Journey to a New Life

If I look at all the knowledge and information published on the internet, books, magazines, tv – there is so much information out there; that if you’d bring all this information together and study it as a subject, it would be just as massive, complex, and full of conflicting schools of thought as any other big subject out there, say Politics and Economics.

With any topic in these disciplines, for every ‘right’ someone states, another will claim it is ‘wrong’.

Me, being the reading type – I read a lot and am aware of a lot of the information existent with regards to many parenting topics. This makes me awfully aware of all the ‘right’ and ‘wrongs’ – and how everything which is a ‘right’ in some circles, turns out to be a ‘wrong’ in other circles.

When I was in school and a student, I wanted to do ‘right’ and ‘be a good student’, as a way to please everyone around me. At least, that was easy – simply copy/paste information from books into your brain, when time comes cut and paste on test. Making friends and being liked? Look at what the popular kids are doing, copy/paste – done deal. The expectations from my environment were clear-cut and so easy to determine what my course of action should be, to meet those expectations.

Within parenting, I saw and am still seeing this exact same dynamic play out. I am still looking to please everyone around me, I’m still wanting to do ‘the right’ and be a ‘good mother’. With parenting, this gets tricky, because there are many different types of schools, as schools of thought. What’s the right answer for one, is the wrong in another. Within my head, this then makes a ‘good mother’ to one, and a ‘bad mother’ to another. With this, I often come to a point of being really conflicted inside myself and how and what I do with my son, because I each time I do something, I trace it to ‘all the information I have read’, remember all the different views and opinions – and in the end I could be both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Then I wonder, shit, what’s other people going to think of me? Should I have done the other thing? But maybe that one is wrong too??

When I hold on to all this information in my head, I quickly accumulate a breakdown. Because whatever I do, whatever move I make, whatever direction I take with my child – it’s always going to be wrong in someone’s eyes. I simply can’t make everyone happy.

So then I move myself to let go of all the knowledge and information, and respond moment by moment. But then here, I notice, I am still in tension, because even though I am now listening to myself, I’d still reaaaaallyy would like to find out, as soon as possible, if what I did was indeed a proper move. Was it conductive to his personal growth and development? Which is not something I can just find out, right after the deed is done. Children grow up very slow – where animals tend to take months rather than years; children take a long time to grow and develop. The effects of a decision you’ve made and follow through on, may only much later surface to provide you feedback.

I noticed that I don’t like this; that I very much would like to know, or have someone tell me that ‘everything’s okay’ and that ‘I’m doing a good job’. Only time will tell.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire to be a ‘good mother’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire to know what a ‘good mother’ looks like, and what she does, so I can closely follow those guidelines to feel safe inside myself that I am doing good and doing the right thing

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear ‘doing wrong’ and someone telling me that I am ‘doing the wrong thing’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire to be right, regardless of the nature of the content of what it is I have to do, to ‘be right’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have trained myself to follow guidelines to the T so I can be ‘right’ and a ‘good girl’ – without ever really investigating or critically going over the guidelines I am following as the content I am absorbing and implementing, what their implications and consequences are – where I did not care/bother about any of that, as long as I would be able to get my stamp of approval that I am “right” and “being a good girl”

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to only ever follow instructions and do what other people tell me to do so I can receive a stamp of approval and within that experience myself as “safe” inside myself, where I can now ‘relax’ – knowing that I am standing in everyone’s good graces and that no-one will be mad at me

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be in constant anxiety in relation to parenting and taking care of another life as myself, because no-one can give me definitive stamp of approval, because nowhere in this world have we ever really investigated what it means to bring up a child in this world in a way that is best for all, we’ve all just been following instructions as the structure of the system established, follow those guidelines no matter what, never question if our actions produce results which are best for all life

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to live in anticipation of someone calling me out and telling me I am doing it all wrong, within having made the conscious decision to not follow mainstream parenting – where I fear I made a mistake by ‘stepping out of the box’ and that any moment someone’s going to call me out and be mad at me for the decision I made

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be uncomfortable within exploring and walking unchartered territory for myself, believing I MUST have a proper, clear cut plan, worked out to the T that I can follow to ensure NO mistakes can happen

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to judge myself for not having a plan

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that I am irresponsible within not having a plan

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear the day that I will have to answer to ‘the world’ about the decisions I have made

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have separated the world from myself, where I have to be okay and accountable to myself – always

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to step out of doing right/wrong – as its not about doing the right or wrong as an external label outside of myself, but about checking in with myself, seeing who I am in the moment, and moving myself to always direct/move from a starting point as self and not as mind/energy

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to judge myself tor the friction and tension I face inside myself within my parenting journey

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise I have never in my life been in a position to make major decisions about myself and my life, where I merely ever did with others told me to do without question

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that I never developed personal self-responsibility inside and as myself as I only ever followed instructions given out by others as to how things are done and simply having to follow what is laid out to me

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to long for the experience of security I experienced back when I did not have to make any major decisions for myself or for another

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that my experience of security was not so much an experience of security but an accepted and allowed experience of ignorance is bliss

I commit myself to unconditionally walk and explore my parenting journey

I commit myself to when and as I find myself going into fear of doing the right or wrong thing, to take a deep breath and step back within myself. Instead of associating information with right/wrong labels, I look at my actions, who I am within them, what consequences/outflows they could create and asses myself and my direction based on that

I commit myself to when and as I judge myself for experiencing conflict and friction within my parenting, to remind myself that I have never been in such a position before, that I have never really walked anything for myself, that I have never really created anything for and as myself – and that within learning and walking something new, there’s going to be friction and conflict within the process of letting go of the old and inviting and creating the new

I watched two of the little mermaid movies recently with Cesar, and watching it again for the first time in a very looong time opened up a cool dimension for myself.

