Awareness is the single most important step to transformation and evolving.
What a dichotomy that parenting can be the best gift you will ever receive, but can also be full of so much responsibility and uncertainty. I always thought that there was something wrong with me, like there was something that I am missing that I couldn’t seem to grasp when it came to parenting. That’s why I really wanted to start a blog so that other mothers know that they are not alone on this journey. We’re all trying to figure out in our own way. All our stories are valid no matter what we have been through. Not all of us want to share our parenting experiences and that’s okay. That is why I’m choosing to share mine because I believe that there is comfort in knowing you are not alone in your struggles. There were days where I would be feeling like I was doing it wrong all the time, and for me, listening to or reading other people’s parenting or even life stories really helped to inspire me and lift me up. I always felt alone in my parenting journey, like I was doing it all wrong all the time. I would yell, berate, punish, lecture, then overcompensate because I put myself in a spot where I would marinate in guilt, shame and eventually self-loathing. I hated the person I was becoming because it felt like I was losing myself in this role that I thought I would have control over and be able to accomplish. Being a mother tests your humanity on so many levels. It took me until I had my second child to have an epiphany and confront myself about all of my beliefs as to what being a parent truly is. I like to call this my “awakening”. And so my obsession began about two years ago. I became enamored with learning about parenting. I took many many masterclasses, workshops, attended online summits, read several books, listened to tons of podcasts, and took a cognitive child behavior coaching course. This path that I took also took me on a journey of self-discovery.
Here is what I learned:
Being a parent is not a competition or something that needs to be accomplished. It is about seeing my children from a different perspective, a different lens than the one I have been looking through. There is no manuscript or training manual for parenting. I searched far and wide and I discovered that it is not out there. It can’t exist. Every child is different that requires different needs, and you are a different parent to each child. It was really hard for me to wrap my head around this. Am I a different parent to each of my daughters? Yup, I sure am! It make sense to me now. My daughters are 5 years apart in age. They are at completely different stages in their lives. They have different needs and challenges, so I must show up differently for each of them to guide them to their differing potentials. Once I truly recognized that, it became clear to me that there is also no special methodology or system because parenting is a mindset. Parenting is about shifting your mindset about what you think of your children. That was my biggest breakthrough as a parent. It was about seeing them as whole human beings, not half humans that needed to be fixed and molded by me so they meet my expectations of what I think they should grow up to be like. I really had to sit with and unravel the societal and traditional programming and beliefs that were no longer serving me or my children.
So I asked myself, why am I so rigid in my parenting? I started to confront myself and befriend all these beliefs and emotions that I had ingrained in me. I’ve always hated confrontations. Confrontations made me uncomfortable because it meant really addressing the issue even if it hurt someone else’s feelings. The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow especially if it’s directed at yourself. Confronting myself as a mother with the way I show up for my daughters took me on the best personal development growth that I never really knew I needed. It forced me to go on this path to own up and overcome my own excuses. Confronting myself completely redefined my view of parenting. I realized that there are other parts in my life that are impacting my parenting that I was not consciously aware of. It made me aware that I cannot connect with my children if I can’t connect with myself first. My daughters really gave me the courage and consciousness I needed to enter a connection with myself. My doing, my parenting was coming from a place of shame and control, not presence. I was repeating patterns from my childhood and I had no idea. Our past impacts our children. I had to be aware of my own childhood patterns to be able to parent my daughters more consciously.
We live in a world that is rapidly changing. There is so much uncertainty about the outcomes of these changes and what that means to us as parents. Our youth are vulnerable because we as parents are also vulnerable because we did not grow up in a world like today’s. Our childhood was completely different. How can we expect to raise our children the same way our parents raised us? That world does not exist anymore. The way we are right now is what was taught to us at an early age. I don’t want to be bashing our parents because they did the best they can with the circumstances they were raised in, and beliefs they were taught by their parents or guardians. It is up to us now to try to understand how we learnt these behaviors and patterns, and why we put these pressures and expectations on ourselves. How and where did we learn these standards? Are we falling victims to societal expectations and generational cycles imbedded in us by our predecessors?
These expectations and pressures that make us forget the important things in life and keep us rigid in our ways. It helps us forget that our children are unique beings, they are not our minis, they are their own person. It helps us forget that trying to meet societal expectations and pressures that every child should be at this stage in their life by this age, and if they are not that something is broken in them or something is wrong with them. It takes the joy out of today, because all that does to us is put us in a space of an an imaginary future that our kids are not going to be successful in life.
I now know that my childhood experiences have defined my relationship with myself and my children in both a negative and positive way. Our past pain make our choices and reactions and behaviors. When you start becoming aware of that, you start to realize how many of your present day behaviors and reactions come from the past instead of the present. Let’s stop robbing ourselves of today’s joy worrying about tomorrow. Parenting is about helping our children become resilient in life, and help nurture her uniqueness on who she wants to become and be as an autonomous being. Trying to become the best version of myself is a crucial foundation I must work on everyday in order to help my inner dearest girl, and my dearest daughters. I want to raise my daughters to be resilient, grounded, and to become independent from me, not dependent on me. We need to know when to be their leader and when to band together with them and collaborate.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have all this figured out. We don’t hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” with big smiles on our faces. My household is like any other household with children; there’s screaming, crying, yelling, belching and all the loud things that comes with our little humans. I am no longer in a battle with myself because I am learning to understand my conflicts, rather than push them aside or “fix” them. I can now confidently say, without any shame or guilt, that my name is Rana and I am a recovering yellaholic.
Cultivate compassion, connection, and understanding every single day. Remember that parenting is not a competition, it’s a journey. You’re not alone on this beautiful, evolutionary path. Xo
“What our children need from us is a mirror to their own self-worth”. (Dr.Shefali)