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August 13, 2004
August, 2004.
Warning: This entry is extremely long, and extremely personal. I’m having moments where I’m wondering why I’m even posting something so personal, so go easy on me. And if you haven’t got 20 minutes spare for some rather intense reading, I’d give me and my entry a big miss this week. :^)
*****
“Great Spirit, I am Mother.
I was made by you so that the image of your Love
Could be brought into existence.
May I always carry with me
The sacredness of this honor.”
(Native American prayer)
*****
The Dirty Discipline Debate/The Spiritual Principles of Parenting/A Dump-Truck of Parenting Fuck-ups/Eloise on the Analysts Couch…
Yes, yes, yes…there are many, many titles I could give to this diary entry. Suffice to say, it is long, it is intense, it has been sweated over with great goblets of perspiration, and I hope (hope, hope, hope, hope!) that somewhere within it’s damp and dog-eared pages there is a little moment or two of clarity, of insight, of something that will help me to understand what the fuck is going wrong in my household!
Let me preface this entry with a few observations…Stay-at-home mothering is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Mothering is the most profound, disturbing, and intense inner-journey I have ever undertaken…a journey of epic proportions, making ‘The Odyssey’ look like a pleasant trip to the park! I have never been so challenged in all my life. I have never been confronted with my own faults in such a relentless manner. I believe that this is the most important job of my life, and I have never needed a ‘spiritual’ perspective as much as I do right now.
*****
“Motherhood’s crises are ‘marvel-ous’, and motherhood, as a context for spiritual discovery, is unsurpassed by any other form of spiritual life or commitment. One of my teachers once commented that he knew of only one group of people who were motivated to become enlightened for the sake of others – and that was mothers, for their children.”
(Ann Tremaine Linthorst)
*****
It’s been a tough week for me. I have reached a dead-end in my ‘disciplining’ of Pixie that has forced me to reassess absolutely everything I know about child behavior, my mothering attitudes, and discipline. Oh yes, the dirty ‘D’ word has reared its ugly fangs and bitten me hard. I find myself completely unable to ‘control’ my child, all my discipline techniques are failing, abysmally, and I have been forced back to square one to reassess everything I have ever thought and practiced on the discipline front.
For all my intelligence I sometimes seem to be a very UN-enlightened parent. It has been my misfortune to have made probably EVERY parenting mistake in the book. It doesn’t help that I had NO knowledge of children at all prior to Pixie. It doesn’t help that my first born was a rather miserable hard-to-please baby. It doesn’t help that my own mother had a mean streak of impatience that I ‘caught’ at her skirt-tails. But whatever the long list of ‘excuses’ I could muster, the bottom line is I have made so many mistakes parenting Pixie that it has reached a crisis. Yes, we are at CRISIS point. But hey, I am used to crises, they seem to follow me around like lost puppies; they are always looking for me to give them a home. In fact I could be accused of LAUNCHING myself into their orbit because I have experienced enough crises to KNOW that they help me to understand something I don’t, that they help me to change, that they help me to root out old out-dated assumptions and unworkable beliefs.
And so it has been a week of profound inner-work for me. Digging and ferreting around this brain of mine, trying to find answers to questions that have been plaguing me for years now. It was a horrible incident that brought this crisis to a head, and I guess I should explain it to give a full picture of what has unfolded. I think it is worth opening up about this ‘issue’ in the hope that someone, anyone, out there, might learn from my stupidity. If I lose some reader’s respect in the process, so be it. It’s time to be honest, and admit my struggles. I am not afraid of admitting my faults, what I am afraid of is pretending they don’t exist and never solving them. I am determined to be a better mother, and I think this tale is worth the telling… so buckle up and get ready for a very long-winded and convoluted journey into my psyche… ouch!
*****
PART ONE: THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM…
“The greatest advantage of not having children must be that you can go on believing that you are a nice person. Once you have children you realize how wars start…”
(Fay Weldon)
Let’s start at the very beginning…
As some of you may have realized by now, I have had ‘trouble’ parenting Pixie since birth. I will admit - and it is really hard to admit this - that she was not the baby that I wanted. I was, in fact, painfully disappointed and confused by Pixie as a baby, and found her terribly hard to love. Yes, it is horrible to say that isn’t it? But I have to. I cannot get to the TRUTH unless I am prepared to look into every dark and dismal corner of my mind! (This is the problem with the ‘Perfect Mother’ syndrome that I discussed last week - if you think you’re supposed to be ‘Perfect’, you’ll have trouble admitting your weaknesses and mistakes. And in a society that ‘expects’ you to be ‘perfect’ you will worry about getting flogged over it, branded a ‘bad mother’. But this is a sad and sorry state of affairs because how can you possibly fix something you can’t admit is broken?)
