We parents can get very caught up in trying to be perfect. We don’t even know we are trying to be perfect; we just feel bad all the time, and when we retrace our steps the trail is littered with moments of perceived mistakes. This is especially true if our kids are suffering.
We feel bad about frozen pizza for dinner, too much screen time, not giving our kids the right number of chores per day, praising our child for the wrong things, providing too many extracurricular activities or not enough extracurricular activities, feeling overwhelmed, not modeling happiness, and failing at self-care. It’s endless – and those are just the everyday (real or perceived) mistakes that chip away at our sense of feeling ok. What about when we get a divorce or we have a bout of major depression, or someone loses their job?
We can be SO SO hard on ourselves because we love our child more than anything in the world. The stakes are high! Taking care of our children is the most important job we will ever have, so we really don’t want to #uck it up. There is no clear and consistent feedback from our kids. If we do a good job at work, we get the grant, or the promotion, or simply accolades from the boss; but as a parent, there is no clear signal that we are in the target zone, and that makes us a touch anxious.
Although I would not have been aware of this at the time, when Lucca was little, I tried to shear off certain parts of myself. I didn’t want to be so imperfect. I was ok with a little imperfection, but there were old beliefs about myself that I was doing my best to hide, like trying to hold down beach balls in a pool. It was exhausting. Today, I feel only compassion for the young(ish) mother I once was, armed with all the child development information in the world, but unable to see out from under the exhaustion and give myself grace.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
Your humanity is not a liability. Your humanity—i.e. your imperfections—is the seedbed of connection. You can’t be connected without your imperfections. In fact, you won’t be able to give and receive love without all those pesky and relentless imperfections. (And here’s the deeper truth: Who you are is whole and perfect! It’s only our minds that tell us otherwise.) The parts of ourselves we’ve rejected – those relentless beach balls – are here to be integrated into the complete package. Your goal is not to become less human, but more. I help you to feel deep down in your bones that you are enough. In embracing your own wholeness, you and your child will be free to move from self-rejecting to self-loving.
If you are struggling in your parenting journey, please reach out to me for a free twenty-minute consultation and feel free to pass this on to any parents you know that could use some support. Let’s see if working together can help you reset.
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