Category: Mamahood

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Myths, Personal and Otherwise

While reading for school I came across this quote:

    Our stories are not always composed by us, but come to us in powerful ways from others. If, as children, family members describe us in a particular way, these family stories often remain the same no matter how we change. What others believe about us, what we learn in school, in the media and from the reactions of strangers, define our stories.
In searching for alternative narratives about ourselves, we are often drawn to stories about others. Listening to these stories may offer us new possibilities, but if our new life stories are to fully emerge, we must also challenge the underlying myths and prejudices that limit us.”
— Ellen Pulleyblank Coffey “The Variable Tales of Life” (2007) as quoted in “Revisioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture and Gender in Clinical Practice”, Monica McGoldrick & Kenneth Hardy (eds).

This quote speaks of how our personal stories evolve, where they come from, and in many ways more importantly, how we can heal and rewrite them. It is true that community and society and our families and friends contribute to the creation of our negative myths about ourselves, and it is ironically true that through our community, families and friends we can re-write them, creating positive stories about ourselves and our lives.

I’ve written in the past about my personal struggle with the myth of the Not Good Enough or Bad Mother. I’ve struggled with this generations old story from both sides of my family. The struggle, in many ways, has guided me to being a Good Enough Mother (in Winnicott’s terms) and has led me to develop a strong and deep connection with my daughter. Most days I am in a place of peace with this story, knowing both in my head and heart that I am a Good Mama, that my girl and I have a beautiful relationship and that I am breaking a pattern and cycle and myth that was handed to me on a silver platter. It has taken every rebellious part of me to break away from what was given to me, to re-write motherhood for our family and for myself, and I honestly couldn’t have done it without my friends, my husband, or, perhaps ironically, my mothers (birth, step and adopted) and grandmothers.

Still, some days I struggle. I struggle with my daughter’s independence and free will. I struggle with her opinions and self-determination. I struggle when she has absolutely no interest in following the path I think she should follow. I struggle with acknowledging her, who she is and where she is at and accepting her wholly and encouraging her to be who she is. I struggle with walking that line of guiding her, being a present parent to help her function in life and society and squashing her individuality, her sense of Self, her brilliant, creative and sensitive soul.

It’s a line all parents walk, I believe. We have all our own shit, some of it buried deep. Those messages we were given when we were squashed, how we weren’t good enough just as we were, how we needed to measure up to some arbitrary standard, how we needed to fit in (but never felt like we really did). When our children start to express who they are, we have a knee-jerk reaction to squash, simply out of defense for ourselves, simply because it is all that we know, simply because we can’t always see the nonduality of life and how it is yes/and not either/or.

In those moments I struggle to find my breath. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I stop myself from saying some shaming thing or another. Sometimes I can slow down enough to open the space for her to be her and acknowledge my own pain and give each of us a little extra love.

Sometimes. Not always.

There are the times when the shaming words come out and sometimes I immediately regret them and start the repair work and sometimes it takes me a while to get there. This is human. This is part of my journey.

There are other parts to this motherhood journey. Myths that speak of value and worth, both financial and emotional. Myths that on bad days can break me down into a ball of sobbing tears, feeling that my girl would be better off with any other person on the planet for a mother than with me. Days that can start to eat me alive. Myths, that on good days, just piss me off and help me stand tall, knowing that today, in this moment, I am not that person, I am not the prescribed, pre-ordained bad mother, knowing that in this moment I am doing the healing work of generations.

I have a gorgeous circle of women who help me explore these myths. We guide each other on our journeys of digging into the stories that have been so deeply ingrained in us, and yet aren’t true. It is through this community of beautiful souls that the deeper healing is happening. Together we explore, we heal, we deconstruct and rebuild. We don’t erase, but we do re-write.

I have many circles and tribes, some of them intimate and in-person, some of them global and online only, some a mix of the two. It is through my circles that I excavate my myths and guide others to unearth their own. I believe that in order to heal, to find our way to joy and the present moment we need to understand what has stopped us, what pieces of our past and present, what messages from our families and our cultures, have defined us in a way that doesn’t ring true to us any more. This deep exploration of who I Am is, to me, a vital piece of our healing process.