Anyway, I spent a great deal of Pixie’s baby year in agony over her behavior, completely desperate in my attempts to understand her, to give her what she needed, and utterly heart-broken that I couldn’t make her happy. I felt like a bad mother all the time, because my baby was difficult, miserable, and cried all the time. I was jealous of Mums who had ‘easy’ contented babies, and spent so many agonized hours in tears asking the horrible question, “Why me? Why did I get such a difficult baby?” (Why indeed eh?) I was very resentful and very stressed out. I had had to listen to my baby screaming and crying hour after hour, day after day, month in month out, and my spirit felt completely crushed. Every time she cried and screamed I felt that it was my fault; that I was ‘failing’ as a mother. And this feeling was compounded because I knew in my heart I was struggling to love this cranky cantankerous baby that I was ‘supposed’ to love with an overwhelming passion unlike anything I had ever experienced before!
Pixie’s toddler year was not much better. As a toddler she was into everything. Every single thing she could touch was fair game. She’d pull all my books off the shelf and leave them in disheveled piles. She’d pull our videos off the shelf and rip the paper jackets. She’d pull anything off the tables that she could reach, and she was always trying to reach everything. She’d open every cupboard and every drawer she could find. She screamed in the car, screamed at nap-time, and never once (well, maybe once) slept in the pram! She’d bite and push and hit other children at playgroup. She threw mega-watt tantrums. I struggled enormously to understand her, had no clue as to WHY she acted this way, WHAT I could do about it, and felt constantly that everyone was judging me because I had a ‘difficult’ child. I was a stressed-out wreck, and in serious agonies trying to understand my child and control my reactions. It felt like I was failing to keep my child under control, failing to teach her appropriate behavior, failing to keep her happy and calm. I felt the whole world could SEE I was a ‘bad mother’ because I had such a ‘difficult’ child!
Now those of you who read my baby and toddler diary might be actually scratching your heads thinking, “I don’t remember reading that it was THAT bad?” And maybe it wasn’t…all the time. We had lots and lots of good times, good weeks, great weeks, and had lots of loving and close moments. But the bad times, the bad moments, were bad. They shocked me. They shook me to the core. And I probably didn’t write about it as much as it was happening because I was deeply confused and ashamed, and had not a fucking clue WHAT was going wrong!
Now it is worth noting that one of my biggest fears as a mother is having a ‘spoiled brat’ child. It is a deep and intense fear of mine, and this fear has DRIVEN my parenting approach. When Pixie was little she displayed what I thought were the signs of early ‘spoiled brattiness’. I was deeply worried about her, and really felt that she was out-of-control. Somewhere along the line I must have decided that Pixie needed some serious discipline. I must have decided that if I didn’t provide some rather firm, clear boundaries for Pixie then I was in serious danger of producing a child that to all outward appearance acted like a ‘spoiled brat’!
And so I started providing Pixie with very clear, consistent, and probably rather strict, boundaries. She knew her mother had rules and she wasn’t afraid to enforce them. If Pixie played up she was sent to her room. If Pixie got out of control in a ‘social’ situation we would leave. If Pixie wanted something at the supermarket it was always “no.” If Pixie threw a mega-watt tantrum over it, I wasn’t fazed and the answer was still “no”. I managed her life like a Sergeant Major: I kept her diet healthy, she had strict bedtimes, and we avoided situations that I knew would over-stimulate and tax her. Pixie’s behavior seemed to greatly improve, and I thought “Yes, this is it. All she needed was some tough discipline.”
Ha, ha, ha! No, no, no, NOTHING is ever that simple in Pixieland!! Eventually my attempts to ‘discipline’ Pixie started to fail. If I sent her to her room she’d just walk on out. If I told her not to do something she’d just ignore me and go right on doing it. Sometimes, she would scream at me, “NO!” Sometimes she would lash out and try to hit me.
My fear of having a ‘spoiled brat’ kid re-asserted itself. I went where many an Un-enlightened parent has gone before me, and I upped-the-disciplinary-ante. We started threatening Pixie: If you don’t do/whatever I’ve just asked you to do or not to do/you won’t see your friend tomorrow/get any dessert/have a bedtime story. If you DO/what I ask you to/you will get a ‘treat’. Yes, we started down the slippery slope of rewards and punishments.
