Wednesday, February 01, 2017

so what have you learnt ?

An article caught my eye today, Huffington Post's "National Children's Day: Why is it important for parents to focus on their own wellbeing"

How do we care for ourselves ? Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by the demands of life, my children, my husband, all the responsibilities of running a home, everyone's social lives, feeding, clothing, co-ordinating, that my needs and my identity are deleted. I allow them to be crushed into a tiny corner by the needs of these three people. Ah the tyranny of the inner voice !
I remember feeling so strongly that the Parenting Course was a bridge too far...
Here we sat, listening to all the fine advice in the world on raising children the right way, but all I felt was EMPTY. I raged against the course's premise, the assumption that every mummy and daddy has all their shit sorted, that they're filled to the brim with good feelings, good intentions, oodles of energy - both emotional and physical, and lots of support. It's someone's dream. It certainly didn't reflect my reality when we did it. I felt locked out of that 'normal': families that had a few struggles, but overall were on top of things, had healthy emotional and psychological lives, where the adults were adults, and the children were children. What I realised - thanks in a large part to therapy - is that THAT idyllic 'normal' was absolute drivel. Nicky and Sila Lee have issues, all the people they interviewed have issues, the people sitting next to me on the course had issues, the leaders of the course had issues. The course didn't deal with those issues, instead it added the enormous burden of 'how you should do the job'. Ha! what a joke.
Teaching parenting is much like raising children - a combination of nature and nurture. Attending that course was a bit like trying to nurture ourselves, to feed the bits that felt wholely unprepared for this role. While what we do when we parent is live out our own experience of being children again, and we do it to our kids. It brings me back to that post I wrote in January 2015 - with the two poems.

We really have to learn how to recognise and affirm the (innate) parenting in ourselves that is entirely nature, and be empowered to nurture ourselves and grow. A parenting course is NOT going to do that.

We need kindness and love, from within and without, to take the next step to being the parents; not the buddies, not the nazis, but the adults in the relationship.

My most recent insight is the essentialness of joint parenting - but that's another blog post.