My Parenting Prayer
My prayer lately is help me. It comes and goes, but it’s about my kids. Especially my older one. He’s got his adult molars now. And he has two loose front teeth. He’s six and a half. It’s astounding to witness a person becoming - how many seasons we’ve lived through and he’s only 6. So many lifetimes within each life, so many relationships within each relationship. I look across the kitchen and he’s reaching the cups in the high cabinet to get me some water. Mind blown.
Recently someone asked me, “What’s it like to have a 6-year-old boy?” with a tone of lamentation in his voice. This person is very kind, it felt like it came from a habit, and that habit is terribly sad to me.
I said “it’s just so beautiful, it’s amazing to have a 6-year-old boy.”
Someone else recently asked me, “Isn’t it amazing to have a kid?”
Yes. Yes it is.
Like any relationship that lasts any significant length of time, it is everything. It is confounding, it is overwhelming, it is annoying, it is terrifying, it is gorgeous, it is excellent.
My prayer has shifted over the years from asking for what the “right thing” is to do for him. Recently, as in the last couple years, I keep having this realization. Oooohhhhhh, it feels like. Oh. This person is becoming a person. They have always been a person but they are becoming a new thing. This year is when Saturn marks time, 7 years it makes a square for the first time - the first passage into understanding oneself as separate - getting one’s adult teeth, building one’s own lifelong structures. Not separate negative, although surely there is heartbreak that comes with it, but separate as in the beginning of recognizing that he is a person and other people, including especially me, his mother, are separate people with their own wills and destinies and choices.
The realization is that he’s not getting out of his childhood without complexity. Without heartbreaks and pains, sorrows, confusions, questions. And even more importantly, I wouldn’t want him to. As strange as it is, for mysterious reasons I don’t know in this earth school, I can’t do his life for him. My codependence has me try, certainly. But when I’m in my office writing to you right now, and the window is open and the plants are with me, oxygenating my memory, I know that at my best I’m here as a loving witness for him.
I don’t wish for god to help me take away his pain. I don’t pray for god to tell me what to do that is right for him. Lately I pray to god to help me. Help me listen, to the deep, quiet information available to us. Help me listen to you god. Help me listen to you in the form of my child. Help me listen to my husband who is also god. Help me listen to you as myself. Help me not jump ahead in the story. Help me stay in this day. Help me respond to what is present today, nothing more. Help me see my own fear, so that my fear is not the one parenting. Help me live the love I feel, in my own body, beaming toward my family’s bodies.
Those are my prayers. Something like that. It’s honestly not usually words. It’s usually just sitting, pausing, closing my eyes, and beaming it. Feeling it for a moment. Not turning away or frantically rushing through the pain. Okay - this one is really wild and often annoying if you’re hearing it from someone else but I do have to try - even bowing in gratitude for the pain. A very wise friend recently told me, “Maybe your devastation is the miracle.” It was about something really painful, and I think of it all the time now. Our pain is the miracle sometimes. Our pain is the awakening. I don’t know if this is true for anyone else. I know this feels true for me. My pain in regards to watching my children become and encounter a heartbreaking world is a miracle. Because it reminds me of my own awakening to the moment. It reminds me I am awake to this life, I am here to experience life on earth - the unedited version - and this pain snaps me awake. This pain helps me feel the love I experience, helps me find the shape of the love. The magnitude of the love. The vast wave of the love, that washes over every single species painting the field of “my life.”
What I mean is, my younger one, she just turned three. Lately she doesn’t want me to leave when I drop her off at school. The last two mornings, she says, “I don’t want you to leave.” I’m squatting, looking at her eye level. I take a breath. I say, “You don’t want me to leave.” Nothing else. Just silence.
Then she says, “I will have fun though.”
“Yes,” I say, “yes, that sounds true to me.”
And that’s it. She’s okay. But only when I am clear that she doesn’t have to be okay. I can’t have a motive when I’m saying, “you don’t want me to leave.” Just stop filling the silence with frantic words to try to make it okay! This is the response to my help me today. These kinds of moments, where the action becomes clear, all I need to do is fully hear her, be with her fully in it, are so rare, I find. More often, as my kids get older, there’s more complexity and uncertainty about what the action is. But one thing I’m getting clearer on is that when there’s a panic energy for me, an urgency, that’s something to resist. That’s my codependence.
Her devastation is the miracle too! Taking that away from her is taking something deep from her.
I hope it’s clear I’m not suggesting passivity when it comes to making moves for my kids when they need different circumstances, etc. I’m just saying the motivation for those actions needs to not be that I imagine I’m going to prevent pain in their lives, or that that would even be advisable.
I wrote all of this because I needed to write it, may it be of use to you! And it’s related to something I’m trying to do in my work with you, which is to make spaces where we can think and feel our way through the maze that parenting can be sometimes, together. One such experiment is my Astrology Retreat for Parents, which is happening Tuesday November 4, 9:30am-11:30am pst. There is a spot for one more parent there - I hope you’ll join us! We’ll see how it goes and perhaps there will be another one.
Many blessings in your parenting and/or your reparenting yourself.