Tag: parenting

Cathedral Building

Cathedral Building

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A few years ago, I was forever-changed by a beautiful piece from Nicole Johnson, entitled “Invisible Mother” which drew the perspective-changing parallel between Cathedral Building and Motherhood. I’ve re-posted it on Mother’s Day many times but it is worth re-visiting again, as this year I have had the honor of working with a group of people that has allowed me to draw new parallels. This year it occurred to me that this Cathedral Building notion also corresponds to the changes these incredible folks are catalyzing with respect to racism, addiction recovery, homelessness, and those returning to society from prison.

For ALL my fellow Cathedral Builders…whether they be mothers or change-makers, this is for you….thank you for your commitment to playing the long-game.

Invisible Mother

It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response, the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I’m on the phone and ask to be taken to the store. Inside I’m thinking, ‘Can’t you see I’m on the phone?’

Obviously not; no one can see if I’m on the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me at all. I’m invisible.

The invisible Mom. Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more! Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this?? Some days I’m not a pair of hands; I’m not even a human being. I’m a clock to ask, ‘What time is it?’ I’m a satellite guide to answer, ‘What number is the Disney Channel?’ I’m a car to order, ‘Right around 5:30, please.’ Some days I’m a crystal ball; ‘Where’s my other sock?, Where’s my phone?, What’s for dinner?’ I was certain that these were the hands that once held books and the eyes that studied history, music and literature -but now, they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again. She’s going, she’s going, she’s gone!

One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England . She had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well. It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself. I was feeling pretty pathetic, when she turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, ‘I brought you this.’ It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe . I wasn’t exactly sure why she’d given it to me until I read her inscription: ‘With admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees.’

In the days ahead I would read – no, devour – the book. And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, after which I could pattern my work:

  1. No one can say who built the great cathedrals – we have no record of their names.

2) These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished.

3) They made great sacrifices and expected no credit.

4) The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.

A story of legend in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving a tiny bird on the inside of a beam. He was puzzled and asked the man, ‘Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will be covered by the roof. No one will ever see it’. And the workman replied, ‘Because God sees.’

I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place. It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me, ‘I see you. I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does.

No act of kindness you’ve done, no sequin you’ve sewn on, no cupcake you’ve baked, no Cub Scout meeting, no last minute errand is too small for me to notice and smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you can’t see right now what it will become.

I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on. The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our lifetime because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree.

When I really think about it, I don’t want my son to tell the friend he’s bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, ‘My Mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand bastes a turkey for 3 hours and presses all the linens for the table.’ That would mean I’d built a monument to myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend, he’d say, ‘You’re gonna love it there…’

As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be seen if we’re doing it right. And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible mothers.

Original author: Nicole Johnson

Boundaries.

Boundaries.

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You know how you have those a-ha moments that feel like they have been building for days, but you only realize it in hindsight, like, “oooooohhhhh, THAT is why that happened”, and perhaps that was the Universe tapping me on the shoulder and saying ”are you paying attention? I’m trying to teach you something.”

I have been listening to Brené Brown talk about Boundaries for ages. In her books, in her podcasts, it always makes sense.  Then I get thrown into a real-life opportunity to apply it in my own world, and where did all that wisdom go? Replaced by frustration and overwhelm, and a HEAVY dose of brain-chatter, I did my best to muddle through, taking the lessons on the nose as I went. 

So here is the context:  Four kids at home for the summer, Mom trying to hold space for her own identity through her own work, but keeps getting called upon by her children for various needs. There is an assumption in their requests that I will help, always.  And why wouldn’t they think that?  Haven’t I tee’d up that expectation with my behavior and responses their whole life?  Even if the request could be fulfilled themselves with just a wee bit of effort, the quickest point from A to B in their minds is, Ask Mom.

As an aside, you may be familiar with this in your own world. It looks like this:  Your child, sometimes in the same room with you, but often yelling from another room, says “Mom, where is <fill in the blank>.  At which point, you are faced with a handful of options:

  1. Reply (or shout back), “it’s in the <fill in the blank>, giving them the easy answer to save you both time, but extends a terrible precedent.
  2. Respond with the empowering encouragement to “look with your eyes, not your mouth!”, knowing they are capable of finding what they are looking for if they just put a little effort into it. Caveat, this often loops back to either a) or c) .
  3. Drop what you are doing, go to where they are, pick up the item (often sitting right in front of them) and hand it to them with one of those Mom looks that says “are you kidding me?” but teaches them that Mom will always rescue them so they need not be resourceful

I write this in a vibe that suggests frustration, but if I’m being authentic, there is a part of me that is validated by my children needing me. After all, motherhood is a huge part of my identity, and I do truly want to be a great mom to my kids, and that look of relief on my child’s face when their item is found, translates to gratitude to me. As a mom whose love language is Acts of Service, this means I have shown them love, right?