Watching it and being a parent - well, watching it and being both someone's child and a parent to a child -- I was paying particular attention to the relationship between the little mermaid and her father while watching.

It was mostly the third movie, which was actually made after the first one but tells the story of the little mermaid when she was even more little that gave me some food for thought.

In this movie they show how Ariel's mother died, and how this broke her father, Triton, his heart. Her parents had a "special connection" which revolved around music and after the mother dies Triton bans all music: no one is allowed to make music or even sing. Then the movie fastforwards to ten years later, where Ariel and her sisters are older. Ariel is an expressive girl but the Kingdom is ruled my monotone routines where any form of fun, laughter or enjoyment set her father off in a fit of rage -- telling her to 'behave'. Stuff happends, and Ariel finds out about some underground music/dancing club and then before your know it so does Triton.

He of course blows up and gets freaking angry -- at which point the little mermaid basically has got "enough" of it and tells him 'what's what'.

I was going "Wow, she's brave!"

And then in the movie something happens.

He gets it.

And he changes his behaviour.

Cause while I was watching the movie and the ten years went by, I was think "Woah, ten years went by and nothing changed? No-one went up to him and questioned what he is doing? And now they are still living the same shitty life?"

And then it dawned to me:

"Shit, I did the exact same thing".

Growing up, my dad had a lot of anger issues and as a result I molded myself to be small and invisible to prevent any type of triggers going off to which my dad could blow. It is quite fascinating, because even the face of Ariel's father and how his face looks when he gets angry is quite similar to that of my own father.

And I did the same as in the movie. I did not once question his anger. I accepted and allowed it. I saw it as 'his right' to be angry and to not be questioned for it.

So instead of 10 years, I lived under the same monotone and miserable conditions for 18 years -- assuming that questioning my dad, or making it a point of telling him that this is not cool would result in my total oblitiration. While all the while, someone questioning him and telling him 'what's what' could have been exactly THE THING that would have snapped him out of it, so we could ALL move on and have some fun in life.

So that one decision, as the acceptance and allowance of anger within another, and so within me = determined my whole life.

Because, what is anger?
Fascinatingly enough, around the same time as watching the movie I went through my own little bout of anger and so had a nice opportunity to really look at what it is all about.

So anger -- when I looked at it, being in it -- I saw that the anger and the intensity of my anger was actually a measurement/reflection to the extent that I wasted potential, that I did not take responsibility for something or things that are in my response ability.
And more I do not actively take responsibility for things in my life, the angrier I get.
Then, anger gets used as a safety net. Everyone knows what the presence of anger feels like and how it is sooo very tempting to not 'step into' that net and set it off. And that's exactly what angry people are counting on. They count on you being afraid of this energy they are resonating, so that you would not question them and their actions, so that they can continue not changing, so that they can continue abdicating responsibility.

So while anger is this big WOOOOOOOAAAHHHH energy -- behind it hides a small person who's too afraid to take responsibility and take the steps they need to take to sort out the things in their life that are causing the anger. Meaning -- there's things playing out in their life which are undesirable, BUT which they have the power to change. Anger comes in, when that power is not being used but left to waste and then just goes towards powering their anger.

So what I have been pushing myself to do when I come into contact with someone who is in a state of anger, is to not focus on the energy of anger which is intimidating (and is what I have feared all my life), but to look at what it represents and the underlying point causing it. And what I've realised is that I cannot direct an angry person by focusing and directign the anger, as the anger is not really the point. The point is the responsibility which was abdicated. And if I can put my finger on it and show the person exactly what they abdicated and how -- then the anger simply disappears.

And man, have I really been wondering what my life could have looked like if I had realised this one simple thing.... Aaah the regret

During my pregnancy, I tried to prepare myself the best as I could by reading up as much as I could on taking care of a baby/child and parenting and went to a pre-natal class to get some last questions answered. You’d think that after 9 months of reading that I’d be pretty well informed and confident to walking the actual practical process of taking care of a baby. Truth was that on the day we got released from the hospital and we were busy leaving the parking lot, I was thinking to myself: “Oh cr*p, can’t someone give me a manual on how to do this thing?”


Having an actual baby and going through the daily process, more questions came up. As I would nurse Cesar, I’d be reading up in more books, looking more things up on the internet. I wanted to be informed about every single point or question I came across. Because every time a point opened up that was new, I was faced with uncertainty – and that was not something I liked in relation to having a new born lol.