Of course, that didn’t work either. When we threatened her with a withdrawal of something (dessert/story/whatever) she’d become desperately emotional and anxious. She’d start screaming and throwing herself on the floor in a flap. And when I started to offer her “treats” as rewards for good behavior, then she started demanding treats ALL THE BLOODY TIME and became a pain-in-the-butt!!!
Enter the arrival of our second daughter Miss Scarlet Poppy.
Scarlet Poppy is a lovely easy baby. And let’s face it, this doesn’t help Pixie’s cause one little bit. In comparison, Pixie’s babyhood starts to look worse and worse, and on my bad days has got me thinking that Pixie was simply tricky right from the start and that maybe she’s just a ‘difficult’ child, END OF STORY. But it can’t be the end-of-the-story, can it? Because I CANNOT live with things as they stand between us at the moment. Something HAS to give, because we are locking horns all the time…I am having moments where I am struggling to like my daughter, and it is breaking my heart!
Yes, it is since the arrival of Scarlet that Pixie’s behavior has spun wildly out-of-control. No surprises there! She is more needy than ever, more touchy than ever, taking less notice of our ‘discipline’ than ever, and the stakes are indeed HIGHER than ever. Now there is a little baby in the house, Pixie’s meltdowns and screaming-tantrums are impacting on someone else; someone small and vulnerable and fragile, someone who is often asleep and is being woken by Pixie’s meltdowns! And let’s face it, it’s not a good time to be more ‘needy’ than ever, because Mum and Dad are busier than ever, with a new baby to look after. And it’s not a good time to ignore Mum and Dad’s discipline, because Mum and Dad haven’t had a whole lot of sleep, and are touchy, grumpy, and don’t really have the energy to come up with creative alternative ‘disciplinary’ tactics at the moment. Yes, Jay and I are losing our tempers easily, and we end up in fights with Pixie all the time. And of course the more we fight, the more needy and ‘difficult’ Pixie’s behavior becomes. Enter: Vicious Cycle.
Let’s take a look at what happened this week that sent me over-the-edge…
First let me get this admission over and done with: I gave Pixie three decent wallops on the backside. Yes, I know, I know! I never EVER wanted to be the kind of mother that is cranky, bad tempered, who yells, threatens, sends her daughter to her room, and ends up spanking, yes spanking!, her daughter because her temper has completely got the better of her, but here I am, guilty as charged! It is HEART-BREAKING to me that I have become this sort of mother. Losing one’s temper to the point of physical violence is EVERYTHING that I am against. But we all know that the road to hell is PAVED with good intentions.
Yes, I gave Pixie three decent wallops on the backside. Granted she was hitting me at the time. But that’s because I was detaining her in her room by holding the door shut. Granted I was holding the door shut because she had been screaming in Scarlet’s ear, and Scarlet was crying from fear, and I had had to drag Pixie down the hallway and hold her in her room until she calmed down. I was trying to protect Scarlet, but the reason Pixie was acting that way was because she senses the fact that Mum and Dad don’t trust her around the baby. And I am sorry to admit that we don’t.
This whole incident started when I was breast-feeding Scarlet and Pixie came over and started bothering us. She wanted some attention. She was tired, a little strung-out, and probably wanted some mother-love. Pity she has such inappropriate ways of expressing her needs, but then again, she is just a child! Instead of responding calmly, with understanding, I made a big bloody deal over it. She was annoying me, pushing my buttons. Granted I’d barely had five hours sleep the night before, but despite the lack of active brain-cells I am still a mother. I can’t cop-out because I was tired. I still have to do my job, tired or not, to the best of my ability. So instead of trying to ‘understand’ Pixie’s behavior, I simply got mad. I wanted Pixie to go away and let Scarlet feed in peace. Pixie wouldn’t. Pixie felt misunderstood. Pixie got mad, Pixie started poking Scarlet. Mother gritted her teeth and asked Pixie to go away. Pixie wouldn’t. Mother felt powerless. She couldn’t make Pixie go away. There was not a single damn thing she could do to make Pixie go away. And Scarlet’s feeding was disrupted. She popped off the boob and looked a little confused. Mother blew a head gasket and cuffed Pixie across the head. Just a little, but she wanted to a lot! Feeding was sacred, didn’t Pixie understand that? Pixie knew what was really going on from the start. Everything about Mother’s reactions, everything about her tough discipline, has told Pixie that deep down her (stupid) mother believes that children are bad, that SHE is bad, and that she needs to be MADE ‘good.’
