Parenting From the Ground Up

“It is being caged with this out of control child that shows you truly how lacking in inner resilience, grounding, and control you are.” — Dr. Shefali Tsabary

I used to be an adult. Seriously. There was a time in my life that I really believed I had it all together. I had a great career. I worked with kids, and had (almost) infinite patience with them. I owned a home, I was completely independent and autonomous, I had enough money for everything I needed and a fair bit of what I wanted, I had great friends and meaningful relationships. I travelled the world for months at a time, on my own. I was successful, competent, resilient, and grounded. Or so I thought.

Then I had children.

As a psychologist, a child and adolescent psychologist to boot, I have to admit, I thought parenting would be pretty easy. I had TONS of patience with kids, I rarely raised my voice, I was empathic and could get where they were coming from but still give them the feedback they needed. I believed I was pretty good a guiding kids. So I should be a pretty good parent, right?

Then, as Dr. Shefali so aptly states, I found myself “caged” with children who were (and still are) often “out of control.” These little beings don’t wait for me to be at my best before they lose it, and in fact, they often seem to choose the exact time that I reach my worst point, that point where I have nothing left, where I’m hanging on by a thread or preoccupied by something stressful, and it is exactly THEN that they choose to lose it. It’s like a sixth sense that they have.

And what it has shown me is exactly what Dr. Shefali points out, that in all reality, I am truly lacking in inner resilience, grounding and control. Wow. That was a revelation.

It’s not all bad, of course. Having kids has allowed me to let go of some of my inhibitions. I can meet them at their level and be silly and goofy. I no longer cringe at the idea of singing at the top of my lungs when others might be listening and care little about what others think as I dance or play with my kids in public. I have fun doing things I never would have done before having kids. We giggle over silly things and still get into tickle wars. Finding my “inner child” so to speak has had its benefits.

The thing is, sometimes I also meet them at their level when they aren’t at their best, shall we say. They start melting down, yelling, fighting, etc. and what do I do? I hold on as long as I can, and then sometimes meet them right where they are and it’s a yelling, melting down mess. How does this happen to such a well-put-together person?

Simple. The context has completely changed. When I was that person I sometimes long to be again, I was largely in charge of myself and my life. There weren’t too many variables that I couldn’t change or remove from my life as I saw fit. I had a sense of control over my life. Enter the children and that control completely disappears. I am no longer in charge of my life, there are now hundreds of variables I can no longer change or remove from my life as I see fit. And these wonderful little beings I’ve chosen to bring into my world have come not for the purpose of bringing me joy and making me feel good about myself. No. They’ve come into this world to be themselves and live out their own life’s purposes, and test me in the process. I may be their guide on this journey, but make no mistake, I’m not in control of it, they’re not on my journey, they’re on their own. I find rather often that our journeys are not always aligned, and one of us is often attempting to change or disrupt or derail another’s path.

Furthermore, these little beings have come into my life not for the purpose of learning from me, but for the purpose of teaching me. I definitely didn’t realize that when I had kids. Yet, they truly have become my best teachers. They somehow manage to confront and trigger every deep-rooted issue that I thought I resolved through years of evolution but clearly didn’t. They’ve come here to show me that all that control I thought I had was an illusion, and that the work I did within that controlled environment, while helpful and meaningful, did not necessarily heal the “inner child” within. So now that inner child sometimes runs rampant and decides to go tete-a-tete with the chronological children in the home.

After a few years of wondering what the heck was wrong with me and searching for some way to “fix” the “problem” of the “out of control” kids, and/or the incompetent mom, I realized something. They aren’t the problem, and neither am I. It’s simply time for me to grow up—to truly grow up and become a real adult. Not just an adult within the environment of my creation, the one I control, but also an adult within the real world—the one I don’t control, the one that is not of my creation, and the one that is ever-changing. I now need to be an adult and quite simply, raise my own child within.

So now I have three children—my two chronological children and the one that lives inside me. If you then count my spouse and my dog perhaps I have five, but I digress. The only ones I’m responsible for raising are the first three. I can’t do it alone, obviously, or I would have done so before I had my children. I therefore need to remember to let my kids in on the process, to let them teach me. They are truly gifted at showing me the areas in which I need to grow and evolve, and I need to let them show me. Then I can set about the process of growing up, healing what hasn’t yet been healed, and becoming the adult I thought I was and the parent I want to be—or maybe even a better version of her.