Who I Am changes, sometimes from day to day, or moment to moment and with each shift of the tide I’m given the opportunity to explore the myths, to heal and to rewrite or embrace as I feel moved to do in that moment.

I love this journey. I love my own growth and change and I am deeply grateful for the people who allow me to be witness to their own growth change. It is a process, an unfolding and an awakening and I deeply believe that together we can heal: our Selves, each other and the world.

It is my life work, the unearthing of personal myths, guiding others while they guide me, finding our true selves and healing generations long stories of pain and lack. It is my life work, this rebuilding of relationship to our Selves, to each other, to our world. It is my life work to heal and be a part of other’s healing, to bring change and love and joy into the world. It is my life work to find and share the beauty of the present moment, to laugh deep belly laughs and to cry body-wrenching sobs and to support others in their similar yet different journeys.

I am grateful for this life and this life’s work. I am grateful for you, allowing me to be a part of your journey.

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Living in fear and resistance

I was sitting at the spray park, talking with a friend as our children were splashing and laughing and exploring. She was sharing some realizations she’s had, part of her transformation journey and her words were pulled right from my soul. Her words were my own unspoken words, my own unacknowledged fears and fights. Her words were her own, of her personal struggle, and they spoke of the struggle of many of us.

The struggle of motherhood. The struggle of being a stay at home mom. The struggle of being a working mom (either outside of inside the home). The struggle of the role of motherhood not being valued by society, by our families and ultimately not being valued by ourselves.

I will not share my friend’s words. They are hers, her story, her journey. I will share what it stirred up in me. What I realized about myself and my own journey in motherhood. As both a “working mom” and a “stay at home mom” and the variations I’ve lived between the two for the last six plus years.

I longed for motherhood in a way I have never longed for anything else in my life. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted a house filled with children, my own and their friends. I wanted to bake cookies and pies and paint on canvases and our bodies and have kiddie pool parties and bar-b-ques with all the families we know. I wanted a life not very different from the life I have now. I dreamed of it, I longed for it with an aching I can’t truly describe.

The day our daughter was born was transformational. To say it was the happiest day of my life is honestly an understatement. I think there are no words for those first moments when we get to hold our child. OUR child. Whether the child came from our bodies or not, those first moments of connection are indescribable. There is joy mixed with terror. Tears pour out in release as we acknowledge everything is different, an acknowledgement that we had made mentally when we knew our child was going to enter our lives, but one that our body hadn’t fully accepted until that moment, when they are in our arms.

We don’t really know how our life is going to be different. We can’t imagine. Everyone can tell us how our lives will change, but until that child is in your life, you really have no fucking clue. And that, I believe is where resistance to this role I longed for, this life I dreamed of, steps in.

I do resist this life of mine. I feel frustration with motherhood. I feel less than because I’m “not contributing” to our household. I feel uninteresting because my focus day and most of the night is my girl and caring for her. I feel angry because the dishes and the laundry and the mess is never-ending.

The Truth is, I love my life now. I love that I get to spend most of my days with my girl, guiding her and being with her and watching her. I love that I can show my love of our family through cooking our meals, through lovingly washing and eventually folding and putting away our clothes. Showing love to our home and the beautiful people who live in it by organizing and vacuuming and every now and then even dusting. I love that I get so many ways, every day, to show the people who mean everything in the world to me just how much I love them.

And the Truth is, I feel shame that I love my life so much.

I was raised to have a career. I was raised that to have value and importance in a home, one must provide financially. I was raised that “women’s work” is uninteresting and boring and ultimately not useful. That being focused on being a mom means not living up to my “potential.” Raising children and maintaining a home shouldn’t be fulfilling and if it is, one is clearly “less than.”

What a bunch of bullshit.