Right from the start, when Pixie came over to us, I ‘assumed’ she was trying to ‘bother’ us, I reacted from a false assumption about her intent, and from that very moment things started turning bad…
Yes, my friends, if you still choose to be called that, HERE I HAVE TRIPPED OVER THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM.
Yes, finally, you say, thank the fucking Goddess, she’s made it. Here we have the root of the problem. Now can we just leave this painful personal confession behind, forget it ever happened, and get on with the fun stuff? Hmmm, well? Sorry! This is not the end, not by a long shot.
Yes, finally we have the root of the problem…or ONE of the roots, anyway. And guess where this nasty little root has been living all along? IN MY HEAD! Argh! Yes, I am now of the understanding that the root of all discipline problems with children is the mistaken, and possibly fairly common, belief that children are, by nature, inclined to mischief and disobedience and must be MADE good, or they will be bad. Dangerously enough, you can have this belief without even noticing it, but a sure-fire symptom is how much you rely on discipline and how much it is failing. Here, let me show you how I think it works:
1st) comes the mistaken belief that children are inherently mischievous, naughty, badly behaved.
2nd) comes the mistaken idea that we have to ‘manage’ our children. We mistakenly believe it is our job as parents to MAKE our children well-behaved and ‘good’.
3rd) This sets us ‘against’ our children; they are bad, we must MAKE them good. This causes a force-resistance dynamic between parent and child. And I am sure there must be a law of physics or something that proves that all force creates resistance.
4th) And so our children come to ‘resist’ our attempts at discipline. They resist perhaps because unconsciously they know the implication is that they are inherently ‘bad,’ (and that their inherent goodness is being denied). In every situation we will ‘assume’ they have ‘bad intent’, and they will respond to this false assumption with bad behavior. Children are sponges, they will ‘absorb’ their parents beliefs, and sooner or later they will begin acting ‘bad’ because they have absorbed the message that they are!
5th) When your children start resisting your discipline and start to act ‘bad’, you freak out. They seem to be becoming exactly what you feared in the first place, and so you decide to up-the-ante on the discipline stakes to ‘make’ them good. (Enter coercive discipline.)
6th) When this doesn’t work, you become extremely vulnerable to exasperated ‘explosions’ of temper. This is because your ‘attempts’ to discipline your child are failing, and their behavior simply seems to be getting worse and worse. You feel powerless, at a loss, like you cannot ‘control’ your child’s behavior (which you can’t), and so you start yelling, losing your temper, maybe even smacking when you completely blow a head-gasket! This is not your fault; it is NOT necessarily because you have a terribly short-fuse and a bad temper, it is because you have faulty beliefs. I believe that violence (yelling, screaming, spanking) is usually a last resort in our behavioral repertoire, a result of feeling extreme powerlessness. We feel desperate, we do not know what else to do, we have tried EVERYTHING, everything is failing, we can’t stand our child’s behavior (it is genuinely obnoxious), and so we simply explode. The frustration has nowhere else to go but explode through the head.
And indeed the head is the root of the problem (sorry), it is where the problem originates, and it is the ONLY place where the problem can be solved.
So, if the root of all discipline problems is the faulty assumption that children are ‘inherently’ bad and need to be ‘made’ good, where do we go from here? Is discipline still relevant? And who says this is a ‘faulty’ assumption anyway? Maybe it’s true, maybe children ARE inherently bad?
I think this assumption is ‘faulty’ because it fails to take into consideration the spiritual principles of Life. That Life is inherently ‘good’, beautiful, harmonious, loving, peaceful, orderly, intelligent, and innocent. It seems to me that there are TWO paths we can travel down as parents: what I will call the ‘low’ road, and what I will call the ‘high’ road. The Low Road of Parenting says that no spiritual reality exists. Goodness in human behavior is entirely up to us, and we, as our children’s ‘gods’, must MAKE our children good. Along this path you will be forever tripping over gnarly roots, sliding down slippery slopes, stumbling over rocky roads, hitting crossroads and not knowing which way to turn next. But the second path, the High Road of Parenting claims that spiritual principles do exist in Life. That our children come from a higher Source than us, and that they – along with all life – embody the nature of this divine Source. This is the spiritual path of parenting, which, like any other spiritual path, requires tremendous amounts of self-discipline to walk along, because at all times you have to hold in your mind the spiritual principles of Life: that Life is orderly, intelligent, meaningful, good, beautiful, harmonious, right.
