* I am writing from the position of a mother because it’s the only one I know, but I believe that the text is applicable to all parents.
Have you heard of the term mom-shaming? If you haven’t, you must have encountered it.
It’s the attitude: if you gave birth naturally – so what, do you want a medal for that?! My grandmother gave birth in the field and kept on working;
if you gave birth by c-section or with an epidural – you don’t think about your child, you only worry about making it easier for you;
if you don’t breastfeed – what kind of mother are you, are you doing it to avoid saggy breasts?:
if you do breastfeed – make sure you don’t do it for too long or in public;
if you are a mother who takes care of her appearance – surely others are raising your child while you are at the gym or at the hairdresser’s;
if you haven’t put on make-up for months because your priorities have changed – you’ve let yourself go, I wouldn’t be surprised if your husband left you…
Someone always has an opinion on how you can and should be better than you are, someone on the internet always sets the bar a little higher. Please don’t take this text that way. I know motherhood is hard and most of us are doing the best we can. The reason why I write this text is not to show how it should be, but to offer a topic for reflection.
In recent years, you can hear more and more about the emotional and psychological side of raising children, how and why you should treat children with respect, how to raise an emotionally healthy child, etc. But the question we rarely look deeper into is: how to be a parent who can do it?
If you think I have an easy solution, save yourself some time and don’t read any further 🙂
***
Let’s start with an obvious thing: children learn from examples. I know, I know, you’ve heard it before, everyone says it… But the truth is that if young children watch parents who are truly calm, present, respectful and compassionate, they practically have no choice but to adopt this way of approaching problems. Maybe our child has a different temperament than us, but they learn the pattern of behavior from what they see, not from what we would like them to do. If you want your child to listen to you later in life, listen to them now, even when they’re talking about a game that doesn’t interest you – ask questions, show that you’re listening and whenever you can, find out something about your child’s emotional world.
Likewise, don’t expect a child to have the emotional maturity of an adult. Just as we shouldn’t expect a 5-year-old or a 14-year-old to have the body of an adult and run a marathon or to have the intellectual capacity of a 35-year-old, it doesn’t make sense to expect them to be able to approach every situation with emotional maturity. They are still growing, even if they are already taller than us. They need support in order to mature.
What can help us not to go crazy and explode?
I can only share what helps me and maybe some piece of that story inspires someone. These three segments that I am writing about are inseparable in my life, they support each other and grow from each other, but I separate them here for easier understanding.
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Psychotherapy is not something you only start when you can no longer function.
Psychotherapy is a kind of emotional-mental hygiene: recognizing what pollutes my life and my family’s life, learning where it comes from and how to clean it up.
Through our own psychotherapy, we begin to recognize why we have so many unfounded fears and worries that we pass on to children; why does one child makes us angry and we easily lose patience with them, while we constantly protect the other and think that they can’t do anything on their own. We recognize that we expect our child to fulfill our unfulfilled needs for support and love, we recognize that we want a perfect child in order to get validation of how great mothers we are, and we are disappointed when we don’t get it…
We recognize that the child reminds us of an ex-husband or a younger sister with whom we had conflicts and that part of our emotions towards the child actually originate from that source. We recognize where we do not want to take responsibility for ourselves and our decisions.
But the most important thing is: in psychotherapy, I am the one who receives support and it is the place where I can be who I am. I can express my feelings, scream and cry, be immature, touch the parts of myself that scare me and admit that I have them. Psychotherapy is not a method that I apply and practice in front of a mirror – psychotherapy profoundly changes me and this new me slowly discovers that it has the option to react differently.
MEDITATION
The meditation I ‘m talking about is not sitting cross-legged next to incense sticks or endlessly repeating mantras in order to fall into an ecstatic state. Meditation is a simple (but not easy) practice, which means that it is learned and repeated, repeated, repeated until it becomes a part of us, so that its benefits can be available any time we need them.
Imagine that you are on a stage where a drama is taking place. Some are shouting, some are crying, some are staring blankly into space, something has just broken loudly behind the scenes, smoke is coming from the kitchen, and the dog is chewing something it shouldn’t. Stressful situations are just that, a drama in which we are actors and it seems to us that everything is happening at the same time.
