Measure their
success by the amount of joy they experience.
This is the first line of my Mission Statement for
Motherhood. Liking word play, I have taken the first letter of “motherhood” and
attached a sentence to each one. They are reminders of my core values as a
human being and as a mother. I chose success as the center of my first value
because it has been a difficult idea with which to come to terms myself.
As a product of the 1970s, post-feminist, era, I was raised
to believe that I could be anything as long as it made a million dollars a year
and was on par with any job a man could do. When I had my first child, I had to
redefine what success was for me. Raising a child according to my previously
held notions of success nearly killed me. Working full-time in a corporate
environment, fighting with my husband over who would pick up baby by 6pm,
feeling wiped-out and exhausted just was not working for me.
My next transition was to find a part-time job. I even had
the good fortune to find one with an on-site day care facility that was also
within walking distance of our home. It really could not have been more ideal,
except for the mind-numbingly boring work for which I was being paid a very
paltry sum every month. It didn’t take me long to realize that this, too, was
for the birds.
After the birth of our second child, we were in that
well-known position of putting nearly all of my salary into daycare so that I
could work OR not working at all. We chose the latter. I really saw no point at
all in returning to a job that I didn’t like in the first place so that someone
else could raise my child. Being a full time mom was a very attractive option
and I was glad that my husband’s salary allowed us to do it.
Fast forward a year and a half, with a four year old and one
year old, and I was ready to tear my hair out. Uh-oh, I thought, not another
existential crisis over how to be happy while being a mom. That’s when I
started to completely reevaluate how I defined the notion of success. In my
world, it clearly was not making a million dollars a year in a job that
required most of my time, nor was it the pleasure of spending all my hours with
my little munchkins.
To say that I felt there had to be a better way would be the
understatement of the century. Once I began to equate my sense of inner joy
with success, I began to make changes in my life that made me feel more joyful
more of the time. The first thing I did was put the laptop up on the kitchen
counter and begin to record all the ways my children were showing me what it
“looked” like to be joyful. In essence, I became the student and they were my
teachers.
Lots of things they taught me are in my book The Way of the Toddler and I don’t have
the space to go into them in detail now. Suffice it to say they taught me a
great deal, but all of it connected to the central idea that success is a
measurement of how much joy we experience in any given moment. No more. No
less. I have been living by these words ever since.
When I sat down to write my Mission Statement for
Motherhood, I was grateful for their toddler teaching. It had helped me
tremendously in picking up the pieces of my self-esteem and realizing that no
matter what I did, no matter how much money I brought home each month and no
matter how glamorous my office space, none of it could replace a sense of inner
joy. That joy wasn’t coming from any of those things. It was coming from the
level of pleasure those things provided. After kids, it simply became less
pleasurable to divide my emotional resources between so many competing elements
for my time. After spending awhile with no other elements competing for my time
other than my kids and the domestic arena, I was able to slowly add things back
into my life that fit my new definition of success. Thus, a book, a radio show,
a speaking platform and all the rest that I do as a professional woman came
into being. Putting that sentence at the top of my Mission Statement for
Motherhood was the least I could do to repay my children for showing me I was a
successful human being through the amount of joy I experienced with them in my
life.
Offer support
without interfering too much (ultimately it is their journey)
Defining the balance between offering support and
interfering too much can be like aiming at a constantly moving target. As they
grow and develop, what our kids need from us is always changing. One day the
help they want in dressing becomes the fodder for a tantrum the next because we
did not let them do it on their own. How can we ever possibly hope to get this
parenting thing “right?”
“Ultimately this is their
journey’” is my mantra for helping me to maneuver into the best position
possible on that delicate knife edge between support and interference. I have
my own journey. Hopefully one day they will be in a better position to assist
me along my life path. Right now the scale is tipped in favor of me doing most
of the supporting – and the interfering.
The journey they are just beginning is one in which I have
the greatest influence right now, in these early years. Shaping their character
in positive ways that will support them in the overall path of life is my main
job today. Unless I repeat myself a zillion times over the course of years and
years, what I say exactly is not going to enter into the long term memory of
their consciousness. What will make its mark there, however, is who I am in the
world.
