Holding baby chicks

Tis the season for baby chicks. Whether you’ve seen them or not, they’re hatching right now at farms or science classrooms near you.

Have you ever held one? With their impossible softness and yellowness? Their little chirpy warmth?

Even if you haven’t ever actually held one, you can probably imagine how, if you did, your hands would cup in a way that was gentle yet firm. Your shoulders might even fold in a bit, as if you rounding over this fragile thing could help protect it from the world.

Well, hold that feeling in your awareness, because I’m not talking about holding real baby chicks.

I’m talking about how we hold the fragile, tender vulnerabilities that our loved ones share with us in confidence.

More specifically, the things we share with the people in our lives about how, given our specific mixture of insides, we want to be cared for.

I’m thinking of a client who recently told me about how she gets mad at her wife for not texting her to let her know when she’s on her way home from work.

They’ve had this argument a hundred times before. Her wife walks through the front door, relieved to be home after a long day of work, and my client shoots off a passive aggressive “thanks for letting me know you were on your way.”

Any other variation of how you think you might handle this situation, believe me, she’s done all of them. Cool sarcasm. Cold shoulder. Heated rage.

But not, until recently, had she told her wife the baby chick version.

The baby chick version is that my client grew up in a household with a lot of uncertainty. A lot. On top of that, the mood her mom was in was THE tone setter for her childhood home.

Given this, a few weeks ago she waited until after she and her wife had eaten dinner and both were feeling comfortable and warm toward one another.

“You know how upset I get when you don’t text me to let me know when you’ll be home? I know you think it’s me trying to control you, and I can understand how you’d feel that way,” my client explained calmly.

“But really what it is is that, even after all these years, and even knowing it’s you, my body still gets tight and anxious and I get freaked out when I’ve been at home in my own space and thoughts and someone comes in without me expecting them.”



She had tears in her eyes at this point, and made it clear to her wife in a new way not how awful her wife is for not texting her, but how awful the experience is for her because of who she is.


Instead of attacking her wife for her behavior, she handed her wife a baby chick. She essentially said, “Hey, there’s this vulnerable fuzzy soft thing inside me, could you help me take care of it?”

Once she said it that way, my client told me, her wife has remembered to text her on her way home from work every night.

What’s the baby chick version of the thing that a loved one does that pisses you off?



And do you know the baby chicks that the people you love the most carry around that you could help care for?

I encourage you to get curious about the answers to these questions if you don’t know them, and then have a conversation with your loved one about it.

Typically we’re better at holding each other with care and tenderness if we know there’s a baby chick involved. Especially when the thing that upsets the other person seems irrational.

I’m not saying that holding someone’s baby chick always means you have to change your behavior—because sometimes the thing that would feel so healing is not as easy as sending a reminder text.

But holding someone’s baby chick can also look like simply offering empathy and warmth and understanding when they’re feeling upset about something that, to you, is no big deal but to them is.

Here’s to your baby chick having some gentle and firm hands to hold it.

Want more skillfulness in how you relate to the people you love? Check out my signature online program, Yours Truly.