Fear can lead to nothing good.

I am afraid of love. I am not just afraid to be loved, which, after 13 years with my husband is evident in my fear of expressing my love to him. 

He and Irina spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Michigan with his extended family and he remarked upon the reaction that she had to her super loving Aunt Sue. It is the first grandma type that she has been around who is not emotionally guarded. Not only are her grandmas emotionally guarded, so is her mother. 

Kevin described how long it took him to get used to my emotional distance. He who comes from a family where his mother still wants to chat with me about the current events and I feel like every time I talk to her is the first time.
I am afraid to love. Why?  I am afraid that if anyone gets to know me, they will be truly disappointed.  Because my standards for my self are so high, not so for everyone else, just for me.  to me, I am ugly, fat, unaccomplished and a big loser.  

Now I know that that is the image that I will pass along to my daughters.  I certainly don't want them to feel that way.  

It is about time I empowered myself.  That I show love for my amazing husband for my beautiful daughters and for my family in-laws and blood relatives.  If I do not, it will be too late for all of us and my impossibly high standards will cripple us all.

THE SLAP

I haven't done it yet.
A friend of mine confessed to me that she has spanked her children a few times. She has parenting skills that I respect a lot. She is accomplished and has very well behaved children. She is also a stay at home mom, so it kind of goes with the territory. I can see how it would get to the point every so often of so much frustration that it manifests physically.
Irina was throwing one of her notorious tantrums after school and I embarrassingly looked at my babysitter who has an eight year old and asked if her daughter eventually got over that stuff to become a poised young woman. She assured me that it never happened because once, when her daughter was two she gave her THE SLAP and she never misbehaved again.
Another friend who has wonderful grown children said she attributes their great behavior to THE SLAP and recalled for me the incident with each of her three children. I remember THE SLAP for each of us children, but we were fairly old and I think we talked back. I hate to think that it is so simple as THE SLAP. I also hate to think of the day that I am so frustrated that the only solution that I can come up with is THE SLAP.
Here is a story told to me by one of the parents that I worked with.
One of the memorable stories from teaching parenting skills to inner city parents came from a Dominican dad who told the story of his conflict with child welfare services. He came from a family who, although they didn't beat their children, they did use spanking when necessary. His son was attending school in New York and had gone through the awareness raising seminars that Child Welfare conducts in the schools. His son had told him that if he ever raised a hand against him that he would land in jail. His son proceeded to cut school, engage in illicit activities and fully compromise his dad who was forced to bail him out in school repeatedly and feel that there was no way to really discipline his child.

Things had gotten way out of hand and the father's hands were tied, his son was out of control and he felt there was no more talking that would change the way things were going. They planned a trip to the Dominican Republic together for spring break and the moment they landed on Dominican soil, the father lashed out at the boy and gave him a 'spanking he would never forget'.

Am I the Only Bad Mom in the Room?

When is the last time someone was describing a root canal and it's excruciating pain to you, when they stopped in mid-sentence and said, "oh, but it's so great'!?
That is what it is like to try to have a candid conversation with a mom. They start talking about tantrums or bossiness that is driving them to exhaustion and then they stop and say "Oh, but it is so great"! Just when we are getting to a point of really sharing about the challenges of child rearing, they derail it with a comment like that. It is as if they aren't allowed to have other feelings about motherhood than the eternal bliss that goes hand in hand with three year olds' tantrums.
Give me a break, it is challenging, yes it is rewarding, but how are you ever going to get through all of this if you are in denial? Okay, when you push them through the birth canal, you are making a lifelong commitment to love them, but still...you bring your own stuff to the equation. It's okay to occasionally be irritated or disappointed. It's as if somehow saying that it is challenging, you are negating the child.
I attribute it to the thinking mom, attachment parenting model, where we are trying to undo our parent's damage. Somehow you are supposed to be supermom who overrides all of these mixed feelings about parenting. To be fair, upon reflection, they are really great, but that is something to tell them, not another parent who is struggling with parenting and wants to have a heart to heart. whatever happened to the village that was going to help me raise my child, did they all somehow move into the exurbs and leave me alone to parent with all of its' challenges?

The Moment of Truth

Eckhart Tolle tells of his moment of enlightenment.  He was depressed and he wanted to kill himself.  He had the thought, I just can't live with myself anymore.  That was when he realized that the "I" and "myself" were two different people.  That is when he began his journey of "I".  Understanding that he was indeed an observer and the observed.  

When we were going through the bedtime routine tonight and there was much stalling around the brushing of teeth after I finally got the baby to sleep, my daughter said to me, "Mommy, why are you not happy"?  

