Journey to a New Life

Continuing from: Day 66: Why Do I Hate Being a Mother? | Parenting & Fairness
Another dimension I would like to explore / open-up in relation to being unhappy or simply having resistance from time to time towards tending to your parental responsibilities is that of parenting being a ‘duty’ versus parenting as self-expression.

Often I found within myself, when there was resistance or a nagging sensation within myself within moments where I had to tend to my baby, that I within that moment was approaching parenting/tending to my child as a ‘duty’; and so as something that I ‘have to do’/’must do’.

Parenting then becomes a ‘duty’, where you are ‘paying your dues’. The problem with ‘duty’ is that you will only do what is due, when something is due – where your starting point is determined by a negative energetic experience. Once you have ‘paid your dues’ – you stop. There is now nothing left to move you – all dues are gone, you are no longer obliged to move and so you don’t. You stop being a parent the moment the need for it is removed. You are parenting at the bare minimum, where self will do what needs to be done – but please don’t ask me to do more.

What’s fascinating about this – is that your range of movement as a parent is limited within a scope of negativity to neutrality. You will only ever ‘be a parent’ as ‘performing parenting tasks/points’ when there is a need for it, and this ‘need’ is channelled through a negative energetic charge within yourself, by your very starting point. Then when you have completed your duties, and all is back to neutrality – you stop being a parent the moment your duties are over. Now you go back to ‘being me’, ‘doing what I want to do’. Implied within that, is that you will only ever experience Parenting as being something negative, as a burden, as a duty – because you yourself set yourself up to only play out your parenting role when there is a need for it. And this need is always situated within a context of negativity, where you can only remove what is due/the negative by performing your duty. Now the child has stopped crying, now I can return to what I was doing.

If you look at dues and debt – you will only ever pay what is due. And you pay your dues because it is written somewhere that ‘you have to’. There’s an actual figure indicating/showing you what is needed from you, and as you pay your dues, the negative figure decreases until it reaches zero and then you stop paying your debt. You don’t go on paying more money once you’ve reached zero!

So when you parent from a starting point of duty – you do the same. You do what needs to be done but once the need has been removed you stop, you retreat. Parenting is then a formality, you do it because ‘it is written somewhere’ that you have to do it. You don’t do it from a point of understanding, you don’t put anything from yourself into it, you don’t allow yourself to explore what is possible when there is ‘no more need’, you don’t do it just for the sake of it – the very notion of spending more time/moments with your child, giving more of yourself is seen as ‘a waste’ (just as you would paying more than what your debt told you to pay). And every time you ‘pay your dues’ as ‘tending to your child’ – you take note of it, you keep a record – just like you would with a bank account where money movement is involved. And then later, when you child is older – you can remind him/her of these records and what the child now ‘owes you’ in return. Look at all these things I did for you – now what will you do for me?

This is parenting on automatic mode – there’s no life in your actions, in your attention. You are simply reacting to impulses. The impulses stop and you stop. You did not do those things ‘for the child’ – you did them out of duty, you fulfilled your duty – but you did not fulfil your child.

To be continued…

In my previous blog I ended off with how one can become reactive and resentful within wanting to hold on to one’s ‘off time’ when a child needs your sudden attention. This point also links in with a previous blog I wrote, Day 51: Why Babies throw Tantrums | Parenting & Fairness, where one can become ‘unhappy’ and throw inner tantrums when you compare the moment/situation you are in vs. the situation/moment you would rather be in as what would make you happy (eg. Current moment ‘changing frantic screaming baby’s dirty diaper’ vs. desired moment ‘sitting down, reading newspaper with cup of coffee’).

Within this blog, I want to investigate a different dimension that is connected to this point of being unhappy when faced with parenting responsibilities and wishing that you could be doing something else that would make you ‘happy’ – specifically looking at: what determines our happiness?

If we go back to the scenario of the previous blog where we have the two parents relaxing / enjoying some off time and both not wanting to give this up when being faced with a needy child; we can already see/identify a first ‘clue’. Here, I am looking at how one labels/compartmentalizes one’s time in ‘work-time/child-time’ and ‘off-time/relax-time’.
When we create labels for what we are doing, because they refer to distinctly different experiences of ourselves during these different time-periods = something’s up.

In terms of the scenario, self had created a polarized experience, whereby tending to the child was distinctively ‘negative’ while ‘not tending to the child’ as ‘off-time’ was a distinctively positive experience. So in this case ‘not tending to the child’ makes self happy because then you can do ‘whatever you want’ without being limited by a child who needs your attention.

So, why does this make you happy? And why does tending to one’s child make you unhappy?
If we have a look at what determines our happiness, we need to look at the things we find valuable in life, what we find meaningful. When we identify the variables of value and meaning, we can determine what makes us happy, where if x (value) and y (meaning) is in place = I am happy.

If we look at what society promotes as being of value and meaning in life, we come up with factors such as:

- freedom (of choice)
- money
- beauty
- career/status
- individual identity
- partying/events
- consumerism
= ego, freedom and selfishness

So when we take these ‘values’ and translate them into parenthood then...yes – life is hell.

