I can be a bit of a chameleon, I’m sure it brings many positives aspects to my life, but it also often leads me to ‘betray’ myself. The deeply subconscious need to fit in and be accepted means that unknowingly I mimic accents and intonations of speech. I am automatically asked ‘where are you from’ on a first meeting because my voice is so full of these global interactions my own accent is hard to place. It seems, I have absorbed and retained a little piece of almost everyone I’ve met!
I have belatedly acknowledged this part of myself and become more curious and reflective about it, and it has allowed me to witness how else this chameleonic tendency plays out in my life.
Whilst recently spending time with friends who parent in some quite polar ways to me, I recognised how their choices and energy pulled me away from where I wanted to be as a parent. I had noticed it in myself before, in a beautiful way, how I knew that I appreciated my own mothering abilities and efforts when I was in a circle of friends who were aspiring to similar aims of parenting, but I had yet to really note that I could be pulled in the opposite direction too.
What I gleaned from this was how integral our arms of support are as vulnerable new mothers. When we are in the midst of the mothering fog and we are drooping with tiredness and fretful with confused intentions, we need to be held and loved by those who can support and nurture our nascent desires to be the type of mother we want, however that looks.
In these recent days, when I felt myself to be shorter, less patient and with higher than necessary expectations of my little ones, I recognised that the circle I was standing in felt alien to me. I felt fear of judgements and I batted off criticisms of my children’s behaviour and it led me to tension and stress, too much of which ended up in my children’s fields. It led me back down that path of mother’s guilt…. the shoulds, the angsts, the regrets.
I yearned for my home, my circle of mothers who I have uncovered and discovered in my community, who inspire me and teach me, guide me and love me, welcome me and trust me; all of the traits that I wish to offer to my children.
Denise Linn recently quoted on her facebook page:
‘When you’re in the middle of changing and transforming, it’s not uncommon for those who are closest to you to feel threatened, or to judge you,… or even to try to stop you from changing.
Love them anyway.
(And it’s okay to love them from a far distance!)’
Those last words in brackets are hugely important to me, that permission to leave a healthy distance with those who cannot, for whatever reason, sit with their arms of support around me whilst I change and grow into my role of Mother.