I know it’s bullshit, these myths and stories that I was raised with, that so many of us were raised with. I know the value of raising our children and giving them a home that is safe and filled with love. I logically know all these things and even parts of my heart knows the Truth is in the value of our work as mothers. And yet…

Yet these myths and stories run deep.

These myths and stories have been distracting me without my conscious knowing. I’ve been allowing myself to work on my business or school when it is time for me to focused on my girl. The laptop comes out and I go into a zone, or I have my phone by my side and I constantly check it. Distraction after distraction taking me away from those beautiful moments with my girl, those beautiful moments that flutter away whether I am present in them or not.

These myths and stories have been fueling my anger without me being aware. I’ve been getting angrier and angrier at the dishes and laundry and being “the only one” who picks up and cleans  in our home (another myth and story of it’s own, another Untruth). I’ve been picking at my girl and my man, saying unkind words, allowing shame to enter our relationships, shame that is coming from me.

These myths and stories have been feeding my feelings of “less than” and unworthiness and taking me away from the present moment. I’ve been seeking ways to feel valuable, important, worthy. This seeking has lead to unkindness towards friends, family and myself. I have lashed out in ways that I am not proud and in ways that honestly probably no one has even noticed.

All of us have stories and myths that affect us in ways we aren’t consciously aware. These myths and stories drag us down and prevent us from growth and release and joy. These myths and stories feed on the negative emotions they produce, “proving” their “truth.” Once we become aware however, they start to lose power.

It’s the becoming aware that can be the trick, of course. The first step is being open to change, being open to growth, being open to acknowledging our own Truth and struggles when others share their vulnerability with us. Being open to your own vulnerability, to your own pain, to the Truth that you have hurt others in the past–knowingly or unknowingly.

After the talk with my friend on Tuesday so many things became clear–the fear and resistance I had been clinging too, that had been clinging to me. I released tears, acknowledged my own deep-seated fears, shared them with my husband and let him know this wasn’t something for him to fix, it was something for me to simply know, to share. And with the release, and the acknowledgments, space was opened. Space for patience. Space for love. Space for repair–with my friends, my family, myself.

Releasing these myths and stories from our hearts, creates much needed space for the joy, the peace, the beauty of our lives to enter. Releasing opens the space for us to ground, to center.

Being open to acknowledging the stories and myths, to seeing how they play out in our lives, is the first step to our release and growth. This is a huge step into vulnerability. It can be terrifying to do this work, work that puts us in a place of acknowledging the pain we have caused others, the pain that others have caused us. However the only way to release this pain is to move through it. We experience the pain every day, whether we know it or not–it’s not a matter of avoiding the pain, there is no way to avoid it. It is a matter of moving through it so that we can experience the beauty and joy and peace that is on the other side of it.

We cannot do this work alone. This is work that is done in community, in relationship with others. It is work that requires both guidance, support and honesty. If it weren’t for the conversation with my friend on Tuesday I would not have seen my own Truth in her words. If it weren’t for the safety of my relationship with my husband I would not have been able to acknowledge these myths and stories and release them through tears and words. If it weren’t for each of you, I would not have witnesses to my journey–sharing that you and I are not alone, that through our imperfections we are all in this together.

Community. I am called to gather community. I am called to guide others in this deep personal work. I am grateful for those in my life, who I guide and who guide me. Truly, we are all in this together.

 

 

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Small Stuff, Big Stuff

When my daughter was a baby I was in overdrive. I worked outside the home, in a job that required 50 hours of time on a slow week and up to 70 hours of my time during crunch weeks. While I was being Super Career Woman, I was also determined that I would be Super Mom too. The problem was, I didn’t quite understand what being Super Mom truly meant.

For the first couple years of my daughter’s life, being Super Mom equated to what I now consider incredibly superficial and ultimately irrelevant things. Things that in the big picture absolutely don’t matter. Things that my daughter won’t remember or know unless I tell her. Things like being determined to cloth diaper, making *all* of her baby food from scratch, only allowing organic foods to enter her body and dear gosh there would never be sugar anywhere near her. No TV either. And all her toys would be wooden and there wouldn’t be a commercial character anywhere in sight. And of course all her clothes would be made of organic cotton or bamboo.