Then imagine that you can take a few steps back and descend from the stage into the auditorium. Seeing what is happening as a drama rather than a real situation. To be interested, but without great emotional involvement. Ask yourself: is what I see and feel really true?
Meditation becomes just that after a while. At any moment we can step back and observe. We can feel that we have our own pleasure in participating in the drama, pleasure in being the victim or the aggressor, we can feel that at any moment there are more options, feel that this watching part is always bigger than the one on stage.
For example, for the thousandth time I tell my daughter to take out the rubbish and she rolls her eyes. The drama is already boringly predictable: I yell, she snaps or sulks, I punish her, etc. Boring, familiar and actually fruitless.
What will happen if I stop, inhale-exhale and give myself time to feel everything that passes through me? Tiredness, the feeling of being unsupported, the desire to feel sorry for myself, the desire to punish or hit her, envy that she is so young and carefree, fear that if I don’t teach her responsibility, it will be difficult for her later in life… And what if I see every part like a character on the stage, I don’t take them too seriously and I don’t react from them? If at the same time I firmly hold the intention in my heart that I will not hurt myself or another person? What options then open up?
The old saying goes that whenever you feel you only have two options, be sure to choose the third. The practice of meditation opens countless options.
RESPONSIBILITY AND GRATITUDE
For me, responsibility towards myself and others is the basis of healthy functioning. In this case it means: motherhood was my decision. Yes, I am the one who wanted to be a mother and it is my responsibility to help my child grow up to be the healthiest person possible. My child owes me nothing because of that decision, neither good grades, nor success in life, nor respect just because I gave birth to them. I am not a victim of motherhood. As with any job I choose, there are challenges in motherhood and it is my responsibility to overcome and learn from them. Telling my child how much money and time I spent on them or blaming them for my own worry/anger is completely pointless. I am an adult and motherhood is my choice. (If I feel that I am not an adult and motherhood was not my choice, I go back to step 1 and go to psychotherapy :)).
My younger sister fell seriously ill very soon after her birth and the consequences of her illness left a mark on every member of our family. Awareness of what it means to live with a sick child has led to the fact that I never see my son’s health as normal, but as a gift. Maybe it sounds crazy to some, but my child’s healthy hands, legs, eyes, heart or speech are a miracle for which I am grateful.
Realizing that the life of every being, including me and my son, is very fragile, fundamentally changes the way I approach it. If I say or do things that I feel were not OK with my child, it always helps if I ask myself the question: «What if this is the last chance to fix this situation? How would I talk to him if this is our last meeting?” It helps me anchor myself in uncompromising love. Truly, there is nothing he can say that will stop me from loving him. That doesn’t mean that I coddle him or that I don’t get frsutrated or raise my voice from time to time. He told me many years ago: “Even when you are angry with me, I feel that you love me underneath.” And that’s it.
Anthropologist Angeles Arrien had a wonderful sentence: «Teach yourself joy. / Learn to be happy.» It’s literally about learning to observe the beautiful little things around me until they bring me joy and gratitude. And motherhood is such a source of joy!
This summer my son outgrew me and I remember how small he was in the beginning and how when I was carrying him, the top of his head was right under my chin (I don’t think any parent forgets that smell), and his legs only reached my navel. How wonderful it is to see such a big young man now!
I listen to the silly jokes he tells non-stop and I’m grateful for his inner spark that almost never goes out. I allow myself to be touched by every moment in which I recognize my boy becoming a young man. I really soak up every hug I get and I’m grateful for it. It’s amazing to me how different he is from me or his father. I am aware that in a few years he will go his own way and the moments we spend together as a family then become even more precious and beautiful…
All this does not mean that I am continuously in the la-la-land of love, peace and acceptance, but that my internal compass through these three long-term practices is so calibrated that it always returns to them after a while whenever something stirs it up and throws it out of balance. I gravitate towards peace. It’s a foundation I can always come back to.
The truth is that every mother-child pair is unique, deep and complicated in its own way and that everyone needs to find their own way to walk that path. How to choose a parenting path that I won’t be ashamed of or regret in 30 years.
As Donna Ball says: “Motherhood is a decision you make every day, a decision to put the happiness of another being first, to teach them hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you’re not sure what the right thing is… and that you will forgive yourself, again and again, because you did everything wrong.”
