The old lady who lives inside me sometimes has a hard time with what I do for a living. Specifically the part where kids misbehave. She cries out from within my head in her geriatric voice, “When I was a kid, I sat perfectly still in the dentist’s chair. I never would have cried out or acted up! My parents would not have let me get away with that nonsense.” Meanwhile, the kid in my chair makes himself gag, or lets herself pee, or tries to slap my assistant in the tit, and I sigh. Kids: they just don’t make ’em like they used to.

One of the most grating things for me to hear says a lot about my personal belief system. While I’m moving my tender, tired hands about within a tiny oral cavity, doin’ my thang, and a child yells out, “But that HURTS!” I absolutely cringe. Only occasionally will I restrain myself from using that dialect so underappreciated by children–sarcasm–and not say something like, “Who told you that you were getting a Swedish massage today? Did you get lost and think you were at the spa?” I want to teach these children the lessons I learned: that life isn’t fair, that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, that they should be glad they don’t have to walk six miles to school in the snow uphill both ways. And sometimes I do that. Others, I just crank up the laughing gas. (Admit it. By now, you really want my business card.)

But kids are just an unfiltered version of what adults think. Which means that we, the grownups, have bought into the lie that a life going right should not involve struggle.

I blame our success. Our first world problems, our hangnails and car trouble, that lull us into a sense of entitlement: we DESERVE to have things go well. A slow internet connection is enough to send me into a rage; which indecencies do you feel especially outraged by when you encounter them? Traffic? The wrong guy winning the election?

We behave as though we were promised smooth sailing. We were promised, in fact, the opposite. Which means that maybe our battle plan should involve less fighting and more enduring. Less rebelling and more accepting. Less outrage and more…whatever comes instead (I’m still working on that part).

During a particularly difficult period of my life, when every day began with a struggle to get out of bed, followed by an entertaining of the idea that today would be the day when I just bailed on the path I was taking—during that period, I amassed a musical collection that accompanied me on my painful drive to a daily schedule I wanted to escape. Lyrics and melodies were my sacred texts and hymns, and they reminded me of a truth that felt far away in the midst of my trials. But I kept listening. Maybe because even when it feels far away, truth is real. Maybe because even (especially?) when life is ugly, beauty is recognizable. Maybe because the sacred is always there, it just takes the puncture wounds of suffering to give it room to seep in fastest. But those songs—my Pain Playlist—remain embedded in my iPod and soul, and now they don’t feel sad to me. They feel like buoys, markers on a path I never left. And the other night, as I fed The Kid his bedtime bottle and began singing, I realized they had become lullabies.