Harnessing the Power of “I Can’t”

So my ‘Yes, I Can’ girl today said “I can’t” for the first time. She’s obviously conveyed this attitude before (she’s three after all), but it’s the first time she’s ever verbalized it in English or her native language.

The ‘I Can’t’ was the result of an unwillingness to climb the stairs. Her proclamation was accompanied by some rather lengthy and unrestrained screaming. For twenty minutes, we made no headway. My husband coaxed, her brother encouraged, we all gave her some space. But she wouldn’t budge. Finally, I sat a few steps up and held up two of her favorite dresses. “Which one do you want today?” I asked. The wailing continued. I went back to the closet and returned with two more dresses, both frillier than my original offerings. “What about one of these?” I asked. The crying stopped for just a moment and she nodded in the direction of one. 

We reached a compromise. She climbed up four steps and I helped her into her lavender dress. Our moment of crisis had passed. 

But what she said got me thinking. Where did this ‘I can’t’ come from? This wasn’t the first time she’d balked at climbing. We’ve had tears before. But it’s the first time she said she couldn’t as opposed to she wouldn’t. When I mentioned it to my husband, he suggested she’d picked it the phrase from her brother. But the more I mulled it over, the more I knew the cause couldn’t be pinned on anyone under four feet.

I thought about how when I was asked to read them a book, I had said, “I can’t right now.”  Or there was this weekend when my son asked me to dance with him to live music at the open air mall. “I can’t,” I had laughed. “It’s hot and I’m too tired.” It was hot and I was tired. But those excuses were admittedly a pretext for me not making a fool of myself with my rhythm-less moves.

So I’ve made a decision. We are all going to remove “I can’t” from our vocabulary. It’s not that I’m going to start dropping everything to accommodate requests from my kids or anyone else. Or that if someone asks me if I’m capable of climbing Mt. Everest tomorrow that I’ll pipe up with a cheery ‘Yes! Yes, I can!”. Because I can’t. But the reason I can’t is because I’m untrained, unprepared and, frankly, unwilling. That’s different than incapable. So from here on out that’s what I’m going to say. I’m going to state why I can’t and not rely on a blanket statement of physical impossibility.

Semantics? Maybe.

But I prefer to think of it as harnessing the power I Can’t into a mindset of I can.

---------

Here are a few videos of congenital quads to inspire the ‘I Can’ in you. Video 1 is Gabe Adams. We started working on pouring milk after I saw this video. Video 2 is not in English but you don’t need it to be to understand it. Watch her thread the needle! The really good part is about 2 minutes, 20 seconds in.