Because parenthood means:
- absolute responsibility for another life
- being practical with money
- dealing with body changes / minimal time towards looking presentable
- spending time home / with kids
- personal sacrifice
- being on a schedule / getting all the sleep you can get
- cleaning up after another / managing a household
= humbleness, responsibility and selflessness

So if we look at what society promotes and values, we find these things to be completely absent within the world of motherhood/parenting. Being a housewife / stay-at-home-mother has become stigmatized and looked down up – why would anyone ‘give up’ doing something meaningful with their life to look after children and staying at home?! You could be having a career, be productive, going out and do things whenever you want!!

So then looking after a child, changing diapers, wiping butts, making food, cleaning up, feeding and whatever else is involved in taking care of a child becomes an experience of being ‘degraded’ and ‘suffering’ because it doesn’t fall within the category of value and meaning that has been fed to us through and by society. The worst part is that one actually believes self to be ‘unhappy’ and ‘not doing anything of value/meaning’ and not seeing/realising that self was not the directive principle within deciding for oneself what you find valuable and meaningful in life, but instead went with the ideas, pictures and imaginations sold by our consumerist and capitalistic society. Society’s values are all about accumulating, while that of parenting is that of giving away.

This schizophrenia of values reminds me of an article I read a while ago, where a person went into a hospital for a hip surgery but ended up dying from dehydration. Why? Because everyone thought that getting the patient water was ‘beneath’ them, after all they are a surgeon/doctor/this or that and surely it’s not their job to do something ‘ordinary’ like bringing someone water? Surely someone with less important things to do can take care of this?

And then the man died.

This nicely illustrates how within our obsession with career/status/prestige, our individual identity and self-importance – leads us to neglect important, life-enabling factors such as providing someone water because it’s ‘too ordinary’. We look at things in terms of specialness and ordinariness, and make our decisions according to what we believe will add to our own splendour.

Similarly within parenting/motherhood, we have forgotten the value and importance of tending to a child, performing ‘ordinary tasks’ – because they create no grandeur, they don’t add to your amazing personality and no-one’s there to pat your back and say how amazingly productive you are.

Parenting is the business of life. And life is not about all the imaginary concepts we’ve promoted and elevated to godliness. Life isn’t about personal grandeur, beauty, freedom and self-interest. It’s about eating, shitting, sleeping and looking after each other. It’s about guiding one another and creating responsible human beings who in the future will ensure responsibility towards themselves, others and their environment.

With the values we are currently upholding, the only thing we are ensuring is for life to go down the drain. Everyone’s so busy going ‘me! Me! Me!’ and ‘Money! Money! Money!’ – that we forget to look around ourselves and spend our (oh so precious time that we could be spending doing whatever the f*ck we want) time towards life-enabling and life-supporting goals such as ensuring proper housing, proper food security, proper education, etc. – all these ‘ordinary’ things, all these things which are absolutely vital to life.

So we are not just dealing with a value crisis in parenting, but a value crisis over all – which becomes reflective within parenting.

To be continued

 In some of my previous blogs (Day 60 , Day 61) I wrote about how comparing yourself and your responsibilities to that of another, specifically the father of your child – can be a source of inner conflict within self.

Because being a mother is a very specific role, you cannot compare it to being a father – and even more so if you as the mother are the primary caretaker of the child while the father is primarily the breadwinner. You’re both looking after your child(ren), but in different ways. The mother through a one-on-one direct approach, the father through creating financial stability to ensure a proper environment for the children/family to live and grow up in.

Another point which I identified within this framework of ‘fairness’ and ‘comparison’ (well, they’re really one framework, comparison always precedes fairness) is that of ‘fear of missing out’.

Having children/a family can be a stressful situation. Especially if not so long ago it was just you and your partner, there were fewer responsibilities and fewer financial pressure. When a child enters reality, both these aspects grow exponentially. Suddenly you are overrun with things to do in relation to your child, and your spending pattern suddenly takes a surge. What I found here is that in essence your ‘survival mode’ knob gets switched up a bit higher, and both mother and father are more tensed.

Then, when there is a moment during the day where both parents can relax / take some time off from one’s responsibilities and ‘switch out’ from survival mode; both parents will tend to want to ‘hold on’ to that time/moment. If then your child suddenly needs attention, obviously one of the parents needs to attend to the child and step away from one’s relax/fun time. And here something interesting happens, where neither of the parents want to go and stand as the point of support for the child, because both parents believe/perceive that they are entitled to their own ‘time off’ and that it is ‘the other’ who should go and stand as the point. This is even more so, if you are still holding on to comparisons between yourself and your partner, where you’ve still been comparing your responsibilities to that of your partner and believe that you got the short end of the stick and that within you ‘suffering more’, your partner should now go and you should be allowed to stay in your ‘off time’. Within this fairness point playing out, there is also a fear that if one goes and tend to the child, that there is a chance your partner was more rested/more up to it than you are and so ‘more suitable’ to go tend to the child than you are, where you fear that your partner is now enjoying himself ‘unduly’ – time that *you* could have been spending enjoying yourself in some time off. So with this added dimension, where you fear you are being taken advantage of – you will resist tending to your child not because you’re not physically up for it, but because you don’t want your partner to ‘cash in’ on your actions; where there’s now this whole mental competition game playing out between the two parties involved, where each one will be reluctant to do what needs to be done because each one is suspicious of one another and fear missing out.