I laugh now at how much I just did.not.get.it. How I put such emphasis on these things that have nothing to do with our relationship or connection. I overwhelmed myself doing all the “right” things, when perhaps allowing myself to be human and having faith that my child would survive to see her next birthday, even if she did play with a plastic Disney Princess tea set. I focused on the outside things, not the inside things. I lost myself a bit, thinking that if I controlled all these outside things *that* would mean I was good mama. And dear god, I so desperately wanted to be a good mama.

Fast forward to today. This morning my daughter ate Oreos for breakfast (hey, she had organic milk with them, so it’s okay). She was outside in her pool before 10am and before the temperature had reached 65F. I did manage to get some apples and sunflower seed butter in her before she snacked on a cupcake. Lunch consisted of chili cheese fritos, a hamburger patty, three green beans and then some more cookies and milk. Yep, I’m going for that Mother of Year award, Nutrition division.

I played Barbies with her today. We did some painting together. We snuggled and watched a couple of TV shows. We cleaned our living room, dining room and kitchen today, without tears or screaming. I gave her lots of hugs and asked her for help and mentioned how she always makes the shoe rack look extra awesome when she organizes it.

We had a great day.

I finally have it (mostly) right. It’s not the outside stuff, like whether every meal is fully nutritionally balanced or whether she has branded character toys, it’s the inside stuff – the fact that we played together, that we created together, that we worked as a team cleaning our home – that matters.

It was quite a process of letting go and realizing what truly matters and what doesn’t. I was guided by not only my own instinct, but also by great mama writers and bloggers. Women who have been there and done that. Women like those in the Mindful Parenting eBundle (note this is an affiliate link – I appreciate your support). Parents and organizations who know what is important for us to focus on our relationship and connection to our children and all the rest is truly small stuff that ultimately doesn’t matter.

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Time, time, time

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. The passage of time. How much time we have. How little time we have.

It’s the nondual truth that we have both all the time in the world and only this present moment now. Thinking about how important it is to be present in this now-moment, not to make it “count,” rather to savor it, enjoy it, have those around me savoring and enjoying.

As I talked about in my newsletter this week, we are moving into our summer rhythm. Our days, while full, have also slowed down. There isn’t a need to be anywhere by any certain time. We can spend the day at home, sitting out in the sun when it’s out or curled up cuddling, reading books or watching tv if it’s not. There’s not a rush to get any particular meal on the table by any certain time and yet we always manage eat together. One moment seems to endlessly roll into the next in an easy fashion that keeps us all calm and at peace.

Except those moments that don’t, of course. Those moments where frustration presents itself for whatever reasons and we work through it, finding our centers, getting ourselves grounded again in the beauty and love that we share.

Focusing on connection has been my priority for this year and it has come through in so many amazing ways. I’m more connected to myself and to the present moment, which leads me to being more connected to those I share my life with. I feel the deep connections with my daughter, husband and close friends, growing and expanding. I’m finding myself more at peace with my life, despite the “hardships” we are facing. I have a trust in the Universe that we are all going to be just fine, a trust that grows deeper each day.

I’m not finding myself focused on the future or worried about the details of how everything will work itself out. I simply know it will. I do what I can to move forward and then I release the attempts at control over the things that are not in my power to do anything about. This release is so healing.

Releasing and moving into Trust, that is what these last few months have been for me. And it’s been amazing.

In this moment

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Honest Truth

On Sunday, after seeing her overflowing Easter basket when she woke up, which included a 2-foot chocolate bunny, our daughter announced “You and daddy are the Easter Bunny!” Nick and I were in shock and asked her why she thought that and said things like “Would mama and daddy ever buy you that much candy at once??” all of which she gave a very narrow eyed knowing look to. We didn’t initially fess up to anything. We both want the magic of the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus to last as long as possible. We both enjoy the beauty of it all, of doing something extra special for our girl and not taking the credit. I hoped the conversation was dropped, with Nick and I neither admitting or denying anything.