“The beliefs from which we all suffer are always some form of the universal, human misconception of Life in which we are on our own and separate from any larger, reliable Source. Consequently, we seem to be personally responsible for our well-being, and that of our children. This misconception is troublesome in any and every form and variation…” (Tremaine Linhorst)
Yes, I have come to the conclusion that children don’t need discipline. Well, discipline of the old-fashioned coercive reward-punishment variety anyway. Yes, this is where my mental meanderings have led me: we do not need to MAKE children good, because they already are. Give a child the knowledge of what is acceptable and what is not and we can trust them to do the right thing. A child’s natural state is one of grace, children truly are spiritual beings: they are born innocent, good, trusting. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant, in the book of Matthew, when he said that unless we become like little children we will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Perhaps we have to hark back to our natural childlike state where we are innocent, trusting, open to the beauty and wonder of Life, and essentially ‘good’ in our natures, in order to realize our true spiritual state.
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not too you.”
(Gibran)
Perhaps in trying to ‘manage’ our children we have preposterously set ourselves up as gods? Who do we think we are to question the (divine) nature of children? It is the ‘God/dess’ after all, who has made them, so why do we arrogantly believe it is us, mere mortals that we are with all our human failings, that can MAKE ‘God’s’ children good?!!!
I quoted this Wordsworth poem a few weeks back, to hint at how children come from a ‘divine’ source, but I left out a line or two, a line that has suddenly become ominously important:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our Life’s Star,
Hath elsewhere it’s setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.”
“Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”…what does this mean? Maybe it means that we lose our natural state of wonder and childlike innocence as we grow-up in this world, and perhaps it is BECAUSE our natural goodness is denied at every turn. We are made to feel like ‘criminals’ right from the start, when the adults around us ‘assume’ we are naturally bad and that we need harsh discipline to be MADE good! When the truth of it is we were born pure of spirit and heart, clothed in the glory of god-li-ness!
And so children might not need discipline, but WE, the parents, most certainly DO! In order for our children to blossom into their natural state of ‘goodness’ (god-ness) we parents have to discipline OUR minds. We must always and forever hold in our minds the vision of our children as ‘good’. We must come to understand what Gibran wrote about above; we must come to realize that our children are the children of ‘Life’s longing for itself’…they are the children of God. They are not OURS, to own, shape, mould, possess. Our children are not possessions. They are gifts. They will pass through our homes for a short while, a small stop-over on the journey of their lives, and we must treat them like honored guests at our table. The God/dess has entrusted them into our care, and we need to provide the right environment for them to bloom. We need to TRUST in their inherent goodness, to stop trying to ‘DO’ our children, to stop trying to ‘MAKE’ them into something they are not, to stop trying to ‘possess’ them. Motherhood is not a personal performance and a child is not a personal project! On the contrary, motherhood seems to be one of the most profound lessons in spiritual awareness that I know of.
“We are good and our children are good not because we or they try to be good persons, but because Life is made up of good qualities. We never have to try to operate upon our children to make them be good or make them not be bad. They are here to discover their ‘quality’ identities (god-ness) and we have the privilege and joy of watching and facilitating this discovery.” (Tremaine-Linthorst)
PART TWO: THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD TO A SOLUTION…
Earlier I said that “indeed the head is the root of the problem, it is where the problem originates, and it is the ONLY place where the problem can be solved.” So what exactly IS in my head that has led me down such a slippery slope in my parenting?
The first clue came when I found this curious quote from Jung:
““If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.”
(Carl Jung)
Well, I’m not one to run away from a challenge. And so I sat perfectly still, and wondered what was it that I was trying to change about Pixie? What was it about her behavior that was driving me so perilously close to the edge?
It didn’t take me long to realize that my biggest fear regarding Pixie’s behavior, and the thing that motivated my parenting strategies the most, was the fear of her becoming a spoiled brat! So could I turn that fear on it’s head and discover that it was really MY problem? Oh my God! Yes, it’s true; I was ‘spoiled’ as a child. I was given ‘things’ instead of the words “I love you”, and given a steady stream of confectionary to shut me up! My ‘material’ needs were fully met and (even) overfed, but my creativity, my spirituality, my need for encouragement, understanding, support, was pretty much overlooked. I became the sort of kid who wanted everything, because she felt so very empty on the inside. I was whiny and grasping, and drove my Mother mad!
Many, many years ago Pixie had a dream. Well, it was a nightmare really, and it haunted her for days. It haunted ME for days too, because I played the starring role in this dream. I mulled over it often, trying to decipher its meaning. It seemed that Pixie’s subconscious was trying to tell me something, and now, all these years later, the full weight of what it was trying to ‘tell’ me suddenly came crashing down on my shoulders.
