Journey to a New Life

I was asked a question by someone as to how come some parents can be blatantly selfish in their behavior towards their child(ren). Where, to observers, this type of behavior is unacceptable – but where the parents themselves will act out their selfishness within a sense of entitlement and thus in essence not seeing what they're doing or seeing "what's wrong" with their behavior.

So I had a look inside myself as to where and how I could see such a pattern would emerge and develop, in terms of what I have experienced myself and walked through myself with Cesar so far.

And what I saw, was that it really goes all the way back to the beginning. And what becomes clear from the beginning is that: parenting is not easy.

All your life, your life has been about you. What you want to do, what you want to do with your life, your friends, your family, your job, your hobbies. Then – a baby is on its way.
You think you can conceptualize and ‘imagine’ what it would be like to have a baby – but the truth is = you don’t. Even when you read others’ stories, written in detail about birth, babies, parenting – in the end they’re just words and you don’t really grasp the reality of it – until you’re in it.

I suppose in a way, pregnancy does prepare you a little bit for what is to come. All these things start happening to your body, you get put into the backseat and your whole body becomes about ‘the baby’ – where to a certain extent, ‘your body is not your own’. But you know, you can still do a lot of things and pretty much live your life ‘as usual’.

Then, the baby comes – and everything changes. Every minute, every second, every breath you take is in service of your baby. Your baby is completely helpless and completely dependent on you. You are quite frankly put: its slave (unless family/friends are there to help out big time or you’ve hired someone to assist). It’s feeding, changing, clothing and feeding again round the clock. You sleep, when the baby sleeps (or at least you try). You are sleep deprived, your body hurts, you look like a mess (and very possibly smell like one too) and it seems to go on for what seems like forever. That’s how the first 3 months are registered in my brain.

So, especially in the first few months, being a mother, being a parent does a big number on you.
I mean, I am pretty lucky in terms of the environment and support that I have available with Cesar. I’d say that I pretty much live in the ‘optimum environment’ to bring up a child. And so – even with physically everything being in place, it’s still hard, it’s still an immense job.
I have no idea how I would cope if my situation would have been any different and I have the greatest respect for all women out there who are doing their best to raise their child(ren) when their environment is not one that promotes peace of mind.

So you have your baby, you’re busy all the time, you’re trying to do your best and sometimes that seems to even be not enough. Your old life is GONE. Byebye seeing friends, family, work, hobbies – it’s just you and your baby now (at least initially). Having a baby probably looked and sounded like a fun thing, blissful and all joy – but ends up being quite the opposite as you’re drained tending to your baby’s every need. If you’d imagine how you would want a relationship to be between two beings – this is not how you’d want things to be, as it’s in essence a ‘master-slave’ relationship. Now, I don’t mean to blame or shame the baby for being demanding or needy. And I don’t mean to create any type of moral issue within describing and comparing a baby-mother relationship to one of a master-slave relationship. It’s simply that by design – they are the same. It’s not good, it’s not bad – it’s just what it is.

This point, if you look at the design of babies and their 100% dependency relationship towards the mother is what one could call ‘unfair’. Meaning, you have two beings, and the one is living every moment of its life in function of the other.

I’m pretty sure that if you had a relationship with another adult in this line you’d pretty much break ties as soon as possible, because it’s no way to live.

And it’s this dynamic – being ‘unfair’ by design – which is your introduction to your relationship with your child - which forms the baseline, the nice fertile soil, from which many mind patterns and resonant designs can emerge from… if you let it.


To be continued

My only previous experience with feeding babies was that of feeding baby birds. With them, I had to feed them every 20-40 min depending on their age from sunrise to sunset. So I thought – if I can feed baby birds, feeding baby human shouldn’t be so bad? Turns out that the ‘feeding only during daylight hours’ makes a BIG difference.

So here I was, at home, feeding my little baby pretty much every hour during the day… and night. The first three nights were pretty horrid. I was still in a general state of fatigue from the whole hospital happening and not getting much sleep was quite the punch . The exhaustion and pain from the c-section combined reached a stage where I couldn’t keep myself together anymore and had a big cry-out, just from the physical intensity. I then changed my sleeping strategy as it was obviously not working out. I started lying down during the day when he would sleep and changed my approach towards sleeping. Previously I would lay down with the intention to now ‘get some sleep’. What would happen then was that I would be lying in bed and by the time I’m almost asleep Cesar would make noise to announce his next feed and I’d still be tired as no sleeping occurred. I then changed my starting point in lying down, to not be ‘to get some sleep’ – but rather ‘to get some rest’. I would just lay and apply the 4-count breathing method. By the time Cesar announced his next feed, I was immediately up and about and did not experience myself has being worn out and my body actually felt pretty good. It’s like I went to sleep inside my body while my body was still awake. This strategy worked out much better.

Sometimes when there was more than an hour between feeds, I would fall sleep after doing the 4 count breath for a while, and then I would suddenly wake up – and as I wake up and open my eyes, I am immediately here, wide awake and would experience a form of pressure and presence within my chest area – and then a minute later Cesar would wake up for feeding.

