Parenthood / Motherhood
Fix Yourself, Devices, Emotional Intelligence, Beyond Self, Setting Expectations, A Lot
I.
Fix Yourself
Last year, I applied for a scholarship to attend a week-long retreat designed to help participants recognize and address negative patterns that were unconsciously conditioned in childhood. As part of the application, I responded to questions like:
How will your experience affect the people in your family?
And I began my response with this:
The family members who stand to gain the most from my experience are undoubtedly my future children. They are the driving force behind my commitment to healing and self-discovery. If I were to have children without first doing “the work,” I risk passing on my destructive habits and emotional pain to them. This is a harsh reality…
Before writing that response, I couldn’t quite articulate why I felt called to do self-work. But, as is usual for me, I figured out my “why” through the written word. And, to my surprise, that “why” was predicated on people who didn’t even exist yet.
The thing is, we’re all born to imperfect parents. And as we grow up, we inherit all the programs and patterns modeled by our parents. If a parent struggles with harmful patterns—impulsivity, pessimism, catastrophizing, blame-shifting, procrastination, self-sabotage, jealousy, etc.—and doesn’t do the difficult introspective work to break those patterns, then they risk passing them down to their children.
Well, I was a child once, and in childhood I acquired lots of harmful patterns. I even developed some distinct unproductive behaviors of my own. If I were to ever become a mother myself one day, I would need to dismantle and rework the harmful behaviors I adopted, lest I pass those on to my own children. Trying to be a “good” parent would be hard work… I won’t have the capacity to deal with my own demons, too. So I may as well address those first.
If blessed with the time and self-awareness, I believe it’s important for new parents to confront and heal some of their destructive behaviors before bringing new life into this world. Note how I say “some.” By some, I mean the most important ones, the ones causing you the most hardship. The ones that would cause your children the most hardship if they were to catch them from you. No matter how much self-work a parent does, no child grows up unscathed. No parent, no person, is going to dismantle all their imperfections. Not in this lifetime, at least.
That said, if the opportunity for preventative self-work has come and gone and your kids are now adults themselves, it’s never too late to model positive change. Chances are, the patterns your children adopted from you have been passed down over many generations. They didn’t start with you, and they weren’t your fault. They are coping mechanisms your ancestors took on, not knowing they would one day take a toll on generations to come.
Patterns and programs are exactly what they sound like: patterns and programs. They are installed, conditioned, learned. People are not perfectionists or workaholics or people-pleasers by nature… they are experiencing patterns of perfectionism and workaholism and people-pleasing by nurture. With practice, patience, and a whole lot of persistence, patterns like these can be undone. And when we do “the work” that’s required to undo them, we show our loved ones that it’s possible for them to undo their harmful patterns, too.
II.
Devices
Did you know that there’s a whole range of smart alert systems designed to remind you when you’ve left your baby in the car? Some even come with an app—so when you remember to grab your phone before exiting the vehicle, but forget your child, you’ll get a push notification.
The first time I saw one of these “solutions” recommended to me on Amazon, I thought it had to be a joke. People leaving their babies behind in the car? Getting a notification to remind you that you left your baby? Where are people’s heads at these days?
Well, fortunately, leaving babies behind in a hot car is not a common occurrence for 99.9999% of parents. Companies selling these products are banking on overly anxious moms (see Idea #1 to address this pattern) and/or overzealous regulation that mandates their adoption. But my question remains: Where are people’s heads at these days?
For many people, their heads—their minds—are in the smartphones that were not left behind in the car.
One study found that millennials spend an average of 5 hours and 28 minutes per day on their phones, while Gen Z—the next generation of parents—spends 6 hours and 27 minutes daily. Walk down any street, and it feels like half the people have wireless earbuds in or their eyes glued to a screen. Whether the distraction is visual or auditory, the result is the same: when we’re absorbed in our devices, we’re disengaged from the people around us—including our children.