“Trust in your dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.” (Kahlil Gibran)
Yes, I studied psychology at University, and there, wading through the tomes of Freud and Jung, I became an ardent believer in dream-analysis. I have had some huge and momentous dreams in my life, and I have come to understand that within our dreams can often be found ‘seeds’ of knowledge that we don’t yet have. True, you have to be able to decipher the symbolic language of dreams to uncover those seeds, but they are there, just waiting to be uncovered and given light and air to grow into monumental discoveries. And so it was with Pixie’s dream…
Pixie dreamt that I was ‘Veruca Salt’… you know, the spoiled-brat character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Yes, just like Veruca, in Pixie’s dream I went down the ‘bad egg’ chute, and Pixie was deeply, terribly distressed by this. It seems that Pixie’s subconscious has known what was going on all along. Pixie was having so much trouble with her mother NOT because SHE was in danger of becoming a spoiled brat, but actually because HER MOTHER already was one!
Suddenly things started falling into place in my mind; like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle a picture was suddenly forming in front of my eyes. Suddenly I knew WHY I had been so disappointed in Pixie as a baby. Yes, she was difficult, there was no question about that, but my response to that was the REAL problem. I was like a kid at Christmas who got a poor imitation Baby Born doll instead of the real thing. I was pouty, disappointed, resentful…basically I was having a tantrum because my baby was not what I had expected….because she wasn’t sweet, and easy, and cuddly and manageable. And I made both our lives miserable because I couldn’t accept my ‘difficult’ baby and fully appreciate her for the divine miracle that she was.
“When we want something for ourselves, the self’s specifications may become so narrow that they obscure from us the goodness of what we have.” (T-L)
Oh how our own faults come to shadow our children’s lives. Yes, I was deathly afraid of my own daughter becoming a spoiled brat because I myself already was one!!! I knew it would ruin her life by clouding her happiness as it had mine; that if she became ‘spoiled’ like me she would forever be searching for something to fill the endless void inside… and nothing would ever make her happy, because she would be ‘taught’ to try and fill the emptiness from the outside (with pride and possessions). But the only way you can fill such emptiness is from the inside, with the knowledge that Life is good, beautiful, safe, orderly, intelligent, meaningful. Once again, it was the Spiritual Principles of Life that were missing.
And it seemed that Jung was right; it looks as if it is ME that needs to change, not Pixie. I have had a stinking bad, ‘spoiled-brat’, attitude to the challenges that Pixie has presented to me. I have let this bad attitude cloud my deep and abiding love for her. Pixie knows this, she senses this. She senses that I have let my love for her be compromised by her ‘behavior’, and this is why she is so needy. She needs MORE from me…she needs my love for her to be the first and last thing that guides MY reactions to her…not my ‘personal’ disappointment, not my impatience, not my laziness. And she has never needed this more than now; now that she has a little sister who is receiving the ‘unconditional’ love that SHE needs too.
Pixie is not my ‘millstone’, as my personal (selfish) ego has often complained; no, she is my greatest teacher. She is teaching me about Love awareness, in a profound and unrelenting way. She won’t accept from me anything but my best-self, and it is my struggle to find this best-self, to let this best-self rule the day, that is at the heart of my parenting struggles. Let’s hope I can overcome my faults and weaknesses, my bad attitudes and laziness, and rise to the challenge!
*****
The second clue to provide insights into what was going so wrong with my parenting experience was of course, Scarlet’s birth.
After planning and preparing myself for a completely different birth experience and a completely different parenting strategy for my second child, I was VERY surprised when my birthing plans didn’t work out. Not only did they not work out as planned, but I had EXACTLY the same birthing ‘problem’ as I did with Pixie. Despite all my inner work and preparation I was not able to ‘push’ my babies out. Now I am no fool. I realized instantly that to have the same birth ‘issue’ twice was no coincidence. I heard the alarm bells ringing. Something was going wrong, something within me was causing this, and instead of being disappointed I decided to get to the bottom of it. No matter what it took.
