Have a Heart That Never Hardens

February 16, 2026

Have a heart that never hardens.

That line from Charles Dickens has been sitting with me today. It sounds noble. Almost poetic. The kind of sentence you’d cross stitch on a pillow or frame above a fireplace.

Then your kid drops veggie straws on the floor and screams like the world just ended.

And suddenly your heart feels like concrete.

Dickens writes, “Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” It is beautiful. It is aspirational. It is also deeply inconvenient.

Because real life is loud.

Real life is three kids at different volume settings, and somehow all of them are set to maximum. Real life is being tired before the day even begins. Real life is wanting five quiet minutes and getting none.

I know my kids do not understand what they are doing when they scream. They are five, three, and small enough that the world still feels enormous. A broken snack is a catastrophe. A sibling breathing the wrong air is a personal offense.

They are not trying to harden my heart.

But some days it feels like they are chipping away at it.

Yesterday, after my son screamed because he dropped his veggie straws, I looked at him and said, “Scream again and I am going to scream louder. Now knock it off.”

That is not Dickens.

That is fatigue.

And if I am honest, I know it bothers me more when I am tired. Which is most of the time. When I am rested, I can laugh. I can kneel down. I can say, “Hey buddy, it is just a snack.” When I am running on fumes, the scream goes straight through me.

So maybe the line is not about never feeling irritation.

Maybe it is about what we do next.

A heart that never hardens is not a heart that never gets annoyed. It is a heart that refuses to calcify. It refuses to turn a moment into a verdict. It refuses to say, “This is who you are. You are a screamer. You are exhausting.”

It remembers they are children.

It remembers I was once a child.

It remembers that the people who had a soft touch with me shaped me far more than the ones who raised their voice.

There is something humbling about realizing that the thing driving you insane is also the thing you will someday miss.

One day the house will be quiet. No screaming over veggie straws. No dramatic collapses over dinner. No tiny feet running across the floor at 3:12 in the morning.

And if I am not careful, I will wish I had been softer.

I do not mean permissive. I do not mean letting chaos rule the house. Boundaries matter. Structure matters. Teaching them that screaming is not the way to solve problems matters.

But how we hold those boundaries matters too.

A temper that never tires does not mean endless patience. It means choosing restraint even when you are exhausted. It means taking a breath before escalating. It means remembering that volume does not equal authority.

And a touch that never hurts. That one is not just physical. It is the way we speak. The way we look at them. The way we let frustration leak out through sarcasm or sharpness.

Children feel that.

So do spouses.

So do coworkers.

So do we.

The world gives us plenty of reasons to harden. Bills. Stress. News. Deadlines. Sleep deprivation. It would be easy to justify it. To say, “I am just tired.” Or “They pushed me.”

But if I let my heart harden at home, it will not stay contained. It will follow me everywhere.

So today, the practice is simple. When the scream comes, and it will, I want to pause. I want to remember that this is not a battle to win. It is a moment to shape.

Have a heart that never hardens.

Not because life is easy.

But because it is not.

And the people in front of us deserve our softness more than our sharp edges.

I may not live up to Dickens every day.

But I can try again tomorrow.

And sometimes that is enough.

Stop.

Waiting for “next.”