Do you think children are born empty of love and our job as parents is to fill them up with love them to make them feel loved ?  No! This makes no sense does it?  We are so backwards sometimes!  Our job as parents is to actually open ourselves [...]]]> Huge insight lately about children and love.

Do you think children are born empty of love and our job as parents is to fill them up with love them to make them feel loved ?  No! This makes no sense does it?  We are so backwards sometimes!  Our job as parents is to actually open ourselves up enough to receive their love and all their fantastic expressions of it.  That’s true acceptance.

Children need to love.  And they need to have their love received.  Maybe even more than they need to be loved by others. Children already have a deep infinite source of love  and joy that they are connected to because they are children and it’s innate in them. They need to have their love and bouncy joy accepted and taken in.  They need to have their love and all their creative expressions of it appreciated with gratitude.  They need others to receive it with full presence.

Recently I read a journal I wrote when I was eleven years old.  It was poignant, funny and full of longing.  Longing to love.  NOT longing to be loved. I was struck by the distinction.  From my adult perspective it’s easy to think that children simply want to be loved, but this is actually not the whole truth.  When children see suffering or pain around them, their natural instinct and desire is to love and to try to help.  This reading of my own eleven year old perspective really reminded me of this.

I remember feeling sorry for my parents as a very small child.  I remember not so much the feeling of needing their love, but I wanted them to stop suffering.  SO BADLY.  Children can see their parents suffering.  It’s as plain as day to them.  I saw how stuck in their heads they were, trapped in the self imposed suffering of  their worrisome doubts, thoughts and fears.  I tried everything to get them to feel better.  Cuteness, loving kindness, servitude, being funny, being loud and silly, being rambunctious, being quiet and good and eventually being BAD, to try to get them to snap out of it.  Rarely did they have the willingness to peek out of the window and  see me, to see how hard I was trying to make them feel better.  They were blind to me.   I was just an annoyance and I’d get a reprimand, and back into their heads they went.  Lost. In the cocoon of misery.

So what if you are a parent who (let’s face it) is grumpy a lot of the time or worried all the time, lost in thought and just not really there?  Do you think you can accept their love when you are so focused on your miserable thoughts?  Do you think you are capable of enjoying them, or truly seeing them and appreciating them?

Are your children already angry and acting out because they feel so invisible?  If so, then sorry, it may already be too late.  They may already have learned that their energy is useless, worth nothing and not important to you and therefore the world.  Their love was not received.   God knows they tried, but you were too stuck with your head up your ass to notice them.  They were powerless.  That hurt.  So they hate you.   Maybe, I don’t know.  But this is how children learn to loathe their parents and to feel worthless.  Can you see this now?

And when those children  grow up and eventually feel so desperate to be accepted,  and decide having children is the best way,  they soon repeat that lovely cycle of not being able to take in their own children’s love.  Their hearts were shut down and locked up long ago.  YEP.  Around the misery-go-round we go.

Stop the cycle.  Please.  Start by being willing to learn how to love yourself.   Be willing.  That’s all that it takes.  And  then some baby steps.  Be willing to listen to yourself.  Be willing to take care of yourself.  Be willing to be present with yourself with loving kindness.  Yes it may feel really unnatural at first, but as an act of will, it will actually begin to feel more normal and actually good.  The more you love yourself, the more present you will be for your children and their open expressions of affection and adoration of you.  Yes you.

And when our children see and feel that their love is valued, good and important because we are willing  to take it in to our hearts, then they feel worthwhile.  They feel like they can contribute something useful to humanity. And they can be free to explore and enjoy their world and not constantly be burdened with worry about their unhappy family members.

Can you see this?  Can you see how important it is to learn to love yourself?

Apologizing is powerful.  Apologizing instantly raises the energy of the interaction, so long as it’s sincere and not meant to manipulate.  ’I'm sorry’ is something I pretty much use every day all throughout the day.  There is always an instance where I was insensitive, there is [...]]]> I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry for…. I’m sorry that I….