One day I was reading Polly Berends ‘Whole Child/Whole Parent’, and something ‘clicked’ deep inside this little brain of mine. I was reading a passage on ‘letting go’ and instantly recognized that my birth issue was a control issue. I wasn’t able to ‘let go’ and birth my babies. I had always freely admitted that I was a “control freak” and I realized that this issue ran deep. I was unable to push my babies out because I couldn’t let go. I was trying to “DO” birth, I was trying to ‘control’ the pain, yet labor and birth are so far BEYOND anything I can ‘do’, it is impossible to ‘control’ it, and silly little me thought I had to be ‘god’ and do it all by myself. Technically I knew that birth had to ‘come through me’; but to come through me I had to open up, surrender to the ‘force’, and trust that the force of labor and birth (Life) wasn’t going to destroy me. Yeah right! I am a control freak with trust issues, and trying to birth at home, alone, brought me eyeball to eyeball with a deep layer of scar tissue from my early life. I don’t trust Life. Life isn’t safe! There is no-one to protect me from pain and struggle and suffering. This is what I grew to believe, raised by an agnostic mother and then thrust into the abyss of death and grief at the age of eleven with NO spiritual principles to support me. Here I was, 25 years later, still battling the same dragons. Still failing to understanding that Life CAN be trusted, Life IS safe, that Life is a carefully orchestrated dance of delight and all I have to do is Let Go and let it support me!
Well, it seems that my daughters have other plans for me. Both of their births have brought me face to face with my lack of trust in Life and my complete inability to surrender and Let go!
Hmmm, seems to be a bit of a theme appearing in my experiences of parenting from first to last. It seems that in analyzing all my parenting ‘difficulties’ I am brought face to face, again and again, with the same basic issues: my lack of trust in the ‘goodness’ of Life. My inability to feel supported in Life, to believe that there is a larger, intelligent Source in whom I can rest and rely upon. Yes, this is why I couldn’t ‘let go’ and push my babies out. Yes, this is why I cannot trust in Pixie’s inherent ‘goodness’ and why I try to ‘control’ her behavior with coercive discipline. This is even why I struggled to accept Pixie’s babyhood for what it was: because it reinforced my twisted belief that Life isn’t good and safe, but it is a struggle, full of suffering and difficulty that I can’t control. Yes, it seems that EVERYTHING about my parenting experience is leading me back, time and time again, to the enormous and overarching need for Spiritual Principles to support me.
PART THREE: THE PATH OF SPIRITUAL PARENTING…
And so here I am, suddenly at the crossroads and choosing to follow a new path in my parenting. This path is all rather new to me, and probably achingly difficult, but choose it I must, for the alternative is to be forever locked into a power struggle with Pixie, an option my heart will never let me accept.
So what are the principles that must now guide my parenting? (Please note, I am writing these as a guide for myself, and even though I use the royal ‘we’ I would not expect anyone else to actually practice, or even necessarily agree, with them. Parenting is most probably a personal journey, and we must all find our own ways to understand it)
Principle Number One: Children are inherently divine…
Children may be born from our bodies, but they come from the divine Source of Life (call it God, Goddess, Divine Intelligence, what you will). Children naturally, and unselfconsciously, embody the qualities of divine Life: they are innocent, pure, trusting, full of wonder and reverence for Life, full of Life’s inherent ‘goodness’ (god-ness).
As a parent one must always hold this vision in our mind. Whenever we ‘interpret’ a child’s behavior we must remember that they are naturally ‘good’, and that if they appear to be ‘acting’ bad, then we must choose to UNDERSTAND why. It may be any number of reasons: they may be over-tired, hungry, confused, they may have strong emotions that they don’t know how to express (in which case they will need a good long cry), they may be frustrated, over-stimulated, may have eaten too much sugar and be experiencing energy dips that make them feel rotten. Or they may simply lack the knowledge of how to behave in a given situation, in which case they need instruction.
The one thing we must continually guard against, is taking this whole mother/child business PERSONALLY. Children are not our possessions, they are not our ‘personal project’; they are the sons and daughters of Life. If we take things ‘personally’ we will fall into the trap of casting blame, taking the blame, feeling responsible for our children’s behavior, then feeling anxious and maybe even judged.
“As we have been graced to notice during our children’s early years, Life is not a personal project but a transpersonal unfoldment. The more we try to exert personal control over it’s details, the more we obscure from our awareness the order and benevolence of Being. If we let blame constitute the framework of our thinking, we find ourselves feeling always blameworthy, anxious, and defensive. Worse, we end up blaming our children, which only leads them to feel blameworthy, anxious, defensive…”
(Tremaine Linhorst)
Principle Number Two: The Spiritual Principles of Life operate at all times…
To follow the path of spiritual parenting, we must KNOW within our hearts and souls, that there are spiritual principles that operate throughout Life. And that these spiritual principles are available to support us on our parenting journey. If we stop trying to ‘do’ Life, stop trying to ‘control’ everything, stop meddling in the natural processes of Life, then these spiritual principles will be everywhere evident. Life is intelligent, Life has meaning, Life is divine, Life is naturally ‘good’, Life is beauty, Life is wonder-full, Life is orderly, Life is safe, Life is trust-worthy, Life supports us. Imagine how the world would change if we all truly BELIEVED in this reality?