While my body was still recuperating from the c-section, I could feel myself getting headaches with every little reaction, every little thought that would come up during the day. Sunette explained that since my body’s resources were all being directed towards healing the cut, there weren’t many resources left to stand as a form of buffer for the mind, which made my body very sensitive to any mind activity which I would feel almost as the reactions happened. She also said that I did not want to experience any particular pain or headache for more than day, as this would mean that the point wasn’t sorted out. So as I spend my days in my room with Cesar and a reaction and discomfort would come up (which was usually something like “WHaaaaat – he’s hungry agaaaain??!!”)– I would apply Self Forgiveness out loud until the pain/discomfort was gone.

So the first few days to a week were very intense physically but at the same time also very cool to see how I was able to direct myself and assist and support myself through this.

Another point that was quite cool, was that with the baby almost constantly needing tending, was that my life was driven to a point of zero-choice. It was as if every moment was determined by the baby – and whether you like it or not, you have to walk every moment as it comes. The days that I centered myself quite effectively were very cool in this regard. It was quite fascinating really, that if you allow yourself to be here and make the decision to walk every moment as it comes and do what needs to be done, then there’s actually an experience of Freedom in the point of No-Choice. Because – here you are, leading a life where you have no choice whatsoever, yet you are able to fully direct who you are within every moment and you fully decide how you are going to experience yourself. So to then in every moment will yourself to be here and simply walk as things unfold – is actually quite enjoyable and some nights I really had a blast, because it’s quite entertaining to see that you can actually be quite fine and ‘normal’ in a somewhat abnormal situation and to see that you can actually go beyond your accepted limitations.

And it’s all in those little moments, where you for instance wake up from a noise and know it’s time for the next feed. Where you can either draw back within yourself, cringe and resist getting up – or – you hear the noise and you get up because it’s the common sensical thing to do. Either way – you’re going to be getting up to feed your baby, there’s no choice in that – what you do have a choice in, is how you’re going to feel about it and how you’re going to experience yourself, and this really, is the only decision that matters.

Continuing from Day 09: M-o-t-h-e-r

In my last blog I started looking at some of the associations/connections that I have created towards the word ‘Mother’ – and within doing so, actually also looking at/investigating my relationship with my own mother – as the primary baseline on which I constructed my definition of ‘what a mother is’ and what emotions/feelings are attached to it.

The association points which I discussed in my previous blog were:

- Ice queen
- Morality
- Fear – and where this fear is closely connected to what it means to ‘care’

Related to the image of my mom’s “caring” yet fearful face – is an image of my mom sitting on the couch at the end of the day. To this I connected the ‘burden of being a mother’. My mother worked a bit more than half-time. She would get everything ready for us in the morning, she would take the train to work, get back home in the evening and then start with cooking. Then she would have to do work for school (she was a teacher) and then late at night she could just plop down the couch and relax. She maintained the house all by herself in terms of cleaning. All we kids had to do was clean our room (which in my case rarely happened); sometimes put the dishes away and from time to time kick our dirty laundry down the stairs for our mom to pick up. So even though she worked “part-time” at school, including with everything she did in the house and family things – she was pretty much working all the time.

I would often tease her and harass her in the evenings, when my parents would put up a movie to watch that we didn’t want to see – and then they’d fall asleep after ten minutes being completely knocked out. In the evenings I would also ask her to do or check things for me and then she would say something like ‘Please, just let me SIT for 10 minutes!!!’ – where sometimes I thought if I would push more she would end up crying or something. So here, the whole ‘burden’ association came from: being a mother is hard, you have to bring in money, take care of the kids, take care of the husband, take care of the house and in the evening you can sit for a bit before you’re knocked out and that’s your “me-time”.

The next association is that of ‘mother’ being connected to ‘adult’.

I touched on this point in one of my other blogs in my Leila’s Journey to Life blog, in Day 173: My Moral Code & Politics and the blogs that followed from that. The Adult point consists of kind of a dogmatic belief that Adults ‘know it all’ and Adults ‘know best’. Like there is an unspoken agreement between all adults to act as if they know what they are doing, and deliberately act in a way so that anyone who’s not an adults (= kids) does NOT know everything and should thus ‘shut up, be quiet and listen/respect your elders’. That’s not how I looked at it back then though. When I was the kid, it was a naivety and also kind of a point of innocence, where you trust your parents to know what they’re doing. I strongly believed that whatever decisions my parents made, they had good reason to go for that decision. After all, they are ‘adults’ – they have been around longer than I have, they must be right.

And I mean, the first thing I was faced with when finding out that I was pregnant was “Shit I am not prepared for this”. There are so many things that I still have to figure out and so many things that I have questions about – how the hell am I now going to take care of someone else? I can’t handle that trust – I don’t know anything!!!

I remember when I found out that my parents weren’t omniscient – and it was a big deal, I really felt betrayed because they had purposely portrayed themselves this way to get us to be obedient and see them as authority figures – I felt manipulated! So one of the reactions I had to finding out that I was going to be a mother was ‘Am I now also have to join that gang, and ‘pretend’ that I know “everything” and “know what I am doing”. You could say I connected ‘Adult’ to ‘Mother’ and in turn connected ‘Deceiver/Pretender’ to ‘Adult’ lol.

Will continue with this association exercise in my next blog