These days, new parents can fill up a baby registry with every gadget and gizmo under the sun. But one of the most essential things your baby needs won’t come from an Amazon box or your Aunt Becky—and that thing is your attention.
III.
Emotional Intelligence
The best gift you can give your children is to keep yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually healthy.
Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Sandahl, The Danish Way of Parenting (2014)
The emotions of babies and young children are much like mountain weather: inconsistent and erratic. Newborns enter the world without a clue how to regulate the profound inner storms we all experience within. To grow into emotionally mature adults one day, children need role models who demonstrate healthy emotional regulation. They need parents who have rewired their own faulty conditioning and are emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually whole.
According to psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, 85% of the right brain (the emotional brain) is developed by age three. This means that deep connection with a sensitive, empathetic, and nurturing primary caregiver is crucial during a child’s first three years. In most cases, that primary caregiver is the mother. When a baby is overwhelmed—caught in the turbulence of a rogue mountain storm—they need someone who can soothe them and temper their emotions from moment to moment. Every time a mother comforts a baby with skin-to-skin, eye contact, and a gentle tone, she’s not only attending to that baby’s pain but also teaching them self-regulation. The foundation for emotional well-being is laid in the earliest years of life.
That week-long retreat I mentioned in Idea #1 (which I received a scholarship for!) is known in the self-help world as The Process. Founded by Bob Hoffman in 1967 and run by the Hoffman Institute, this program primarily teaches participants to recognize and regulate their emotions that have likely been dysregulated since childhood. While I found the experience worth my while, it’s perhaps not necessary for everyone to spend thousands of dollars to go to a retreat center in California for a week to get in touch with their feelings.
What is needed, however, is an awareness of how our emotions influence our behavior. As adults, when we experience the wrath of a rogue mountain storm, we often fall back on coping mechanisms—our patterns and programs. We lean on these patterns to avoid feeling our feelings rather than letting them pass through us. A spiritually healthy person knows that difficult emotions are part of life; we all feel depression, anxiety, and fear at times. But if we can engage our left brain (the rational brain) to recognize that emotions are simply a part of life and have no control over us unless we let them, then we can gradually rewire ourselves to become emotionally healthy adults. We don’t need to remain inconsistent and erratic forever.
IV.
Beyond Self
Sometimes we focus so heavily on trying to be a “good” parent that we forget just how sacred, priceless, and special parenthood really is.
5 quotes to remember:
Both a baby and a poem masquerade as something we’ve created, when we know that they arrive from somewhere beyond us, that they are gifts.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child (2006)
I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions (1993)
Children are our guides to the higher spiritual planes.
Stephen Gaskin, quoted in Spiritual Midwifery (1975)
Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)1
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds (1916)
V.
Setting Expectations
I was a wonderful parent before I had children.
Adele Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk
Let’s be real—I’m not yet a parent myself and I’ve been writing about what it means to be one. While I can conceptualize what I’m getting myself into, I have yet to break down over lack of sleep and bodily autonomy. I have yet to be brought to the furthest edge of my patience. I have yet to transform into the person I’m meant to become when I truly Know what it means to be a mother.
As of this writing, I’m hanging out somewhere between 41-42 weeks pregnant, and our baby will make her grand appearance any minute now. I’ve spent months mentally preparing myself for what’s to come, but even if I studied and prepared my whole life for the moment I became a parent, I’ll never be able to expect all the ways in which my life will soon change forever.
There will be mistakes. There will be undesirable patterns. There will be tears and sleepless nights and gray hairs and fights and utter pandemonium.
But there will be love and there will be light and a whole lot of heaven, too.
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+I.
A Lot
I often think that parenting is really an exercise in our own development and growth; when we have kids, we are confronted with so many truths about ourselves, our childhoods, and our relationships with our families of origin. And while we can use this information to learn and unlearn, break cycles, and heal, we have to do this work while also caring for our kids, managing tantrums, getting by on limited sleep, and feeling depleted. That’s a lot.
Becky Kennedy, Good Inside