Parenting Peace

The weekend had been full of living at the intersection of 5 lives. My heart was carrying the weight of each of my sons' joys and sufferings.  Heavy.

"I just want to be okay with wherever they boys are at," I told Tia, my healing therapist last Monday. I wanted deep appreciation of exactly where they are with their lives:  Teenage love relationships. Parties. Stories of drugs. Friendship issues. Fitting in. Money. Marks. Injuries. Homework. Performance. Social Status. New School.  New Friendships. Life.

I wanted to let go of worrying about their struggles and the ancient impulse to fix their lives and take care of everything.  The anxiety was killing my joy and dominating my relationship with each of them.  The source of the anxiety, the story I told myself of each of their lives, became all that I saw of them.  Instead of seeing the magnificence of their beings.  The perfect imperfection of their whole selves.

I wanted to be in deep acceptance of it all.  I knew that acceptance was the only way out of anxiety.

But, shew! How?

Well, the only way for me is to remember who they really are.

Being a parent sometimes gives me illusions of grandeur. "I am older, wiser, and more experienced, " I tell myself.  "I must take care of them."  Otherwise......... disaster will strike, they will fail, other parents will judge me as a bum mother, they won't succeed in life, they will ruin their reputation,  they will ruin my reputation, they will become addicts or alcoholics and never get a job and live with us for the rest of their lives. Again, people will judge me.  People will judge them, reject them, think them fools, failures.  I will have failed, been a fool. And the big one :  they will die. I won't survive that.  Doom and gloom.

Instead of deeply listening to my internal impulses and feeling their potential, their magnificence and their complete equipped-ness to handle their own lives.  Messily. Imperfectly.  Through making mistakes.  Through experiencing what they must experience and learning what they must learn and growing as they must grow.  To lead a fabulous, magnificent, challenging, blessed, WHOLE messy life. As they must.  Without me hovering. Fussing.  Worrying.

So what is the point of being a parent then?  To do exactly the same as them:  Lead a fabulously messy life.  Full of ups and downs, cheer and challenges. And if they want to know how to do something, to trust that I or someone else with embody the solution to their challenge. And to lead by example.  Trusting that I am fully equipped to handle my life. Continuing to consult my inner guide as to what feels good to me. In every decision as it arises.  Baby step by baby step.  Peace by peace.

And there it is again: Appreciation. Love.