But what if I have created four entitled monsters who never do anything for themselves and have no respect or courtesy for when I am busy with something else? What if in my motherhood goal of being a soft-place-to-land for my children, I have made myself too accessible, robbing them of the opportunity to learn grit and resourcefulness? Did I blow it by doing too much for them?

No, of course not, a few years from now the house will be empty and you will actually miss the opportunity to be cleaning up after your children, because it means they are close by.

Are you kidding? This is a life skill, their future room- mates and spouses will thank me for the hard lessons I teach them now!

Bah, curse you mind chatter!

Deep breath….exhale…enter Brené Brown’s wisdom on how to live B-I-G.

B is for Boundaries.

I is for Integrity

G is for generosity

This acronym asks the question, “what boundaries need to be in place for me to be in integrity and generous towards others”. 

(Given the topic of this post I feel a note of of clarification is needed here. Generosity towards others is not what you might first think – she is talking about the story we create in our mind about other people and their behavior – do we villainize, judge and/or blame, or are we generous with our responses and thoughts, creating space for our perception of them to be something more?)

Brené does some great story-telling around the idea of Boundaries. The moral of her stories often asks the question: have you ever said yes to something you didn’t really want to do, and then quickly morphed that into resentment for having to do what you agreed to do? Who is really accountable in that scenario?

What it comes down to in attempting to set healthy boundaries, is being really honest (both with yourself, and others) about:

  1. what is okay
  2. what is not okay. 

So back to my example with my kids. I woke up that morning feeling good and ready to tackle the three items I had in mind to complete by the end of the day. I tossed them around in my mind a little, feeling into what order I should complete them, and what approach to use with each, feeling like a rock star for being pro-active and so well organized!

It may come as a surprise to hear this, but it did not even occur to me that all of it might get sabotaged by my children’s own agenda for the day.  A request from one kid here, another one there, setting aside what I was doing, pivoting to account for the time lost, returning to my tasks only to be pulled away again by something “urgent” for one of my children.  The words of Dr. Phil from many years ago float back into my head “you teach people how to treat you”, but they are quickly quashed by the logic of “it will be easier and quicker to just do this for them than the energy it would take to decline their request and explain patiently why they would have to either wait or find another resource”.  Setting boundaries takes time and I just want to get back to my tasks as quickly as possible so I can feel good about finishing them!

I feel my barometer rising with each additional request, as my mind begins to move to Plan B for completing my own tasks. I begin crafting an email to set modified expectations with a client about how my children are to blame for my lateness. I don’t send it. In a last ditch effort, I partially decline one of my kids, explaining that I also have some items to attend to, and encourage him to ask his sibling for help instead (clever, right?), and if it doesn’t work out, THEN I’ll help. It took about 15 minutes for him to be tapping my shoulder, explaining that he just needed me to do it.

Okay, gloves off. “Darling, when you are planning a project, part of the skill lies in planning the availability of resources. If you know you are going to need other resources (i.e. ME), you need to book them in advance to ensure they are available. I actually have a deadline I need to meet today and if I help you with this right now in this moment, I will not make my own deadline”. Feeling surprisingly satisfied with the calmness with which I was conveying this wisdom, I paused to let it sink in and awaited his response.

 “Okay Mom, I get it. <long pause> Alright, ready to help me then?”    Sigh.

Fortunately in this example, I was able to give him the time and effort he was asking for, and while I was late to hitting my own deadline, I did in fact complete the task, later that night, after supper.

Unfortunately, I was then plagued with the conflicting inner voices of “be a great mom first” vs “set some boundaries to preserve your own identity”.  What does it matter? Everything got done! Yes, but I don’t want to be in that situation again, what can I do to make this better next time?

As so often happens with reflection, I realized afterwards what I should have said. Using Brené Brown’s template:

This is okay:

It is okay to ask me for help. I love supporting you in your goals, I am your biggest fan!

This is not okay:

Waiting until the last minute to ask for my help and then demanding my time and attention with no consideration to other commitments I might have. I may *seem* accessible because you can physically see me, but please don’t assume my time and energy are available.

This approach allows me to feel good about sharing some of my life-wisdom with my son about how to manage a project, and also models the behavior I hope he will one day adopt in setting boundaries in his own world.

The feeling of being an effective Mom. My own tasks accomplished. Check. Thank you Universe, lesson learned!

And in the spirit of great irony, I then receive this quote from Anita Moorjani and I see the whole thing in a brand new light.

May the learning continue…

Teen Anxiety – why everyone else knows how to get it right

Teen Anxiety – why everyone else knows how to get it right

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So, you know that loneliness you feel when you are with other people, but still feel alone and like you don’t belong? That feeling that few people dare to talk about for fear they might seem weak, and many people are quick to gloss over and respond with “ I shouldn’t feel that way cause others have it so much worse – what gives me the right to feel lonely when I’ve been blessed in so many ways?”   