I stopped in my tracks.  Was this an existential quiz?  Would I be required to answer candidly?  This moment was suspended in silence as I struggled to answer my lifelong question for a three year old.  Where should I start? With my own loss of innocence? With all of the troubles that have befallen us of late?  With the impending downsize and possible bankruptcy of a company that I have worked for for 10 years in a shrinking industry? With my desire for a better standard of living?  

Then I realized, that she was just echoing what I had said in frustration of the attempted 'cry-it-put with the baby that ended in failure, or the fact that every time I  asked her to do something she talked back to me, saying "No, I don't want to".  That I had just expressed frustration that once again bedtime had dragged out to an hour long process that wasn't because we were having fun, but it was just me nagging her and I said, "I am not happy"..

I had my Eckhart Tolle moment.  I realized that I am not happy because of my lack of boundaries or limitations.  I realized that in every aspect of my life, I allow the others around me to walk all over me and  THAT is the root of my unhappiness.  She is the simple illustration of that very deep discovery.  I don't have strong boundaries about bedtime, just desires, and she walks all over me.  That is what makes me unhappy.  

Spiritual Parenting

Originally all of these posts were supposed to take the path of spiritual parenting.  The thread is still there somewhere.  In spite of all the tongue in cheek complaining that I do, I haven't lost the mission that I set forth with.  

The definition of spiritual progress always includes the process of waking up.  Waking up is not the most glamorous stage in the process. I have never witnessed anyone at their best when they are waking up.  It is the moment when you are practicing on your mat or cushion or during a temper tantrum that you realize that you have built your reality around a lot of false ideas.  It is that moment during a day long meditation that you follow anger or jealousy for several hours and then feel that jolt when you realize that you just spent half of your practice wallowing in self pity. Those are the moments when you have the true chance of clarity.  That is when the real work begins.  

With children sometimes, you just want to stay in that mind-numbing place where all of your false ideas are not necessarily comforting or useful, but they keep you from feeling the raw feelings that have been pushed down your whole life.  

Parenting as a spiritual practice is allowing those ugly moments of waking up to be what transforms your future behavior.  Rudi used to say that you have to get to a point in your life when you are so disgusted with who you have been up to that point that you have to truly embrace that and move through and beyond it.  It is those aspects of your life that force you awake and prevent sleep, that will make a true spiritual transformation take place in your life.

Children have an amazing talent for forcing you to look yourself in the eye and either closing your eyes in despair or meeting those eyes and challenging transformation. 

Old dudes, young mothers

A few months ago, I had this epiphany about relationships, especially October May relationships.

 A friend of mine told me that her prenatal teacher trainer said that some of the best pre-natal yoga teachers are not mothers.

I believe it.  There is this certain mystique around being pregnant and all of the hope that we put into our baby to be.  This time should be sacred and unmarred by the actual reality of raising children.  

Thus the October May marriages.  It makes sense that men stay caught up in the mystique far longer than mothers.  They don't suffer the same kind of hormonal havoc on the body, the loss of all privacy and sleep.  

Men experience the birth of their first, second, tenth child with the same kind of reverence each time.  

The woman changes.  The woman harbors all of these mixed feelings, loss of self, of lost time, of image.  The man just biologically stresses out to provide for each one.  When the two split up, he is somewhat shocked, as he did his best to provide and his wife just seemed to get angry and distant.  When he looks to re-marry, he wants that mystique again and what better place to find it than in a young woman free of motherhood, of body scarring, and of exhaustion. 

 It makes perfect sense to me.  Better that the new mother has never experienced the bitter fruit of raising a child.  Marriage is hard work, it is even harder with the dynamic of children.  Better luck second time around. 

Obamanos

I remember when I was working in East Harlem and broke up a fight between kids that were using racial slurs against each other.  When I said to Travis, "it would be like you calling me some nasty word that had to do with being white".  He looked at me very seriously and said, "you ain't white, are you"?   I was flabbergasted.  "What do you mean Travis"?  "Well, white people wouldn't be as nice as you or spend so much time doing things to help us".  Someone had taught him that white was a blanket attitude towards others and I didn't fit the description. At the time, I thought this was both horrifying and vindicating.

This election is one of those events that everyone has to write about.  I wish that my grandmother was alive to see this.  Partly because she hated Dubya so much but partly because she told amazing stories about the racism that she experienced in her life.  She was living in Memphis when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.  The stories she tells are amazing about how she and my mother's black nanny hid in the back of a liquor store during the riots, both too afraid to go home.  I wish my grandfather could see it too, just so I could watch him squirm over having a black man as his president. 