Then in the car on the way to my cousin’s for the annual Easter egg hunt and brunch, she asked if her Daddy and I were the Easter Bunny. I again asked her why she thought that and we discussed it. She had That Look in her eye — that look that says “I’m trusting you to tell me the truth. I’m ready for the truth” and so I admitted that yes, her Daddy and I are the Easter Bunny. I didn’t say anything about the Tooth Fairy or Santa. To be fair, she didn’t ask about them and we’ll cross that bridge when we get there in six months or so.

Reality sunk in. My baby is growing up. She turns six next week and I’m filled with a mixture of joy, awe and sadness. The mystery of the Easter Bunny is solved and I realized in talking with Nick later that it was around this same age that I figured out that Santa wasn’t real, though in a very painful way, which involved my parents refusing to be honest with me and even threatening that Santa wouldn’t come if I didn’t believe.

I didn’t talk with my girl about the magic of the holidays and what the Easter Bunny (or Santa or the Tooth Fairy) represent to me or to her Daddy. We didn’t get into that conversation, however I’m sure we will at some point.

What was important on Sunday was that, when I looked in my girl’s eyes and saw how much she wanted and needed the Truth, I gave it to her. I’ve accepted that my child is both a little girl and growing into a very young woman. While only almost six, those pre-teen and then teen years do not seem so far away. The first six years of her life have been filled with Nick and me building strong attachment bonds with her, with each other and keeping open doorways for communication. The next six years will be filled with the same, as will the six after that and six after that and so on.

I’ve realized that what is key, what is most important is recognizing her individuality. Knowing that her childhood is nothing like mine. Knowing that I have learned much from the painful lessons of the relationship with my own mom. Knowing I am studying, for a career, about child development, attachment and families. Knowing I have tools and practices that were never available to my own mom and thereby knowing I will not follow in her footsteps.

My baby is growing up. She’s a child now. There’s no denying it. In the way she talks, her interests, how she can figure it all out. She’s independent, confident and has an inner spark and glow in her eyes that had left my own eyes by her age.

And while she is growing up into this beautiful person, and while she is no longer literally a baby, she will always be my baby. I will always be here for her when she wants or needs me. I will love her beyond the end of our days. I will always be on her side. She’s my girl.

One of the songs I sing to her at bedtime is You are My Sunshine (with my own lyrics). The closing line is “I love you more and more every day.” It’s true. Every day I love my girl a little more than the day before and every day I can’t imagine how I could love her more without my heart literally bursting.  Yet every day I do. Every day.

Understanding and acknowledging and accepting her individuality, her personhood has been a huge part of our parenting. Treating her with respect. Allowing her to be a child while never treating her as if she is less because of her age. Parenting this way is hard, it requires me to dig deep almost daily and face my own past, my own fears with bravery and grace and a willingness to own my shit and grow as a person. It’s a tall order and some days I’m better at it than others. Some days are filled with apologies, tears and repairing measures while others are filled with laughter, connection and joy.

And so my girl grows from a little girl to a big girl. And our journey continues…

…

My mindfulness practice has had the greatest impact on my ability to be the parent I want to be. I want to share this practice, and the tools I’ve found and developed with it with everyone who is ready to grow into the person your Soul is calling you to be. My Grounding in Grace e-course is filled with mindfulness exercises as well as reflection and soul work. And I’m very excited about the video prompts I’ve been working on for this course. Because I strongly believe that to bring peace to the world we must start in our home, and because I so deeply do not want finances to prevent a single person from taking this course if she or he is ready, the program is Pay-What-Feels-Good and I also have scholarships available. For more information about the course and to register click here. The course starts on April 9th and runs for 30 days. I would love to have you join the amazing community that is growing around this program.