Repeating the mantra “Ultimately, this is their journey,” is the most helpful
thing I can say to remind me of the same. When I establish the unique qualities
that each human brings with them into experience of living, I can focus more on
my example than on imposing my will in any given situation that requires my
attention. When we are heading out the door in the morning, am I ready? Are my
shoes on? This is akin to the airline safety tag line of putting your own
oxygen mask on first before you help someone else put theirs on.
Everything boils down to who I am being in the world. Am I
showing my support of my spouse? What are my kids learning about support and
interference from me by the ways I behave in the world and our family unit?
They do need to know that I am there for them, but they also need freedom to
grow into the self-reliant individuals that can make their own way in the world
as adults. Having the eye on the ball of my own journey and remembering that
it’s the same for my kids allows me to tread the balance between too much
support and too much interfering with a lot more success than I think I would
otherwise.
So often our lives, especially at this early stage of
parenting when our kids are very young, are all about our children and not at
all about us. That can be ok too. Focusing our attention fully on our children
is simply another option for a way of being on the path that is our life.
Knowing we all have a path, each of us can oscillate between support and
interference without removing from our consciousness that our example is the
greatest determiner of future character, not what we say in the heat of this
moment.
A handy exercise is to ask myself where I am offering
support to the people in my life and where perhaps I am interfering. When I
look at my adult relationships, it follows that I bring this energy into my
relationship with my kids. The energy of support and the energy of interference
have a very different feel to them. One is buoying, the other deflating. I can
also reverse the exercise and take a look at how those around me are either
buoying me up with support of deflating me with too much interference. With
that kind of clarity, I can make more informed choices about with whom I spend
my time and create a better energy flow all around. My kids will benefit from
this. No surprise, I will too. That is the key to “Ultimately, it is their
journey.” Support and interference become tools by which you gage the direction
of your own path; willing you to move with your kids in life-supporting
measurable examples of consciousness in the choices we make as human beings.
When your kids see you make conscious
choices about whom you support and how you give that support, they will build
into their character the same and be ready for what may come in adulthood to a
much greater degree.
Trust, Trust Them, Trust Myself, Trust the Universe – and
then let go…
Trust allows us to live more deeply in the present. Yet, it
is a quality that many of us struggle with our whole lives. We find it very
difficult to let go of not knowing. It is certain that I do not know now how my
children’s lives will unfold. All I can do is the best I can do today. I have
to trust that my best today will be enough. With all my trust handed over to
the forces of life, I can continue to work on myself and create even better
tomorrows.
We have to let go. There really is no other choice. Well, of
course, there is another choice, but its outcomes are not so appealing to me.
When I hold on to having to know everything about everything, I close myself
off to the miracle of every moment. When I first sat down to write my Mission
Statement for Motherhood (of which this article is the third in a 10 week
series taking each letter of “Motherhood” in turn), I wanted to write something
that could last forever. It had to be something that would take me through to
crone-hood. I wanted a testament to my whole life as a mother, and not just
their infancy.
In thinking about the “T” in “Motherhood,” I played with
many values I held up as important that began with that letter. There was
truth, time, touch, tradition, travel and teaching, but none of these captured
my imagination over the long haul. Of course I wanted them to be honest with me
and tell me the truth, but I also knew that I would be telling them little
“white lies” along the way when it came to subjects they weren’t ready for or I
wasn’t. Time is a precious thing, but their time is for them when they reach a
certain age. Touch is wonderful, but I have to respect their distance once they
reach adulthood. A family tradition is beautiful, but what they choose to pass
on is not really my concern. We love to travel, but again, my influence in that
area only extends to their life in this family. Teaching values is important in
everyone’s life. However, my job is done when they go off on their own.
Trust is the one thing I can continue to give them for as
long as we both live. If they are in this house or heading up their own
families, I can honor them with trust that they will be fine in all their
endeavors. If any fail, I can trust that they will pick themselves up and begin
again. It is also something I can give myself. I can trust that I have done my
best and let go of any guilt that I could have done things differently. I am
offering the deepest, most sacred, part of myself when I offer them trust. It
is a gift for everyone.
