Absentee Parents.
Overbearing Parents.
Reluctant Parents.
Parents by default.
Hopefully, it’s Parents Who Want to Give & Learn Love.
But whatever kind has been the mastermind behind one’s personal brand of choice, it’s incumbent upon us to wake up and learn these skill-sets optimally … because the Parenting Comet comes in a range of emotional needs but come it does, the tail light of which lingers long into the days of our rough societal nights. My parenting skills affect yours affect theirs affect ours, because we are all at the affect of each other on Earth, for better or worse.
When I was a child, my Mother’s physical presence was there but “she“ was not. So I learned to entertain myself with a vivid imagination that became my über parent many wonderful years thereafter. Yet I always needed to explore my world within her vicinity; not because we would have meaningful exchanges so much as that my child’s primal need was to feel safe within my immediate surroundings.
My personal world was as safe as the proximity of my distant mother-figure.
My mother did indeed love me. But her way of loving was childlike, and though amusing in my adult years, during the crucial formative ones I was ill equipped to handle my vast personal world. So I became too careful with it and too precious with my little self, avoiding risk lest I lose my way through it or damage its fragile infrastructure.
Living in the wild forest of my child’s mind was both escape from the fears of an unknown reality as well as a means of security that I could control on behalf of my tiny life, given that my authorised Parental pilot was flying in her own misguided direction (through no fault of her’s, because mostly we’re a bunch of global orphans having inherited the legacy of our well-intended but misinformed parental predecessors – any wonder why our world looks so broken in so many ways?).
Then I grew up. And my child was born. But amazingly, now I was asleep. As my child grew I remained this way. As my child needed to be seen and heard by me I remained absentee. As my child needed to feel safe I remained unavailable. So asleep was I that I wasn’t even aware I was sleeping, much less that I even had a child.
The worst parenting skills I learned were No Parenting skills.
While I was busy “performing” for the world, my child was starving to be seen. While I was busy helping to heal Humanity, my child was hungering to be hugged. Apparently this parent wasn’t there. So where was I? How did I miss this very onus of responsibility I’d criticised my own mother of? Why didn’t somebody warn me that you can physically hold your little one while the rest of you is a parent who apparently is elsewhere?
We learn by trial and error. Sometimes knowledge is a trickle down proposition that begins in the intellectual head where it may or may not embed … only to further wend its way through challenging life experience – to the mind of our hearts.
It was in this winding mind-of-my-heart that I one day awoke from a longterm destructive relationship whose daunting lessons were those very haunting unaddressed ones from my early childhood. I never felt so desolate and alone and afraid and unloved and insecure and abandoned while being in this individual’s midst nearly constantly. So I crawled backward in time; to a metaphoric womb with a metaphoric wound to learn a heartrending lesson about Parental Love:
From the moment we’re born we’re too young to be Parents. Yet immediately we are … to our Self. From thereon it’s up to us to get acquainted and grow this little Being into being alongside the other parent figures in our midst – so that when we birth actual children, the wisdom of Inner Parenting resides alongside. No history book will ever find our true Missing Link on mankind’s outer timeline because it’s remained hidden – even from us.
Today I play … with my adored inner child in whose presence I no longer sleep but vividly see. And hear. And am attentive to. And sensitive to. And with whom I continue to learn the art of deeply abiding Parental Love that I had never ever dreamed of.
To see one’s Self in the eyes of Other is a remarkable yet challenging ongoing Life experience. To see one’s Self with one’s very own eyes is an intimate wonder, the seeds of which blossom inwardly, outwardly, cumulatively, and even exponentially given that we’re a communal species forever at the affect of one another.