Apologizing is powerful.  Apologizing instantly raises the energy of the interaction, so long as it’s sincere and not meant to manipulate.  ’I'm sorry’ is something I pretty much use every day all throughout the day.  There is always an instance where I was insensitive, there is always an instance where I spoke sharply, there is always an instance where I made a mistake.  Apologizing leads to truth, truth of why I behaved a particular way, what I was really reacting to on a deeply personal level.  Apologizing lets me see past all the ego based justifications and posturing and allows me to see through the other person’s eyes.  Apologizing to children is simply not done enough.  It’s usually in the guise of mental rationalization of adult hypocrisy, but if we can get past the bullshit we tend to produce, and apologize from your heart, your child will look you straight in the eyes and you will know that they see you.  Not just ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, not just ‘my parent’, or ‘the grownup’, but human to human.  And every time you do this, and meet them on this level, you will know that they are our own special little gurus come here to teach us about ourselves and not the other way around.  They inspire by constantly pushing the envelope for what we think is possible, they inspire through their resilience, their open hearts and their easy ability to achieve.  And when you demonstrate fallibility to your children, it doesn’t set them up for years and years of self flagellation if they themselves make mistakes in the future.  It teaches them the perfection of imperfection; the joy of the journey.

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 [...]]]> 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!!

I said, ” It’s more like a lot of good, like lots of [...]]]> Last week Lula wanted to discuss the word RICH. When I said that the “cake was rich” while doling out a tiny sliver of my dark chocolate and espresso birthday cake, Lula said, “I thought that rich meant a lot of money.”

I said, ” It’s more like a lot of good, like lots of yummy deliciousness in food, like sugar and butter, and sometimes too much can make you feel sick, so that’s why rich cake in moderation is in order, so you can really enjoy it.”

Then we rambled on about how rich in reference to people, can mean rich in spirit or life or joy or blessings… sometimes it just means a lot of goodness in their lives, often including money, but not always meaning money .

Lula, always willing to go the mile with me, started to broach the next leg of the marathon; how some people are rich with luck, like kids who are lucky to have lots of toys… seriously. And then I decided not to go down the path that she was attempting to lead me astray on. We’ll save the luck discussion for later. I muttering some lame excuse while wondering to myself, How to explain how being lucky isn’t just luck? And how to explain that some kids can become greedy entitled little bastards? Who says parenting young children turns your brain to mush from lack of intellectual stimulus? Har Har!

THANK YOU NOTE:

A THANK YOU has been welling up in my heart of late, which I need to express.  Thank you to all those fabulous people who were there coaching me directly and indirectly with their energy as I howled and growled and moaned and screamed my son out of me more than a year ago. Thank you for supporting me in supporting myself.  I cannot express the depth of gratitude I feel to you all. My midwives Candace and Sarah, my doula Kathy, my rock of a man Grant, my beloved friends Renuka, Carol and Tasha and last but not least, MAX, who definitely did his fair share by wiggling into the exact correct position to get through my pelvis.   Thank you for being there to witness a birth, not only of Max, but a birth of myself. This was the blessing that came out of my willingness to trust and experience my body fully at that time.  Don’t get me wrong, there were moments when I would have taken any kind of relief if it were offered, but I deliberately set up my home birth in such a way so that I wouldn’t have that option unless it was absolutely necessary. There were moments when I didn’t think it was possible that my ginormous baby could come out of my teeny tiny vagina, that he was completely and forever STUCK, and my mind was fahrreaking, and then there was a moment in the tub in the tiny dark bathroom when I had to choose.  I  had a moment when I had to choose what I was going to tell myself and the only choice that I could lean on was: I can do this.  I began to chant it, over and over, over and over and people were all around me were affirming, Yes you can! You can do it, Natalie. You are doing it. But it was MY voice that I was listening to, it was MY voice telling me I CAN DO THIS that held me up. And I did, I experienced what I wanted to experience, the primal humanity of birth, how a bajillion women before me have birthed before modern obstetrics was invented in the last century.  And I tapped into a power I’d never experienced before.  I knew it was there, but now I KNOW it is there, and I feel like the whole world has opened up to me in a new and wondrous way born out of respect for my body, my womanhood and my humanity.

So thank you again to all the lovers and supporters that were in this house with me last November 10th and 11th 2008.  I couldn’t have done it without you.

Love,

Natalie