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!!

The truth is, occasionally I feel like a failure.  The truth is, sometimes [...]]]> The truth is,  no matter how bad it gets, I can always look in the faces of my beloved Grant, Lula and Max and see their shiny beauty and love, and be comforted and amazed that they are my family. My cherished ones.

The truth is, occasionally I feel like a failure.  The truth is, sometimes I feel such a well of deep sadness, I simply don’t know where it comes from.  The truth is, sometimes, I don’t want to get out of bed and be a leader.  The truth is, sometimes, I just  want to lay there in fetal position and hide, hide and hide.  But I get up.  I get up and look myself in the eyes and I see myself.  I get up  and face myself and I am kind to myself, even if this kindness feels incredibly unnatural.   And sometimes getting up and facing myself feels like the hardest thing in the world, but I do it for me, for the kid who dreams.  For the dreams I’ve already achieved, for the dreams I have yet to achieve.  I do it for my children, so that they may one day face themselves even when it feels impossible.  This is courage.  This is compassion.  This may not appear to be some huge daring feat of bravery, but bravery it is nonetheless.  I forget this sometimes.

My mind of late has been on this topic of MEN more specifically Straight Men.   They sure are interesting creatures. And in many ways, I do have compassion for all the roles that they [...]]]> I wrote this a coupla months ago and for some reason didn’t post it…it’s a good time right now i guess.

My mind of late has been on this topic of MEN more specifically Straight Men.   They sure are interesting creatures. And in many ways, I do have compassion for all the roles that they are shoved into being.  Us women, sure we got roles up the wazzoo but straight men don’t seem to have as much progress as women do in terms of breaking their own gender stereotypes, for obvious reasons. But just because their stereotypes are positioned on top, (pun intended)  those stereotypes still stifle the freedom of these funny creatures with organs hanging from their crotches.  In this way, I kinda feel sorry for them.  Especially the ones who completely and absolutely reject the idea that there could be parts of themselves that don’t match with the stereotypes.  Especially the ones who don’t even realize they are simply taking in and putting out the same old boring set menu of manhood.

Personally I love the straight man who can talk feelings.  Who isn’t afraid to discuss real human issues, who bring them up on their own initiative (gasp, is it possible!?…yes! Yes, it is!!) and who are willing to be vulnerable as a result.  This is true strength in men.  Yes, I love a man who can cry, because this is a man who allows himself to feel and express; this is what genuinely makes a man a MAN in my eyes.  Any other time, I just see a scared little boy who runs away from his powerful feelings.

But let’s face it, although the tide is turning, many straight men still won’t allow themselves to cry, to feel their deepest emotions and to be soft and mushy.  It’s an old pervasive paradigm of seeing suppressing emotions as being ‘tough’ or ‘manly’.  Women do this too, in order to play in the old men’s clubs, we all know this too.

Being a Mom, I see where it starts, in unexamined beliefs of parents, in the behaviours that are generally seen as acceptable and unacceptable in boys and girls, it seeps out of the mouths of women and men alike who make excuses for the behaviours that perpetuate the stereotypes that boys and girls have to deal with.  Oh, girls have better verbal skills, boys are slower in that department blah blah blah. I’ve had mothers literally laugh in my face when I ask them if their boys talk about their feelings. BOYS DON’T TALK ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS!!  They will if you teach them how, you stupid cow.  Get over it people, these are dumb ass ideas that stuck but they’re just ideas, NOT the truth.  Oh, but it’s been proven by these studies done a million years ago.  Actually have you done any reading in the last decade or two about brain plasticity and about how synapses are created and grown by repitition and how easily this occurs if you just put a little effort into it?  But no, I generally see very little effort in teaching boys to talk.  We expect SO much from our girls, and yet boys just slide through not having to speak up, being excused from talking about their feelings.  And let me tell you what I see.  These boys feel STUPID.  These boys are treated as less able than our girls to verbalize what is going on with them and so, instead of taking the time to teach boys a vocabulary of emotions and giving them the sweet time to work it out, hand are thrown up and declarations are made,  Boys will be boys!  And they are dismissed.  But these boys who are dismissed, though they may feel initially triumphant and powerful in not having to reveal themselves, will eventually feel inadequate, and stupid because it’s a skill they aren’t practicing, and DAMN they are way behind those girls.  IT’s JUST PRACTICE, girls are trained and encouraged by society to practice far more than boys.  And can you think consequentially, that these boys who feel stupid may one day grow up to be mysogonists?  Hmmm…

Let me also tell you, that although this is still the norm, there ARE parents who are breaking the stereotypes for their boys.  I have witnessed some amazing parents in action out there,  who serve to inspire me;  I see parents who actually insist that their boys talk, give their boys enough time and a safe environment, who teach their boys HOW to talk.  And guess what??!!  Their boys DON’T SHUT UP.  These families have such a high degree of intimacy and closeness with their boys and it’s SUCH a breath of fresh air.  Seriously please, please examine what you are modelling for your boys, people, and what kind of models your boys are surrounded by.   We have a golden opportunity in raising our sons as young men who don’t feel the need to hide anything or to prove anything, who are confident about talking about what they are interested in and how they are feeling.  Who question all the channels they are generally shoved through.  Like sports.  Notice how straight men use sports to connect to one another?  It’s like they have no other safe language.

Thankfully I know a good handful of pretty evolved straight men now who could care less about watching team sports; Grant’s one of them and  i praise Allah every day for this gift.   I love hearing the stories my husband tells me when he tells other men this little fact about himself and the responses are so very interesting;  there are cajoling peer pressures:  But it’s the PLAYOFFS, subtle accusations of being gay, sheer disbelief, or men who try to convince him that he must be mistaken, and then give him a blow by blow descriptions of plays that they think will ignite his dormant passion for watching sports on the tube.  Grant’s final silencing response is: I DON’T CARE.  It horrifies them into silence and they back away like he’s grown a second head.  It’s like a betrayal.  The delicious icing on this cake is that he’s in a supadashi macho industry; renovations and construction contracting.  Uhhh hammers and drills and you like to talk about your feelings???? I just imagine the looks on all these men’s faces and I wish I were a fly on the wall.  And Grant is the sexiest man I know.  Because he’s powerful and he’s a gentle man.  He’s sensitive and he can speak his mind. He cares about himself, our family and he knows; he really SEES and acknowledges the work that I do in raising our kids when he’s working away from home.   He gives so much love in this way and he allows me to shower him with the same love back.  All by accident you ask?  Hell no.  Lots of hard work digging into his own personal beliefs and history.  When I met him he was the typical Anglo WALL.  Shut down.  And he certainly does go back into those patterns from time to time, let’s face it, he’s no perfect human, but  he’s WILLING to learn…as a grown ass man, how to BE a man.  Now that takes balls.  Most men don’t take that route.  Too scary to look inside.  Too fucking scary to face themselves.  Too scary, keep yer mouth shut, simmer in the resentment and then when they go senile and are about to die alone, all they can shout is : Goddammit!  GODDAMMIT!!!!   Is that why so many old men are so pissy???  mere conjecture, mere conjecture…

I know I’ve got to school myself more in how to raise Max.  I don’t know, sometimes I wonder what will be more challenging: raising a boy or a girl.  Everyone I speak with almost always unanimously agree that it’s girls who are harder to raise, but I don’t know about this.  I don’t know…

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