Oh captain! My crap-tain!
My first born Penelope Jane turned 8 today! This little spark that launched me into the wholly unfathomable, most desired, clearest (and muddiest and most challenging) role of my life: Mother dearest. I mean mother!
Early in her life, I might have said something like “she’s taught me so much”. But the title teacher is a heavy medal to pin on her delicate new wings. And it's not true. While she’s certainly wise, motherhood is the teacher. And life of course. We are both students.
I didn't know mothers were also students until I became one. This knowing has helped me unpin heavy medals from my own mother's wings. Parents are so pure in the love for their children, but humanness always muddles the light.
Another revelation to me, one I had in my later 20s, is that no one is guaranteed to become a “grown-up”. We will all get older — no matter what — until we die. But to grow up? That takes deliberate work. If we don’t continuously work to heal our (little and big T) traumas, unwind unhelpful narratives, listen and learn, make repairs, remain curious, take ownership and accept accountability… well you could turn 50 and still be a petulant preteen.
As a mother working to grow-up, I apologize more than I expected to. As in I didn’t know you could apologize for messing up as a parent. I’m also noticing that parenting is less about instruction or discipline …or making play-doh, and almost exclusively about regulating my own emotions and responses. They are watching — not listening. How I live is what they hear. What they learn.
Simultaneously “growing myself up” while encouraging and guiding my children on their individual journeys can feel like I’m a ship captain on an impossible mission. I need to cross an endless ocean with two passengers. BUT they’re the only two people in the world. And ship is not finished! And we don’t really know where we’re going! We’re out here chugging through deep dark water, no land in sight while I’m building, making repairs, and constantly being handed new navigation. No place to dock, get the ship on the lifts, or start over.
There are days, okay fine… moments…I get it right. I respond instead of react. Remain calm in a crisis. Where I don’t yell us all the way out the @%&# door 20 minutes late. Days when I kiss their foreheads after they’ve fallen asleep and I feel like I lived my values and honored their spirits.
And the days I don’t feel as proud? I remind myself to live what I tell them — that they’re doing it exactly how they know how in this moment. They’re who and where they’re meant to be. We each have our own life syllabus — personalized lessons to learn in order to show up the way we want to in this world. Everyone careens off-course, acts in ways they’re not proud of, causes damage. The best we can do is notice, absorb the lesson, make repairs as needed — then forgive ourselves and keep going on.
We’ve got a ship to sail!