Relax and enjoy your kids?
impossible yet wonderful advice from my elders
In my parenting journey, each summer gets a little better. Both because my son is 9 and getting more independent each year, but also all the healing and energy work pays off. Previous years I've felt like I was drowning on and off all summer. Nice metaphor for beach season.
This year, my boundaries are better, and grappling with ancestral trauma seems to be helping this drowning feeling.
I've often wondered about that drowning feeling, beyond high sensitivity. Some days it feels connected to a long line of ancestral matriarchs, drowning with many children, plus the traumas we all know from generations back. Infant mortality. Maternal mortality. Poverty. Lack of choice in life. You know all these stories too.
Today, it feels like a sense of linking, where I can't make decisions for my day without considering my son.
Which feels like a yoke.
A light rope tying us together.
A burden and friction.
Hyper-attunement.
If he’s in the house with me, part of my brain tracks him all the time. I don’t yet know how to turn this off.
Not as bad as other times, where I feel strangled or drowning by this linking. Awareness - dipping in and out of frustration. Some times of centering myself and remembering in my core the fullness of my whole aura, my whole energy boundary, the independence of my energy - from this space I can consider me first, and his needs secondary.
I was with my aunt and uncle recently, and my aunt was proclaimed the expert expectation setter - she knows the boundaries up front and tells the grandkids before the sleepover.
Unlike me, where I vacillate on and off all day, swimming through mud, hoping we’ll all flow together somehow. Sometimes reactionary. Sometimes proactive. Sometimes fun and laughing and connecting. Sometimes losing my temper.
My nature doesn’t easily align with structure, at least structure as we know it in current day western culture. I don't like rules. I don't like being told what to do, or telling others what to do. It’s burdensome to me to conform to routine, other than brushing my teeth and making my cup of green tea in the morning.
It doesn't come naturally to me to know the expectations and bounds with my son each day. I finally realize and inhabit in more layers of me - boundaries are actually what I need to protect myself and my ability to stay more or less centered, rather than rules to enforce for his life.
I asked the elders at this gathering for parenting advice - my parents and aunt and uncle. They all came to the same conclusion - relax and enjoy your children more.
The balm of this advice. I felt the layer of energy that pervades everything I do - "am I getting this right????". It's slick, thin, and covers everything I do, so its hard to even recognize that layer informs all my breaths, all my interactions.
And the question of today’s current parenting climate - how can I enjoy my kid when I have to be all the things - entertainment, rule setter, game player, planner, monitor, cook, chauffeur. I know I’m not the first to say this.
I’m aware I have more choices in this realm. More releasing of this light rope that connects us, which will free both of us. More relinquishing of trying to make sure he has a happy childhood.
And wondering about the bigger structures - the society we live in, Chicago culture, the work expectations, the unseen pressure on a mom to both parent and have other passions or purpose in my life.
I love my passions (duh!), primarily a focus on energy and emotional work for myself and helping others. But how much of this is because I’ve been told I need to have an identity outside of my role as a parent? Would I be able to relax and enjoy my son more if I didn’t feel this pull towards healing work, and if I’m honest, a pull towards “making a contribution to the world"? How much of my distress is actually because I believe some programming that’s so subtle I can’t separate it out yet from my true desires? Programming that says being a mom is incomplete, that’s not enough of a goal in life.
Just writing this gives me a motivation to keep unwinding my desire to be special, so I can get closer and closer to my true self, my truest nature. When I’m more immersed in my true nature, I feel the possibility of so much more enjoyment of what is. And what is in my life, is a lot of relating and connecting to a 9 year old!
And yet my body screams for alone time. How do I reconcile this desperation for alone time with what is? That’s part of what is too - immersed with a 9 year old, and also needing alone time. Sheesh, give me all your advice for how you navigate this? Or maybe you’ve been through it and launched your kids already? What’s your best parenting advice?
With love and appreciation to all of us on this wild journey!
Marta
I have zero advice on how to reclaim solo time. It took cancer for me to get some of that, and then it’s spent on focusing on healing. But I do know everything is a phase and eventually more solo time will be inevitable and I’d most likely wish for more community. But I hear you loud and clear. I crave it so bad especially when I have little people dependent on me.
I don’t know if this sounds appealing to you at all, but I’m planning to take my kids and dog to the Montrose doggie beach on Tuesday around 3:30-4. If you and your son feel like some beach company. The twins are 13 and my youngest is 5, but perhaps worth splashing around in the lake?