This then opens the door for strange behaviour such as insisting that ‘both go’ so that ‘both miss out’, believing that this creates a more ‘equal scenario’, whilst this only satisfies one’s fairness construct. Or the opposite where one insist on making plans where both can have ‘off time’, not because you necessarily want to spend time together, but because you don’t want to experience yourself as ‘missing out’.

To be continued…

While I was pregnant I received lots of gifts and goodies from friends and relatives.
One of the areas where I received many things was that of diapering. The top of Cesar’s clothing cabinet was covered with them. There were creams, gels, powders, wipes, liners,… Then you also have a whole range of products on how to go about storing/throwing away used diapers – it’s an industry by itself.

I kept all the products I had been given thinking that I need all this products and that they were given to me because I must have them. ‘If you didn’t need these products for the diapering process – why would they be made?’ – was how I approached it then. The fact that there were so many products and within each product there being so many varieties; this scared me off a little because I perceived that this was an indication of how complex diapering is lol.

In the beginning we tried out different diaper brands and different creams. Diapers wouldn’t sit well or Cesar would develop a skin rash simply because of the materials present in the diapers, so it took us a bit to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Cesar also had sensitivities to some foods that he would react to within my breast milk, such as tomato which would give him very acidy poop and a rash (which we didn’t know yet at that time).
To minimize the effects of any acidy poo and to reverse the rash he already had, we needed to change his diaper often to make sure he stays dry and clean. Interestingly enough, the diapering/cleaning process was actually making things worse.

I then stopped using the ‘specialised’ products that I was using, and started using a simple baby bum balm based on essential oils, and used cotton wipes (which were sold as baby face cloths lol) with some water and little bit of glycerine as ‘baby wipes’, to which I added some Epsom salts if he had a rash (which after the switch became very very rare).

So here what I found interesting is how if you know nothing about babies and diapers, and you go by what is presented to you: you believe you need this wide variety of products which need to be bought on a regular basis.

While, if you look at what works – it’s all very simple things and a down to earth process. And here what’s interesting is that as I took on this more say, ‘minimalistic’ way of working with the diapers, there was this small moment where I saw I was a bit ‘sad’. Where I saw this sadness was related to not being able to participate in trying out different products, getting to know different brands, seeing what brand suits me / “suits my family”. When I was pregnant I’d read up a lot on things in magazines as well as online, and you come into contact about a lot of information about different things/products and images are presented to you of how say ones diaper changing station will look like with all the different little products lined up. So as you are preparing for having the actual baby, you are starting to take in all these images, and the ‘feel good’ experience that is created around these images where you are preparing yourself to also enter this world/reality. So when I realised that I wasn’t going to be participating in any of that because it was clear that it just wasn’t what was going to work for us – I had to also let go of the idea, the energy and the emotions that I had attached to using different products and the image that gets created around the whole diapering process. So here I saw that I was still taking into account images and energies when making a decision instead of simply, common sensically going with ‘what works’; where in this case was making my own wipes which I would wash and some plain old water; you know, this ‘idea’ had never been ‘hyped up’ anywhere so it didn’t have the same ‘feel good’ experience as using other store bought products, where there is a belief that they will bring more enjoyment to the diapering process simply because you bought them and you’ve been into contact with their advertisement.

And sure – this applies to any area where it comes to advertisement and consumerism where you can ask yourself whether you really need something or where buying something really adds additional value to your life; or whether you are creating the additional value through the emotional and feeling experiences you generate within having been in contact with particular advertising or other environmental influences. Though what struck me in this case, is that with parenting/babies – this is something you don’t really get to learn about throughout your life or in school. I didn’t know anything about babies / taking care of another little human until I got pregnant and started doing my research. So here, where a lot of future parents are faced with a big unknown; advertisement becomes a big part of the first information they come into contact with when it comes down to parenting/babies. And since you’re no expert, there’s the tendency to just take the companies word for it, to ‘go with the flow’ in terms of doing and buying what everyone else is doing and buying without really questioning or investigating what you’re getting into.

And then with pregnancy especially, you have your 9 month waiting period where you’re full of anticipation which is 9 months where you delve yourself into information and receive a lot of impressions on which you later base your purchasing decisions.

So here – to always investigate what ideas, images, energies, emotions or feelings one is accessing when dealing with baby items and purchasing things for your baby; to ensure that one’s purchasing things from a practical perspective and to buy things that work, and not allow self to fall for the temptation of buying things because they give you a particular experience and which may not be best for your baby.