That is why I chose Trust for the T. Whatever else I do in
all my years as a mother, trust is the one thing to which I can continually
return year after year, day after day, second after second. It asks me
implicitly in its essence to let go of all the fruitless needing to know all
the time. There is much in this life I cannot control. The outcome of my
children in their adulthood is one of the biggest. They are just as clueless
now about their future as I am, but they care a lot less about it now than I
do. They just want to play, to be in the company of love and to eat when their
stomachs tell them they are hungry. They trust. They trust BIG time. The least
I can do as their mother, as the one who spends so much time with them, is to
honor that trust in the universe with a little bit of my own. The thing they do
so well is my greatest challenge. That is why they are my teachers. In almost
everything, they make a much better teacher than I do. Now that T for trust is
established in my Mission Statement for Motherhood, I can move on to the H. For
that, you can read what I have chosen in two weeks. Until then, happy trusting.
Help
with life (and homework), but don’t do it for them.
Feed a poor man a fish and he has a meal. Teach him
to fish and he can eat for life. That is how the old saying goes. However, in
parenting, the tendency is to do fishing for our kids, feed them, clean up
after them, wash the plates and put everything away. At least, that has been my
way of doing things. It is, however, my job to teach them how to live an adult
life and not create kids who never learn how to “fish” for themselves.
What does it mean to help? It is very tempting to
think that I am helping them by doing everything for them. I want to do
everything for them – I know how to do it better, faster and with fewer messes.
Homework is the perfect practice ground for me. In homework, I know know that I am not supposed to do
it for them, so I bite my tongue and sit quietly beside my almost 8 year old
while he figures out his math sums. It can be tough not to shout out all the
answers, but I do my best to keep my mouth shut.
In other areas, I could use some improvement. It
doesn’t help my son to learn to tie his shoe if I always tie them for him. It
doesn’t help to teach my toddler how to cook if I don’t let him crack an egg
once in awhile. It doesn’t help my 5 year old to learn to read if I do all the
reading without pointing out any of the letters. What am I teaching them by
example? Is it that they are worth my patience and tolerance? Or is it that
they are in the way of my single-minded obsession with doing everything myself?
I have many tools at my disposal. Day care,
preschool and elementary school are all teaching my kids in tandem with what we
provide at home. I have a husband who takes them out into the garden and
teaches them about plants and taking care of the earth. I have an extended
family, which provides examples of other ways of being in a family. All of the
“tools” for teaching them how to fish are in front of me. Now, the secret is to
use them.
To use the tools of fishing, every fisherman needs
skill, tolerance for the conditions of the water and the fish that swim in it,
dexterity to cast again and again and again until he gets that bite and most of
all the fisherman needs patience. If a fisherman were teaching a poor man how
to fish, he would give the poor man a pole and a few techniques in how to cast.
After that, he would sit patiently by his student while they fished together.
My kids are learning how to live this thing called
life. I have skills they do not, at least not yet. Their pole is the tool with
which they learn to handle all of life’s treasures – and all of life’s
challenges. It is in their highest and best interests to teach them that the
tool is there for them to use, too. It’s not just something I use to “fix” all
of life’s problems, both little and big. What will I be giving them by helping,
and not doing? I will be giving them a valuable lesson that they are capable of
whatever it is they choose to fish for in life. Their imagination is the only
thing between what is now and what can be for them. I want them to imagine
greatness and know they have skill to hook that dream.
However I teach the process of living one’s best
life, I can always show them I am willing to sit with them and patiently go
through the steps of learning. I can give pointers along the way. I can share
the load when necessary. I can do some things if showing them how to do it is
part of the learning process. I can believe in them. I can show them that I
have faith they will learn how to fish for every desire and catch bigger
catches than they dreamed. I am using the metaphor of fishing because it is exactly
what we are teaching them how to do when we parent. When we teach them how to
fish, we give them a life. When we do all the fishing for them, we give them a
meal. I am striving for the former, although I inline to do the latter. My
prayer is that I have the patience to show them the pole and how to cast. Then
I will sit and fish with them.
