Healing My Inner Child — While Raising My Child
Parenthood is a unique opportunity to look at ourselves and the world differently.
Every parent takes the mission of raising a child with the amount of love, availability, and wisdom they can afford, sometimes facing challenging times that go on unnoticed.
I feel today that motherhood was a critical turning point in my self-evolution journey. When I got pregnant with my beloved son, I was naturally attracted to learn more about being a parent and a better person. As a result, I encountered the concepts of Mindfulness, Positive Parenting, Montessori and Pikler Pedagogies, and Nonviolent Communication throughout my readings and interaction with other mothers.
My mindset has changed. I find myself now at a place where love, awareness, respect, and patience are the values that drive my interactions — with my son and my dog, my husband and family, my friends and work colleagues, my community, and even strangers.
The most challenging part is making it an active exercise of self-observation. It’s so tricky letting go of the old “me”, avoiding repeating old habits and communication patterns, telling myself that it is acceptable to fail across the way — that I have the option to apologize and start again.
Some years ago, while my stepdaughter was a sweet 10-year-old child, she came to live with my husband and me for a couple of years while her mother moved to another city for work reasons. So suddenly, I had to assume a bunch of parenthood responsibilities without any tools or learnings.
When I look back, as a stepmother, I recognize similar levels of authority, criticism, and control — that molded my childhood. With no proper training for parenthood, I naturally assumed the parent figure I have known — and that doesn’t make any sense to me now.
Even though I regret it, I don’t feel any blame for it. I know right that I did my very best with the knowledge and opportunities that I had back then — actually, I acknowledge that I aced it given my lack of experience! Embracing forgiveness is the path I chose to look at the present with self-compassion and continue my journey.
I practice the same exercise of remembering with compassion and empathy for my parents’ flaws. My injured inner child doesn’t make it easy, but I must heal it at this long and patient pace. We’re all on this journey to evolve — that includes my parents and me. I have a role in their life that empowers me to invite them to overcome karma, learning new ways of looking at the world and themselves.
After becoming a mother, I started putting myself in positions that allowed me to respectfully confront some of my mother’s reactions that caused me sadness and frustration my entire life. And guess what? I was able to break the circle. Those episodes never happened again.
As humans, sometimes we follow a set of patterns in the way we communicate. We can go through our entire life keeping the pattern, or we can face someone that eventually tells us or encourages us to tell, “Please stop, perhaps you don’t know, but you’re hurting me.”
Every time I take my son’s hand and walk by his side, I expect him to keep some learnings that will allow him to respect himself and others. I’m hopeful that we’re raising a generation that can create a world of evolving compassion, awareness, and spirituality.
I choose to walk side by side with my son and grow up, too — as I nurture the virtue in him, I heal and mature my soul.
Share your own experience or thoughts about what you’ve learned as a parent or caretaker. I’d love to hear more about it.