Principle Number Three: Children need boundaries, not prison walls…
Don’t mistake me and think I am advocating that children don’t need any parental input. On the contrary, children are hungry for parental input, and so much of what we belief, how we act, and what we teach, will shape them as human beings. But coercive discipline is OUT. In the ‘shade of the prison house’ is not a healthy place for a child to grow. Punishment is irrelevant, because children are not ‘bad’. We need to look elsewhere to find ways to influence our children’s behavior. As parents it is our job to be aware if our children are tired, unwell, frustrated, swamped with strong emotions, hungry, confused. We need to help our children to understand their negative feelings and behaviors, and help them to do what they need to do to feel ‘good’ again.
Children may come from the Divine, but they do not understand all the intricacies of human social behavior. It is a parent’s job to ‘teach’ children what is socially acceptable behavior and what is not. This can be a tough job, and sometimes children will appear to be ‘badly behaved’ in social situations; but we must always remember that THEY are not bad, it is only a lack of knowledge, or an inappropriate time, that is causing the problem. We need to provide clear, consistent boundaries for children, so they know what is acceptable and what is not. But this needs to be achieved through TEACHING, not ‘disciplining’. Do not punish wrong behavior; instead choose to teach what is right.
Principle Number Three: If there is trouble, always travel WITHIN…
If we DO find ourselves, as I have done, having repeated trouble with one of our children, we must always look for the answer IN OUR OWN SELF.
I now suspect that our parenting ‘issues’ are always about us. Our children are sponges; they will absorb and act upon OUR beliefs. Children are mirrors; they will reflect back to us everything they have learnt from us. If we don’t like what we see, if we think our child’s behavior is difficult on some level, then we must search within our own hearts to understand why. The “Jung challenge” is a good place to start: “ If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.”
It may be that we hold ‘bad attitudes’ towards our children that are affecting their behavior. It may be that we are constantly misunderstanding their behavior and interpreting it falsely. It maybe that our children are acting exactly as we do, but we don’t like it when we suddenly see it glaring back at us. I don’t believe you can ever change another person, all you can do is change yourself: how you feel, how you think, how you respond.
I can think of no better impetus for personal transformation than seeing your own false beliefs, fears and weaknesses, reflected back at you in the behavior of your child. It seems to me, that packaged into the very procreation of Life, is the finest spiritual training camp ever devised. (But of course, because it was devised by Life itself!)
Parenting seems to me to be a journey designed to help us uncover the spiritual TRUTHS of Life. And it is through raising our children to “embody” these truths, that we will change the world, and free ourselves from the so-called ‘faults’ of humanity.
Now it is time for me to slink back into my life, and learn to Practice what I Preach. I suspect it won’t be easy, that it won’t come at all naturally, and that, in fact, it might very well take me the rest of my life to fully understand, embrace, and be able to practice the Art of Spiritual Parenting. But it seems to be the only direction left open to me, so travel down it I must. I don’t expect any of this to be a ‘magic wand’ that will instantly free me of my impatience, ‘spoiledness’, bad temper, bad attitude, and poor performance as a mother! Not by a long shot. It is a hard road, that will require that I exercise great self-control and mental discipline, and it may well take me YEARS to change all my bad habits and poor attitudes. But somewhere within the words of these pages lies the seeds of my salvation. Goddess, shine on them, so they can grow.
Wish me Luck, somehow I suspect I’m going to need it.
Eloise.
*********************
A Parents Prayer…
“ Let me still myself,
Open my hands to you,
Surrender to you the merry-go-round of thoughts,
And tasks of my life as a parent.
Let me still myself,
Open my arms to you,
And rejoice with you at the gift of the beautiful child,
Who came from you, through me.
Let me still myself,
Open my heart to you,
And ask that you warm it’s cold, bruised, dark places,
So that I may shine love upon my child.
Let me still myself,
Bow down in your honor,
And as we part entrust to your keeping,
The precious child, whose face I hold before you.”
**The entire inspiration for this entry comes from a profound book by Ann Tremaine Linthorst. Any wisdom within my journey I owe entirely to her beautiful book, “Mothering as a Spiritual Journey.” She has said it all before, and so much better than I ever could.**
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