The greatest advantage of not having children must be that
you can go on believing that you are a nice person: once you
have children, you realize how wars start.
- Fay Weldon
I am just emerging from a handful of really challenging weeks as a mother. I reflected on this quote more than once as I wrestled with the harsher aspects of my feelings and experience during this time.
I first came across these words from Fay Weldon a few years ago while reading Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself by the Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano. They struck me at the time (and still do) because her words called out the darkness I felt in my own experience of motherhood.
They humanized my deep longing to know why I was not able to be the buoyant, understanding, compassionate and grounded woman I had thought I would be in motherhood.
Raising our children has been the most transformative, difficult, illuminating, growth inducing, and rewarding experience of my life. It is relentless by design and can be brutally revealing at times.
I’m convinced our kids came into this world with the exact attributes to illuminate the areas most longing for change and recognition within our own being. They also arrived with their own unique way of teaching.
I lived for years as a new mother struggling to get my head above my own emotional waters while in such close proximity and constant relationship to my kids. That was my personal razor’s edge and where my own darkness reared its head.
From all external perspectives, I had it made as a stay at home mom. But inside, I was meeting my own stubbornness and resistance. It was creating a massive struggle and it was strangling my appreciation of this time I had to be with my children.
I wanted something different from”out there”. Whether it was different behaviors from my kids, different opportunities for myself, more time and space alone, or more equal sharing of the household and childcare duties. None of these were inherently wrong, they are all actually healthy goals and wants, in my opinion. But, my problem was that I was putting the solution to my internal unrest on these needs being met by someone or something else.
I believed that until I was rescued by some sort of external shifts, I would be awash in this inner struggle.
When I began studying coaching, my angst within motherhood was a common topic for me to work on in practice sessions. One day last spring I was working with a fellow coach using The Work of Byron Katie to explore the thought “my son should be less aggressive”. I was still in the space of thinking that if he was different I would be free of the rising anger and frustration I felt when he lacked empathy, consideration, and basic safety for himself and others.
When we arrived at the mental exercise in The Work where we begin shifting the words of the original thought to one that feels as true or truer than the original statement, which Katie calls “the turnaround”, I landed on the idea “I should be less aggressive”. The scrutinizing voice of my inner critic immediately exclaimed “that’s absolutely true!” But then the coach questioned my habituated response, responding “but is it really?”
In that moment something clicked, my mind cracked open, and there was the sensation of knowing in my body that this was actually false.
I realized there was a lack of coherence between what I was actually feeling in the moment and what I would allow myself to feel. I could see how the repression of my own feelings had backfired and this was actually perpetuating the fragility and volatility of my own emotional system.
Finding acceptance for my feelings allowed for a sudden change in our relationship to become possible. Until then, we were gridlocked in a repeating pattern.
When I shifted my belief around my own unwanted feelings, a new pathway emerged, leading us out of the cycle.
Repression became channeled expression. My reactions shifted, and amazingly so did his behaviors.
Carl Jung summed it up so eloquently when he wrote:
"If there is anything we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves."
From where I sit today, I can see how our latest dip into the underbelly of parenthood revealed a new dynamic part of myself ripe for re-evaluation and in need of acceptance.
I can see how the uncertainty and vulnerability of starting both a new creative project and another new job had fried my own system and inner stability. This personal wobble reverberated through my family and became expressed in certain ways, including through difficult behaviors in my kids.
It all toppled me and I fell back into that place of blaming external circumstances and believing something needed to change around me so I could feel okay.
I stumbled into the trap of thinking that things are happening to me, rather than that things are happening for me.
I forgot my own agency and responsibility for my own emotions.
I forgot about the true power I hold to inform and influence the world around me when my nervous system and emotional body are tended with care and awareness.
Without fail, as I realized I had fallen prey to my own mistaken beliefs of placing blame and playing the victim, my perspective broadened, my energy shifted, my agency was restored and my family life shifted for the better.
Hallelujah! I’m back in the flow.
