, Oh my goodness, I need to accept my limitations. I need to accept the person that I am as a foundation for myself, and then I can pass on unconditional acceptance to my children.
Because sometimes parents work out of insecurities. They want their children to be perfect because they feel like their children are a reflection of them, and if they can go back and say, Wait a minute. I don’t have to be like everyone else. I don’t have to be like everyone else on social media.
I think until you become comfortable in your skin, you can’t really be comfortable in shaping the lives of other people.
“Until you become comfortable in your skin, you can’t really be comfortable in shaping the lives of other people.”
Andrew: And the “chill” communication for parents to kind of relax a little bit around their children also influences the people around their children, how we interact. Me being someone who does not have children but being around and in a lot of children’s lives, it is the parents who are relaxed about their children that I am most able to interact with their children and their children with me, which those parents desire because I have different experiences, different skill sets.
There’s a giftedness, right? Community is part of raising a child. Parents who are more controlled with their children, there is no possibility for them to interact with just adults they’re coming in touch with at church or by being over at their house at dinner. And it makes me feel a little bit, not uncomfortable, but I’m more guarded if parents aren’t really relaxed. I love it when a kid comes bounding up and accidentally trips over my leg and then climbs up on my lap, whatever. All people, through children, have the ability to learn something about themselves, which is what you’re saying.
“All people, through children, have the ability to learn something about themselves.”
Sally: It’s so true.
I want to be clear. I think sometimes people hear this idea of freedom, and I don’t believe children should just be wild and have no boundaries. But I do think the more a parent is relationally focused on their children… Like you said, Patsy, when you talk to your child, when you befriend your child, when you spend time with them, they’re much more likely to be content in their lives because they just need that personal attention.
I want to say that it’s not just having an attitude of affirming who they are one time. It is in a sense of saying, “Because you’re so important, I want to spend time with you, and I’m gonna ask you questions, and I’m gonna give you a place to express who you are.” And I do think those children are more fun to be around. Children who have been talked to and related to are much more likely to be polite and considerate to you because somebody has modeled that to them.
Andrew: Sure, they know how to interact.
Sally: Exactly, because it’s a regular part of their lives.
Patsy: It’s hard to manage a rude child that has never been taught guidelines of what works for relationships.
Did his challenges that he had, your son’s, did they always seem like a gift?
Sally: No.
Patsy: Thank you.
Sally: No, no, no, no. I am a very selfish person at heart, I’m an introvert, and I would just really like at some points to have quiet in my life. I’m an introvert who talks a lot.
Patsy: I get it.
Andrew: Right here with you.
Sally: I was like Joy. Could we just one night have a meal where everybody agrees that black is black or red is red?
And sometimes I would just pray to God, and I would say, “Do you really love me? Did you really think I should have four kids?” I never changed a diaper. I never babysat any children. I have these four children. How in the world am I supposed to reach their hearts?
So, no, no, no. It wasn’t easy for me. It was a constant stretching of my character. It would’ve been easy for me if any of my children had come out of my body and said, “I love you. I will honor you. I will be perfect, and I will never make any messes.” That’s what I wanted. And I often tell my children I have earned every gray hair. In case you can’t see me, every hair on my head is gray.
Patsy: As is mine.
Sally: We earned them, didn’t we?
Patsy: Yes, we did.
Sally: Yeah. No, that’s a great question. I would never want people to have the illusion that it wasn’t hard for me. Daily I would pray, “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to reach him?”
Finding out, too, that one of his issues was that whereas we can focus on one sound, like I might be looking at you right now but I’m not looking at Patsy at the same time, Nathan’s brain was firing so that he would hear the bird outside, the cricket behind him, the music that was one, me talking to him. His brain was firing so much that he didn’t have the ability to sit still or to be quiet. And so it took me years to finally understand what obsessive compulsive was.
And nobody wanted us to have anything wrong with us. All of our friends would say, “Oh, you’re just having a bad day. He doesn’t have any issues.” And I would think, No, there’s something going on here that I don’t understand. Can you help me? And in general, many people didn’t even want to acknowledge the fact that, yes, a couple of my kids had beyond what was expected of them issues.
So yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because it was never easy for me, but because I wanted to mentor them, I kept saying, “Okay, show me how to love. Show me.” There was a conflict going on in my heart, but I kind of knew I had agency, so I needed to act in the direction of what I would’ve liked for somebody to have done for me. But no, it wasn’t easy. I was selfish every moment of every day my whole life.
Patsy: We’ve mentioned vulnerability, and then you mentioned along with that the humility. The other one is honesty, and I think you’ve been very honest and forthright on this, which just increases the value of the ministry to the hearts of listeners. So we thank you for this, Sally. We thank you that you’re willing to dip into those years that were both hard and revealing that led you to the middle of the tallest bridge and gave you the greatest ability and perspective that you could turn around and be a visionary for others. We thank you for that.
Andrew: We look forward to meeting Nathan at some point too.
Sally: Oh, you would enjoy him so much. And thank you for this opportunity. I love your heart and your understanding of this whole issue.
Patsy: Andrew Greer and I, Patsy Clairmont, just want to thank Sally Clarkson for taking time out of her busy day, and she and her husband, Clay, dropping by to see us.
Andrew: You can find her new book that she co-authored with her son, Nathan Clarkson, Only You Can Be You: What Makes You Different Makes You Great wherever books are sold, and you can find out more about Sally at sallyclarkson.com.
Patsy: Bridges is co-produced by Andrew Greer and myself, Patsy Clairmont.
Andrew: And our podcast is recorded and mixed by Jesse Phillips at the Arcade in Franklin, Tennessee.
Patsy: Remember, don’t forget to leave us a rating, a review, or a comment. It all helps our little show get going.
Andrew: To find out more about my co-host Patsy Clairmont or myself, Andrew Greer, or to read transcripts of our show, simply go to bridgesshow.com.