The weeks between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are the season of childhood reflections. They are the time to contemplate the impact and meaning of the parenting we received in our formative years.
The Karma of Parent and Child amazes and confounds. It makes me think of the quote from Michelangelo. "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
To think of our parents as our sculptors offers a new imagination of the creative karma between ourselves and our parents. It is my experience that parenting is like carving marble. Our parents use a chisel and hammer and carve away. Sadly, they work to shape us in their own image, often failing to seek or see the angel within. Karmically, we choose our sculptors/parents and seek and conform to their blows.
Whether we idealize or demonize our parents, they remain our sculptors. This is the bad news.
The good news is so exciting. Within the form shaped by our childhoods another form waits to be set free. This time we are the sculptors and we sculpt our souls to set free our true selves.
However, if we idealize or demonize our parents we cannot set our true selves free.
This is why I want you to register for Inner Mother Inner Father. This course gives you the tools for self-sculpting. I invite you to begin the sacred art of self-imagining with an inner hammer and chisel!
To encourage you, I am offering the first two lessons (there are 8 lessons in the entire course) to you as a gift. You will have 2 hours of audios where I bring some very important distinctions and questions and some powerful and illuminating handouts to download. Sign up for this soul-freeing gift now. Click
here.
Beyond the Sentimental! Beyond the Unmet Needs!
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are sentimental and costly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimentality) If we take sentimentality and spending money out of Mother’s Day, what’s left?
From my perspective, what’s left are unsentimental thoughts on mothering (and fathering) and yearly opportunities to understand my feelings about my mother/father. What’s left is the work and the conscious arts of grieving, forgiving and celebrating.
Here is what I am thinking about mothering this year...
Thinking with compassion for my mother, her mothering was awesome given the amount of childhood trauma she experienced, her anxieties, her party-girl sanguinity, her emotional explosiveness. But with self-compassion I know my mother failed me, wounded me, neglected me. We were not a match: I was too much and she was not enough. She never forgave me for being more like my father than her…for being
“crazy” just like him.
On Mother’s Day, I both forgive my mother and grieve my unmet childhood needs. I celebrate what I made of myself…my self-mothering. I celebrate the strange and creative karma of my relationship with my mother. I am grateful her dramatic failures in mothering forced me to imagine a better way of mothering and to resist imitating her mothering with my own children.
If my mother had been a better mother, I would not have created the Inner Mother Inner Father course. I wouldn’t have had the deep questions about parenting and needs. I might not have even thought of the work of self-imagining.
The “miracle mantra” I originated, “I am safe. I am calm. I am awake. I am nourished.” is a blessing from my childhood which was not safe, not calm, not awakening, and not nourishing. This mantra is an example of wisdom arising from crystalized suffering.
Was your childhood physically and emotionally safe? Was it calm and calming? Did either parent attempt to awaken what was innate in your soul? Did they nourish your being? Childhood is not meant to be perfect, so if you take up my questions, be reasonable in your reflections. Know that you can give yourself what they didn't give you.
My mother kept me physically safe but emotionally terrified. I feel calm when I remember resting my head in her lap and her stroking my hair lovingly but the anxiety around her emotional explosions was constant. She woke me up to pop music and Broadway show tunes but did nothing to wake me up to anything else. I really can’t find any feeling of being nourished. Spiritually, intellectually, emotionally,
creatively.
My mother knew me, but didn’t understand me because I was so different from her. Her world was too small and too fragile to include or support who I was becoming.
One maternal gift lives in my ability to make others feel comfortable. She was a great listener to strangers so she always had jobs that required greeting and welcoming….for ten years she and my step-father managed a small motel on the ocean in South Florida. Even my teenage friends loved talking with her.
But the madness was always hiding beneath her charm waiting to attack and humiliate me and anyone I loved.
She tried to manage her madness. Starting in the ’50’s after a "nervous breakdown," she saw psychiatrists and took medication to manage her depression and anxiety. So she modeled not being afraid to seek help. A gift!
She never said she was sorry. She never acknowledged her attacks and her lies. Her soul could only see herself as a victim and victims never say they are sorry. Yes, it would have meant so much if she had been able to see my hurt.
Writing all this, and I have left out the unbelievable details, I feel such a distance from the drama and distress. I don’t wish any of it had been different. I have moved through my drama, stress and wishing. And I have reflected and questioned and thought and imagined the mothering I wanted and didn’t get, and I have found strength and freedom in self-mothering.
All my inner activity and all the sacred conversations with hundreds of individuals about their own issues rising up from their childhood have given me great respect for the irony living in unmet needs and imperfect parenting. I see the gift in the wound, the wisdom in the suffering. When I point to the gifts and the wisdom, I hear the sigh of healing coming from my clients.
One bit of irony I find in working with my clients is that idealizing or demonizing a parent are equally false. Those who idealize a parent are afraid of their own anger…no parent is capable of meeting the needs of the individuality of the developing child. Those who demonize a parent will fail to heal the festering hatred and bitterness living in their wounds. Inner Mother Inner Father frees you from idealizing
and demonizing your parents. You will wake up to the irony of karma and you will find empowerment.
Self-love requires self-parenting. Every late Spring when Mother’s Day and Father’s Day show up on the calendar, I look at this online course in self-parenting I created. Inner Mother Inner Father provides imaginations of the ways of self-parenting that we need to give ourselves. You need this and you deserve this course. It will change your sense of self.
Learn the details and register for the first two lessons of Inner Mother Inner Father here. I love giving gifts of self-imagining!
PS: It is quite common to expect a spouse to make up for the lack in the parenting you received. MISTAKE!!! Inner Mother Inner Father will unburden your relationships from the ghosts of your childhood.
If you want to know more about my experience or talk about your own, email me.
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