So from that perspective – finding all the information and making sure I was informed on all points so I knew what practical steps to take if ‘this’ or ‘that’ were to happen – was a supportive action.

But then, I found myself researching the same points over and over – and finding the same answers over and over – and found an anxiety that started generating and accumulating each time I participated in ‘let me just look this point up one more time’ or ‘maybe there’s something I’ve missed’. Because the evidence was clear: there was no new information coming up whatsoever; so there was no practical reason to continue looking, I already knew what I had to know.

So now within having reached a point of ‘knowing all there is to know’, I knew that the next step was to actually walk the practical process of applying the information, when the need for it would arise. Here I got scared because, I wanted to hold on to ‘being in preparation mode’ and still being busy gathering information as being in that process, I found a sense of safety knowing I do not yet have to trust myself, I can still pretend that I ‘don’t yet know’ and that I need more time to figure things out.

So when there was nothing left to figure out / look up and I got faced over and over with the same answers and information – this would each time re-enforce the self-belief that ‘I cannot trust myself’ in the sense of applying the information, and each time I would look things up again, I could feel myself being disempowered over and over.

So one night during one of our many nursing sessions, and noticing how totally unpleasant the process of looking things up and educating myself had become (which at that point wasn’t educational anymore but merely obsessive) – I put down my tablet which I would use to google things, turned it off and just breathed. Because I realised that what I was doing, was no longer practical but had become compulsive behaviour to excuse why I was putting off trusting myself, within knowing that I would be able to draw from my repertoire of knowledge I had accumulated, and actually put it to the test. Where as long as I was still ‘researching’ and something would happen, I could still ‘claim ignorance’.

So I just sat there nursing, breathing and letting go of all the fears and anxieties. After all, if a point would open up like some form of emergency, it was not going to help me to be in a state of anxiety and insecurity as I’ve seen in the past that this disables me within being able to clearly assess what is going on and what I exactly need to do, as I then within anxiety start to doubt myself and mix up information. So the best thing I could do was just to let go, trust myself and not let myself be tempted to look things up just ‘one more time’ as this would only turn into paranoia about me not being able to practically walk the reality of taking care of a baby.

In my previous blog I went over how I was allowing my relationship with my baby to be shaped through scoring his behaviour into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as how I saw it fit in with developmental milestones for his age. In this blog I am continuing with this point, where I not only look at how I see this point affect myself but how I see this being linked in at a societal level as well.

I remember the one day I was doing some research in terms of babies’ development. I have a few books where I had gotten info from before, but since each source seemed to vary in its timeline and approach of developmental milestones, I took it on me to go through quite a bit of sources so I could get a wider picture and not only use one or two sources as my frame of reference. I watched some videos and in the one video the development of a typical baby was shown at X age, and alongside the development of an ‘atypical’ baby was shown.

When I saw how the atypical baby was moving and compared Cesar to him, I was happy that Cesar did not turn out to be a ‘atypical’ baby, because it was clear that the atypical baby was struggling and did not have an effective body to develop and grow effectively. I saw myself going into this point of satisfaction where I kind of went ‘Aaah, everything is okay – I can be relaxed now’ – and as I was allowing this experience to take over, there was a moment of silence within me – and then I asked myself: Wait – what is going on here?

Because what I saw in that moment, is that I could care less about this atypical baby that’s struggling it’s ass off to move himself in his reality and carry his development forward. In a way, it was almost as if there was a form of being pleased that this baby is struggling, where there is this odd logic existent where ‘because this other baby is struggling, my baby has a greater chance of being a winner’.

It’s like, we’ve become so accustomed to the idea that there are always those who lag behind, those who are normal and those who are always at the frontier in society. Whether it’s in growth/development, school, relationships and ultimately jobs/careers. So if someone else in your ‘peer group’ fall in the category if being part of the ‘losers’, then that’s already one less statistical chance of you being in that position.

So when you’re faced with a situation where someone else is disadvantaged, you’re happy because, at least it’s not you or – at least it’s not your baby. Who cares about this other person/kid who is struggling and where this might follow him/her his/her entire life? At least I/my baby’s part of the winners and he will make it in life.

So there’s no regard whatsoever for other people, other children, other forms of life. All that matter is you and your baby. So here I could see, how in the way I was participating in this point of developmental milestones, where I had allowed it to become emotionally and feeling charged – this was another form of Survivalism, where I was trying to gauge and measure ‘how good my baby’s chances of survival are in the world’ – and where an unspoken decision had already been made that I would look after ‘only my baby’ and that I care for ‘only my baby’ – as if there is some tacit rule that each one must just look after their own offspring and ‘may the best win’ type of thing.

And I mean, it was not as if I was consciously voicing thoughts of this nature within myself – it was just like an overall ‘feeling’ that was just scarcely noticeable which was just silently hovering around, like a slight mist present all over inside myself. And only once I started investigating my conscious fears, and then investigating the emotional charged, I really became aware of this presence which is kind of like the rules of the game you are playing, which you once upon a time had agreed upon but had forgotten about. Yet, you were still playing within those parameters as the rules has become normalized through acceptance and allowance.

To be continued