Relax, exhale,  it’s alright, I’m not going to make you talk about it. I just need you to think about it for a few seconds so you can get into the appropriate perspective to keep reading.

At one particularly lonely moment in my life, I exasperatedly said out loud in my kitchen, with all my children present, “do you ever feel like you are living several different lives!?” It was really one of those moments where I meant to say it in my head but my mouth just didn’t get the memo, and thank goodness, because my children all responded with a huge exhale like they’d been holding their breath for days, and each with some form of “Gawd, all the time!”

I was shocked.  There was nothing leading up to that to indicate that any one of them had been struggling, yet all of them felt that way. That was an “aha” parenting moment for me.

It got me thinking that maybe the reason we are seeing record highs in teen anxiety is because no one has told them the truth about how hard it is to be your authentic self! They are living under an expectation that they should know who they are, and behave as themselves and if they don’t, there is something wrong with them.

 “Just be yourself!” they are told. “Right, if only I knew who that was!” they are thinking.

In actuality, most adults are wearing masks of their own, never truly showing their authentic selves, and never telling anyone, hence the misguided expectation!

Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed, talks about this when she went to her first AA meeting.  She explained how she felt like she was always doing life wrong, how it felt harder for her than other people and she just wanted to know what everyone else knows.  And then she sat down and stopped talking because there was nothing else to say, she just wanted to know. Someone came up to her afterward and said to her “Glennon, it’s not hard cause you are doing wrong, it’s hard because you’re finally doing it right. “

Numbing all those years with alcohol and drugs, and armoring up to protect herself from anything that could hurt her, was keeping everything out. Not just all the bad, but also all the good.

Brene Brown also talks about this in her book Daring Greatly. She explains how it takes courage to be vulnerable, in fact, there is no courage without vulnerability, and that being brave enough to allow ourselves to feel may lead us into pain, but is also the gateway to joy, peace, fulfillment and self-understanding. Makes me wonder how many opportunities I have missed because of the armor I was wearing each time I knew I just had to get it right.

One of the questions I often get asked, is “four kids! How did you do that?!” and the truth is, I didn’t do it well until #3. It wasn’t until my third baby that I began to really understand that there are several types of cries babies make:  hungry cry, tired cry, wet diaper cry, loud noise cry, just-needing-a-snuggle cry. With my first two babies (relying heavily on the trusted knowledge I had gleaned from baby books) I rushed to eliminate the options each time my baby cried (check diaper, try feeding, rock them a little, sing to them, etc.); I’m supposed to know how to soothe my baby if I’m a good Mom, right? By the third time around, I learned how to listen, and connect, and finally gained an understanding that my baby was communicating and if I was still enough to listen, I could discern exactly what he needed. But I had to get comfortable with listening to him cry.

Understanding our own types of pain and what that dashboard is pointing out to us is much the same. Brene says that learning how to feel pain is the pre-requisite for learning how to discern different types of pain. For example, recognizing the difference between “Becoming Pain” (the type we learn and grow from), versus “Self-Betrayal Pain” (the kind we berate ourselves for). We have to become intimate with our different types of pain to know what to sit in and learn from.  What would it take to be brave enough to take off our armor and sit with our pain to better understand it? And do we have the courage to take it one step further and model it for our children? If our children never see their trusted adults as anything but “strong” and “right”, what expectations are they forming about what is acceptable for them? What they learn is that showing pain is weakness, and it is not safe for them to not get it right.

As parents, what is our response to our children when they are in pain? Do we encourage them to tell us more and sit with them in their darkness with an empathetic ear, or do we rush to fix it because we can’t stand to see them suffer? How do they ever get comfortable with discerning what their pain is telling them, if we are always slapping Band-Aids on it? I can attest to several examples where I have jumped directly into fixing or solving the problem my kids have been brave enough to present to me, so that I can help them to feel better quickly.  In doing so, I have robbed them of the growth that naturally happens as they are “becoming”.  Certainly, much easier than having that awkward conversation about feelings that you don’t know how to solve for them, especially when you’re already exhausted from a full day and dealing with your own heavy emotions, right?

Shadow of parents feet under the bedroom door

Recently, my husband and I were watching Reese Witherspoon’s new series Little Fires Everywhere. In it she is struggling with her 14 year old daughter and after one of their conflicts, the mom stands outside the daughter’s closed bedroom door, wondering if she has it in her to go talk to her daughter about it. The daughter sees the shadow of her Mom’s feet outside her door, and then sees her mom’s feet walk away without coming in. The look on the daughter’s face is devastating. As much as she was pushing against her Mom hours earlier, she desperately needed her Mom to care enough to come in. I turned to my husband and said “and that is why you have the awkward conversation”.  He nodded in agreement and said “so true”.

It may not be comfortable, in fact, in many cases it is quite awkward, but the message that comes with it is that they have a parent who sees all of who they are, and loves them, not despite what they are experiencing, but wholly inclusive of it.