How to be a better parent. part1.

Here is a tip I’m learning about how to be a better parent.

Take care of yourself by taking time for yourself.  This means give yourself  a good chunk of Time and your Present Awareness, your own Attention.  Time to be alone and away from your children.  Beg friends, hire a babysitter, ask MOM, or even your IN LAWS.   How much time is enough, you may ask?  Once a week for 2 hours is plenty!  Uh, yeah, if you want to be jumping off a bridge in a few months.  Seriously, considering the job of parenting is 24/7 and for those of us who don’t work outside of the home, there is no outside ‘JOB’ to run away to, then, HOW MUCH TIME WOULD A HIGH PAID EXEC in some boring corporate chain need for a break if we asked him or her to work the hours that parents do????  LIKE TWO YEARS!!!! They would quit and start collecting bottles.

So might I suggest two fifteens and a half for every 8 hours spent with children, and after that we get into overtime, in which case, you can only work 4 more hours until you have to get at least 10 hours off until you go back to work.  NOpe, not gonna work is it?   SO DO YOU SEE WHAT I’M SAYING HERE? and yet I KNOW TOO MANY PEOPLE  and sometimes this includes me and Grant, who have difficulty taking 4 freaking hours to ourselves a week.  And this is NOT time spent on our marriage, this is time spent A LONE.  Alone time and marriage time is entirely separate and don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can get alone time with your spouse next to you.  That’s you being AFRAID to be alone, and so you really must do this for yourself pronto, because if you’re afraid to be alone, well, it’s bad then.  It’s gone too far.  4 hours would seem near impossible to some parents I talk to. Why I ask, why why WHY ARE WE DOING THIS??? It’s like we can’t work our head around the crazy hours that are parenting and so we give up on the idea that we will ever  feel human again and we become slaves to the job, we become resentful martyrs.  Or very possibly, we feel we need to punish ourselves because we were tired and snapped and then we felt horribly guilty and so we need to punish ourselves now by not giving ourselves the break we needed BEFORE we got so tired and snapped.  Vicious Cycle, yeah, i know i know, I done it, trust me, NOT FUN.

Nice try, nap times do not count.  Those are stolen moments when you choose the most important things at that time: take a shit, take a shower, do a load of laundry, write my blog, facebook,  make some phone calls, clean up kitchen, eat or lay down.  Not all of those things.  Maybe two tops.  Often for me, I’ve noticed that it boils down to food OR shower.  And then that outcome depends on my cycle, who I’m seeing in the next 5 hours and if I have to go anywhere when baby is up.

Time alone is going for a walk somewhere beautiful.  Slow or brisk, but the pace being set by you and not your mini tyrants.  Alone is meditation, kickboxing, writing, running, painting, dancing, doing whatever you need to do to feel connected to yourself and your body and your emotions.  Alone is being home alone and hearing silence and not worrying about doing a damn thing except what you really want to do.  And last but not least, time alone is not self medicating with drugs, food, alchohol, other kinds of work or busy-ness or other numbing devices.  Again, i reiterate, you need to give yourself present awareness and attention and start to feel your feelings again.

When you spend time with yourself you fill up your tank, as Dov and Renuka Baron would say.  So when you’re with your family, you’re not running on fumes, so you don’t burn out, so you’re not miserable and miserable to be around.  So you don’t injure yourself, so you don’t get sick, so you don’t feel so angry and pissed off all the time, so you don’t feel so depressed and resentful, so you don’t teach your kids that only the crappiness and drudgery is what being human is mostly about.  Spend time with yourself, so you can feel joy again, so you can feel light and not fake cheery, but genuinely happy to be with your family, so you can joke again, so you can tease and giggle, so you can belly laugh so hard you pee, so you can roll around on the floor with your kids pretending to be groundhogs, so you can teach your children how to be FULL SPECTRUM AWARE HUMAN BEINGS.

Spend time with yourself so you can model for your children how to take care of themselves when they grow up.

ps. I just came up with a fabulous new term while creating a new category: SELF HEALTH!!