While I raised my girls, they were raising me to be this woman
How parenting parents you most of all.
My youngest daughter is at the middling age, her early childhood over with that modern coming of age ceremony - joining Tik Tok and being ready with Secondary school sullen.
She is now more conscious of time passing, of sands shifting, slower than she sometimes wants, and quicker than she sometimes needs. She’s started a list in her journal of ‘mum-isms’ - things I have taught her, perhaps recognising that I won’t always be here.
So far her list of things I’ve taught her has left me feeling a little underwhelmed, given the overwhelm of single parenting them for so many years. Surely my legacy should be longer than 3 points (one of which I added when I had to explain what the brush beside the toilet was):
Only people-please from a place of strength, not need.
Always walk in the direction of on-coming traffic.
Always clean up your poo in the loo.
Her eldest sister just added two more for her:
Always wear matching underwear (I don’t have the heart to tell them I no longer have the energy or inclination for this).
Never go for a man who waxes his chest.
I mean, really? Eighteen long years of making this job up as I go along, lying awake so many nights worrying, clearing up relentlessly, loving and caring and giving more of myself I knew was in me and that? That is what they can come up with?
I’m hoping things like be kind, appreciate what you have before you look to what you lack, and don’t spend all your money at once have just landed by osmosis into their central wiring, and aren’t things I’ll have to sneak into her book when she’s not looking.
But it got me thinking. Not about the loooooong list of other things I will need to remind her is my maternal legacy
girl friends last longer than boyfriends
its not your weight that’s important but health and fitness…
for example, but of the life lessons and rules for living and loving well that they have taught me.
It’s made me think about the woman they have raised.
The big positive psychology trend in recent years has been around learning to parent ourselves. The idea that while our own parents will have done a job of varying success, we must finish the job. We have to colour in the ghostly gaps they just weren’t equipped with the right paint to do.
When I coach, I often refer to these gaps - along with the gifts - we get from our childhood. No childhood is perfect, no parent gets it all right. Not your parents, not you. That’s both a burden and a relief for those of us struggling to bring little humans into the world in one piece. You want so desperately to get every single thing right, to catch every nuance like whispering dandelion wisps blown away by the wind, in case that was the thing that becomes the bigger thing, and you missed it. Yet to understand that you just humanly can’t catch them all, means you can just do the very best you can, knowing that part of being a human is learning how to fill in the gaps yourself, just as your kids will.
But what about the parenting we get from our kids?
As the time is fast approaching when I hand my eldest daughter a glass of 18th birthday bubbles and sigh with relief that I lasted this far, and she has grown into such a beautiful, glorious young woman, I reflect on how I have grown, alongside her. As she took tentative steps, so did I, thrust into a relationship that would change me more than any other experience in my life.
I’ve raised a human to adulthood (and two more coming down the line), most of it single parenting. I’ve grown more as a person in these 18 years than in any other time since my own first 18 years. As the sands shifts, the footsteps of all our holidays and daily dances together through life can feel washed away, but the fact is I walk differently now, deeper, defter, my footprints surer in the whatever sands I walk.
While my parents formed the basis, and I figured out how to colour myself in, my children created the light and shade. The depths of me and the shallowness. The light on my love and generosity and kindness, and the shade on my selfishness and vulnerability. They made me walk into a room of mirrors, where all of me was exposed; the beauty and the beast.
They have access to my nuclear codes. The ones deep rooted and under 24 hour lock. They can unpick that lock with a glare and a sneer like no-one else every could. And there is a reason we keep our most frightful selves under lock and key. Seeing her emerge made me confront and deal with her in ways I've never had to. I didn’t like who my children sometimes saw; even though I can justify the exhaustion, frustration and fear exposed by raising them alone, it forced me to confront my demons and what a gift that has been.
They have pushed me so far out of my comfort zone, there where times I thought I’d never feel comfortable again. That has taught me a level of bravery I didn’t know I wanted to find. They taught me to jump into the sea and become a mermaid, not stand on the edge, my feet afraid of the cold.
I’ve learned I have Herculean patience. And renewal for love in the face of teenage terrorism.
I’ve had to learn the hard way not to take things personally. That I can be so selfless in the knowledge that my job is not to get them to like me (and oh how I am desperate, and needy and vulnerable for that) but to get them to like themselves.
Their three different personalities and stages means I’m on constant alert. Just as I breath one sigh of relief that I’ve survived THAT phase with that child, a new held breath takes hold as another phase phases in so insidiously and silently, I turn round and it smacks me in the face.
They have also raised me to new heights of myself.
They have given me a guiding light, a beacon of the person I want to be, so desperately have to be, to be the mother I want them to have, and the woman I want to show them they can be.
I learned how much I was loved as a baby, my mum teaching me the songs she must have sung to me. Her love for them, loved me anew.
The sound of their early years was singing and song. The nursery rhymes and the music, and my mum’s lullabies. Now we go to concerts - our music tastes melding and melodising in harmony. I am sandwiched in a musical legacy of love.
I fight more and more now to be me, not just the mother. To be seen for me, Alana. A person. Not the cleaner upper. The ATM. The boring bearer of banal rules and nagging chores. To reconnect to me so I can connect them as a person in my own right.
They’ve reminded me who I was, as I continually figure out who I am.
I see their obnoxiousness, fear, ambition and dreams. The heady mix of insecurity and brazen know-it-all confidence. And it has connected me to my young self who was all those things. It’s easy to think we stagnate at midlife because our lives become so much about others, we can forget who we are and who we are to ourselves. I raise these young people and am reminded of my young self and that has helped me settle better with who I am now.
My youth. It is gone. In bikinis we lie side by side and I am consumed with jealously at the smoothness of their skin and I have had to learn to stop apologising. To walk with pride for I am, Still Standing. Still dancing. And they remind me that I am not old and need to forget about weight but focus intensely on my fitness and health. I cannot succumb to the body battering that I am somehow less because there is little bit more of me now. I have to live that, to show them how to live that.
As my eldest daughter embarks on her first love, I anticipate my next love, perhaps the love. To know at 53 it is still to come, and inspired by her blistering blaze of first love intensity, I know how to temper myself so I don’t lose myself in another. They won’t be there to complete my life, but to compliment it.
They have raised me. To the ground. To new heights. And hopefully, as the sands continued to shimmy and shift, we continue to learn from each other, raising each other, and importantly, ourselves.
I really loved reading this. You describe so honestly just how difficult it must be to raise children, and yet you also somehow make it sound exciting. Beautiful piece!
This is stunning. Thoughtful. Thought provoking. Wonderful. Thank you.