As I’m in my fourth decade of life, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what my purpose is. In the larger picture and in the small as well. Who I am to those around me, and what impact I hold. I also think a great deal about the tiny person I’m helping to raise, and the immense power my words will mean to her.
Our internal voices are developed so deeply, that as adults many of us know not where they even came from. It’s a miss mash of so many different positive and negative things we have heard in the years that came before, and likely, very few can ever be pinned down to something specific.
That voice holds a great deal of power, one that defines us every moment of every day. It is the only friend or enemy that follows us wherever we go. It creates esteem or depletes it. It enables us or discourages us. It is the source if both success and failure. Yet, do we truly give it the credence it deserves?
How does this relate to mom life? Raising a tiny human? It starts with those Facebook things that get shared all the time. Claiming this and that about motherhood and children with cute pictures that look like there was way more time put into them than your kids dance recital. But in there is some truth. As parents, our words form our children’s inner monologue. It makes perfect sense, as their first and sometimes only source of daily contact, why wouldn’t it?
The negative traits we see get amplified, and the positive do as well. But, what about all of those other words we say too? The words we say to ourselves, without thinking?
It’s more than a mama that laments on her weight or a dad that’s disappointed in his job. Your entire outlook defines your child’s future and we hardly begin to consider this when they set the sweet bundle of joy in your arms at the hospital.
No one prepares you with the words, “take care of their self esteem, because when they have their midlife crisis, you’re going to be to blame.”
That’s the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. And understandably. But what we as parents have the capability to know more.
Our generation is breaking the stigma on mental health, first and foremost, and normalizing the troubles that nearly everyone has in their lives. Chances are, you’ll have anxiety or depression at some point in your life. What we can do as parents is understand that the same is true for our children.
My world opened up to this thought as Luciana faced her first social struggles at school. Autism made things difficult to process, but it also gave her this innate, sometimes repetitive to a flaw, desire to work out social situations through role play.
Countless days after school I rocked her, sobbing through a meltdown, slowly unraveling the ball of mixed up wires that autism tangled up for her. We’d talk, and talk and talk, and eventually it eased. We would find it easier to understand things that happened, and find ways to express how it felt, if only to mama.
Slowly, the world started to make sense.
I could have punished, or ignored this. Written it off as bad behavior or bad parenting. But it wasn’t, it needed me, and I had to learn from her, how to fix my own ball of wires along the way. They don't make a book for this type of thing, and it's not talked about between parents. But it's there, and we need to recognize it.
Just a few short weeks ago, I started hearing Luciana do some self talk from the other room. “Calm down Luciana, it’s okay.”, and that sort of thing. It took a year, and change, but we got somewhere tangible. She was using self talk, as a skill, to ease her feelings and make sense of it solely.
We have important, confusing jobs as parents. We will never get it all right, but together we can make a generation that will improve upon what we can give them, with tenacity, ingenuity and empathy.
Very Thoughtful.
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