The One Thing I Wish I Knew Before I Had Kids
Wish I Knew…
The key to parenting my kids was to heal my own inner-kid.
No one can adequately describe the cellular-level changes coming your way when you become a mother for the first time. Words simply cannot describe the tectonic shift that happens within you once you give birth - or the feeling of forever responsibility for nurturing, guiding and loving them through all your good and bad days. For me the meaning of “Mother” keeps evolving as my children grow – and I grow along with them.
My first year as a mum began 7 days after 9/11/01. The day after my son was born I began my 18 year battle with chronic Lyme disease – a battle I’m still fighting. It was a hard year for me, a year of health challenges and new mother challenges while being scary-sick. Almost three years later my second son was born, and along with him another year of debilitating Lyme-health challenges. The hardest part was yet to come though. I had no idea what was lurking at the start of kindergarten for our family.
When my eldest reached school-age and set off for a Silicon Valley “arts” charter school, walking distance from our house we were so excited. Admissions is by lottery and we sure felt like we won the lottery! That was the beginning of the downward spiral with school and mental health. A brilliant, happy little kid with curiosity and a sparkle in his eyes entered that school and towards the end of kindergarten it was hard to get him out of bed, he couldn't sleep at night, he was so anxious and seemed deeply unhappy. His sparkly eyes no longer sparkled. It might have been different, at least from an emotional perspective had I realized my own role in the situation. I’m not taking the blame for the whole of it, I’m just taking responsibility for how I reacted to these challenges. I say with great confidence his kinder teacher was not fit to teach 5 year olds. She yelled. A lot. Her main target was my son–I know this because another parent who spent a lot of time in the classroom told me. I cannot know for certain if any of my son’s subsequent challenges could have been avoided, but I feel strongly that had I been better equipped to skillfully manage my own emotions while shit went down, he would have learned to handle his own emotions more skillfully.
My role in the situation was that I had never healed from my own K-12 school experience. It never occurred to me that my experience could be labeled trauma or that it might have caused PTSD. After all, I didn’t live through wartime or physical abuse, or obvious emotional abuse in school. When I was in second grade my mother was in the same position as I found myself in when my son started kindergarten. This was an ancestral trauma and history was on a loop. I was not taught a productive response to difficult emotions or difficult people. In fact, if you mention the name of my second grade teacher in front of my mother 43 years later, she will likely rant for a while and re-experience all of those emotions. I still have hard feelings towards Miss Short. Her name is a trigger, and more broadly, so is school, one I still need a lot of awareness and mindfulness around.
Fast forward to my son’s freshman year: I was forced to lean into the long term project of healing my inner-kid so that I could learn to parent my own children properly. The whole family was forced to do some serious inner work. The cumulative anxiety school and all the emotional crap that was built into that slowly broke us all. We all needed a break. Seeking help for our son was not easy, nothing about it felt natural. With a lot of help, we chose a residential horticultural therapy community in Hawaii and therapeutic boarding school in Utah followed. Our younger son went to a day school for kids with dyslexia for a year so he could finally get the academic help he needed. And my husband and I participated in family therapy and did some intense work on our own. We haven’t stopped “doing our own work”.
Our oldest son graduates this year, in the midst of the Corona Virus–there will be no prom, no graduation, no end of high school celebrations. That’s disappointing. The good news is that he is graduating with an impressive GPA, he’s been accepted to 6 out of the 7 universities he applied to, with scholarship money and choices. Before the virus outbreak he was planning to take a gap year in Hawaii to spend 7 months in a massage therapy certification program before starting his college career. I don’t know how things will proceed from here, but I do know we are all better equipped to mange whatever comes our way. And if we can’t then we know how to ask for help, and how to give it.
We’re still so flawed, but now we know that our flaws don’t define us. We no longer seek urgent repairs for broken people. We seek to understand, to accept, to grow, and to connect. There’s a huge difference in the way the mind and body respond to these compared to fix it mode. I can’t go back and change what’s already happened in our lives. But what I can do is share our experience of healing and give someone else hope for themselves and their child.