I cried on election night, I cried during Obama's acceptance speech.  I actually cried when he was elected Senator, because he was so eloquent.  As he was speaking, I said, "he gave us our flag back".  The three days following the election, I worked in Harlem.  I noticed that every black man in Harlem was walking straight with their shoulders back and chests open.  A myth had been dispelled.  I know it is not so simple as that, but for some time let us bask in Americans polarizing and shedding Travis' myth about people's attitudes based on skin color.

Finally, I wasn't a white girl walking into these schools having to prove myself, but rather, an ally.  I had nothing to prove, I had cast my vote in faith of an intelligent thinking man as our president.  People looked me in the eye straight away.  I wish that I had been in every elementary school the day after the election to hear the principals addressing their children with incredible inspiration.

Many of the mothers that I talked to this week said "Now I can tell my children that truly they can aspire to be anything".  

I feel like I can tell my children the same thing, that it is a good thing right now to be a part of a majority of voters and that it is okay to be an American. I know that the road ahead will be a difficult one, but I feel like making sacrifices when there is hope for change. 

The New Bed

We finally outgrew the bottle.  The three year old that is. The baby gave it up at sixth months,  I don't think the parents will ever give it up.  Diapers are another issue.  All in due time I suppose.

Today we just put together a toddler bed for the older one.  She is beside herself. I struggled with buying it for a month.  Children's furniture, like appliances have the caveat that the smaller the space they occupy, the more expensive they are.   Some things  provide a kind of peace of mind that is without monetary value.  The powerful baby monitor that allows us to go upon the roof is priceless. The princess sippy cup that replaced the bottle, priceless. Now, the toddler bed. 

The toddler bed has created a face-cracking smile on Iri's face that will allow us to move past one more baby related stage and into big-girl hood.  

As we finished reading "The Big Sister" and I kissed Iri good-night, she said, did you buy this bed for me?  Not for Roxy?  Yes, it is just for you, my very own happy little, funny little girl.  She cracked her smile even grander and asked me to turn out the light so that she could go to sleep.

Humbling Readings

My husband and I still can't seem to come to an agreement on discipline.  I read a very disturbing article however that was all about tantrums.  

Basically it linked the uptight parent and their hurried agenda to the biggest cause of tantrums.  Natch. That's me.  I know that.  Usually, it's me who is being uptight.  I have all of these goals like getting the kids into bed by 8 or getting them off to school by 8, and mostly I just get uptight when the clock is ticking and we have more and more time outs.

The articles said something like, get a hold of your emotions before you start handling your children.  I just don't know how to stop.  No one is standing there judging me about what time my children go to bed or get to school, just me.  Well, the guard at school gives us a hard time for bringing the kids late, but my take on this is that they get more than my post-tax salary for taking care of my children so I don't really care what they think. 

 It's all of my self-imposed limitations that make me uptight about school and bedtime.  I know all about finding your limitations and superceding them from yoga practice.  I just can't seem to apply it to parenting.

This afternoon my husband and I were fighting and Iri had us both put out our hands so that she could draw smiley faces on them.  We weren't wearing smiley faces, so she tried to draw them on us.  We were so busy fighting that her small gesture was lost on us.  We've been fighting about everything under the sun.  What a surprise that she had several meltdowns throughout the day.  Wouldn't it be brilliant when we are having a disagreement if we could just put our arms around each other and say, here, let me draw a smiley face on you and it would all be better.  Maybe change does come in small gestures.

Responsibility

I just left my husband upstairs with our three year old.  She was trying to bargain her way out of bedtime and it was his turn to read books.  He fell asleep and I just left them upstairs together. I shut the door and walked out.  I suppose she could wreak havoc on the bedroom and mess it up a bit, but honestly, with two young children around, the bedroom is a complete disaster anyway.  What else might go wrong?  She might draw all over him with the markers or stay up another hour or two, but what do I care, I am downstairs, alone, writing and blissfully uninvolved.  

We keep talking about how we need to be on the same page with discipline, but, sometimes you just have to throw in the towel.  

What better lesson to teach than wearing yourself out and then putting yourself to bed.  Usually our bargaining chip every night is that if she behaves and stops whining an goes to sleep, mommy will come in the room for a while.  I am angling for something else.  If you misbehave long enough, I will shut you in the room with daddy and he will fall asleep and you can learn self-control enough to get bored and put yourself to bed. 

Tonight it is working brilliantly.

The only catch? I just locked myself out of the house in the cold!

Amendment.  Don't let sleeping dogs lie.  They wake up incoherent, come downstairs looking for a pen cap or some other nutty thing and don't have enough wits about them to just brush teeth and go to bed.  An hour long, over-tired screaming, whining fest ensues, little sister is awoken and one hour later all of our nerves are shot.