Growing Humans.

Being a mother is the hardest thing I’ve done, by far. I have to manage two sets of completely different emotions, guide two hearts to do the right thing, be a partner to my partner and do laundry and clean and sometimes cook. I bathe three human beings before 7:15 am during the week and deliver both children to their respective schools. I hug them when they’re sad and I dress their cuts when they fall. But my 1 year old still closes the door on me when I’m walking into the room where him and his father are and my 5 year old still tells me he loves his father the most, even amidst his long periods of absences.

I often ask myself “how do I navigate these emotionally tumultuous moments without fostering resentment and without scarring my children?” My feelings get hurt, they make me cry and I end up being their basket to put their anger, their manipulation and their sadness into. I read once that children feel the most comfortable around their mothers to explore their curiosities without judgment and with love. Bittersweet. I am honored to be their safe space to be wholly themselves but I am on the receiving end of the pushback against damage control.

I remind myself often that I have very bad days too, I’ve just been programmed to conduct myself in a way that those negative emotions don’t surface. I’m not allowed to throw myself on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs or tell people that I think their actions are stupid and ugly. And it is my duty to give them tools to cope with their heavy feelings more appropriately, which is something I’m still trying to figure out myself. How do I teach two humans who are leaving footprints on the world to love themselves despite how they’ve suffered? That they’re worth the ride no matter what other people think? That even if they don’t do what everyone wants them to, they’re still smart and capable? I still forget those things on my own sometimes.

I’ve been thinking about the verbatim we use when we address our children for household or general infractions - “I taught you better than that” or “that’s not the way I raised you”. We use our children’s actions to grade our parenting, which is counterproductive to their happiness and ours. We often don’t acknowledge that they have built their own realities, formed their own ideas and created their own perceptions on which they act and make decisions that are completely independent of our instructions and teachings. We’re hard on ourselves because we see our children as a reflection of us, so we keep trying to align them with what makes us look and feel best. And in turn, when they don’t represent us appropriately, they feel less than and so do we. Why do we do this to ourselves? To them?

I’m slowly reshaping my mind to stop doing this and separating myself from them. They are not me and they are not mine to keep. They are mine to equip with knowledge, love, light and resilience to make their own changes in the world as they see fit. There is a point beyond parental teaching that becomes controlling, a point beyond disappointment that becomes damaging to them and a point beyond our sadness that becomes their exhaustion. We affect them a lot more than we know and they know a lot more than we think. There’s no manual and no “best way” to do things. Every family is coping - rich, poor, seemingly perfect or an overall disaster. We’re all just doing the best we know how.