Like for Like

When I was a teenager, my mother and I would get into vitriolic arguments, on a not infrequent basis, and I remember very clearly reaching a place where I said to myself ‘I will not let her see how much she hurts me’.  I quickly learned how to respond to pain with a cold, hard exterior. 

She was no longer able to see the effects of her words and actions on my soul, as much as they still wounded me internally.  I felt more protected, safe and in control when my shutters came down and I could bat away the slights. 

I needed to do that then, I didn’t have any other tools and it was a question of emotional survival. But during the recent weeks of upheaval in my relationship, I have realised how ingrained that technique is in my psyche and how disconnecting and triggering it has been to my partner. 

As my awareness on this grows, I’ve noticed how many people hold similar traits, how natural our defensive hard stances are in response to perceived attack. I observe how the current representation of feminism seems to echo this too. Our societal responses are cold, hard and super boundaried. 

And I get it, I haven’t been cold and hard to my partner because he’s an innocent bystander, we have created a dynamic between us that ping-pongs back and forth between our defence mechanisms. It is understandable that we have wanted to protect ourselves, sometimes from real threat, more often from projected theories, but it has not helped us to grow, to learn and discover our heartfelt truths. 

In these past weeks when I’ve been unable to even pretend to protect my raw feelings, when my heart has been cracked open, I have also been seen and witnessed with restorative love and gentleness. As my defences fell, so it allowed the whole structure of defences between us to crumble and for total vulnerability, total truth, to be revealed and explored. 

The mirror of our souls is a tenant of my belief, that like reflects like, but that is easily forgotten when it feels so natural to create protection from harm. If my walls are up, I may be safe but I am also disconnected, so it becomes a choice to risk the pain, risk the vulnerability, in order to have the chance for a more magnificent life than one that is simply safe. 

Our Natural State

My husband and I are in the very midst of ironing out some of the bumps and grooves that appear in any long term relationship. To add to the fun, we are both in our early forties and hitting that developmental stage (yes, adults have them too!) aka ‘ the midlife crisis’ where all of our childhood wounds pop up with varying stages of intensity, to be faced and dealt with. To top it off, we are just through the very very early years of parenting, which is just one big fog, and now that the kids are at school there is space to face the shit. 

It sucks. It’s hard.  And mostly it is bloody painful. I think I have cried more in the last 3 weeks than I have in the last 10 years. And with this ironing, unpicking, rebuilding and connecting there have been some sweet and tender times, a second honeymoon of sensitivity and kindness. But mostly it hurts, just like any wounds do. We are digging out the detritus that has been left in over the years, the bits causing sores and infections, cleaning them out and suturing them up. 

So whilst I have swung between grief, rage, love, hope, fear and happiness like some sort of rollercoaster on hyper drive, my grounding has been the understanding that our natural state is love. 

This is the state we come into the world, pure love. 

So when my own or someone else’s behaviour, actions or words appear unloving or hurtful, my faith in humanity and our core state, helps me to understand that these come from a wounding that needs to heal. That our natural state of love is our instinctive place to wish to return to and our intentions are drawn from there. It is so easy to hear and be the worst of things, to use anger and coldness as a crutch for survival, but true connection, true living can only come from love; no matter how much it might hurt to get there. 

Trigger Me Tantrum

I have been musing over children’s tantrums and how so often the initiating triggers can be unnoticed; the act of distress being so all consuming and energetically confronting that the source becomes lost in the moment. Sadly, when the catalysts are missed the opportunity for empathy, resolution, connection and growth are usually missed too.

My reflections have led me to narrow down what I believe to be the 3 key triggers that lead to emotional meltdown: diet, sleep and anxiety/fear.

Guaranteed that my children will flip out if over tired, filled with refined sugar or too much wheat and guaranteed, if they are unable to control events that cause them concern or are faced with an emotionally threatening situation, they will act out of character and generally become obstructive, unreasonable and sometimes hysterical. But, if I spot that initiator and manage to support them through it, they feel understood, heard and loved. And they grow to understand themselves better because of the complete process.

As I considered these flashpoints, I realised that they naturally apply to adults too. Maybe we don’t tantrum quite in the style of kids (maybe we do sometimes too!) but those places where we act out, where we are less patient, less tolerant, less kind, also predominantly derive from these 3 core triggers.

Sleep and Diet, whilst often in disorder, are more simply managed and controlled. By recognising the importance of their part in our mental wellbeing they can be adjusted to the appropriate priority.

Anxiety and Fear are trickier; far less control; the numerous possibilities of spontaneous and unexpected catalysts; and generally some of life’s more challenging obstacles that can be hurled in our direction at any given moment.

But knowledge is still power and in this case often retrospectively.  At those time when I find myself presenting the less pleasant side of my nature, it is so helpful for me to investigate these 3 triggers and see how I can adjust or support them. If it is anxiety or fear that has reared up, I can take steps to learn to manage that better, to implement change in my life that can reduce that possibility, or even overcome them completely.

Empathy, resolution, connection and growth are created for me, for my children and for others when I take a breath to explore the source of the behaviour. No one tantrums because they think it’s cool or healthy, it’s a hard place to go and it deserves every effort to understand it.

Values

I was recently challenged to ‘contribute’ more to my family through the means of bringing in income. It was directed at me with the implication that all I do is live off my husband and swan about.

Naturally, I felt hurt and insulted.

I work hard. Most days the only time I get to sit down between 6.30am and 8pm is in the car to and from the school run and at supper; my mind is constantly flitting from one ‘to do’ item to the next and wondering how many I can multitask simultaneously. Oh and yes about once a week I will meet a friend for a coffee or a catch up, my rest time, because my job is all-day-and-all-night-every-single-day, so a coffee break every now and then is just basic essential care.

Many articles have crossed checked the monetary value of a SAHM (Stay at Home Mum) and have discovered that to replicate their input into the household would require a vast outlay of money on separate personnel. But I don’t want to compare my job to gold coins, I want to shift the perspective to our core values, money is certainly a necessary commodity but it is not the ultimate need.

In relationships we discuss whether or not we have similar values, rarely does this simply mean how much finance each partner will contribute. More often than not these values include honesty, respect, communication, parenting choices and family relationships. Do the values marry? If so, these are signs of potentially strong and life-long relationships.

For me, wholesome values are not just in partnered relationships but across the board in friendships, work peers, community connections and of course within our parent/child dynamics.

So when my ‘value’ as a SAHM was narrowed into the crude description as to whether or not I brought home gold coins, I felt a deep grief for all that I provide to my family, for all the non-material value that is unacknowledged and underappreciated across our societal norms. I felt that grief ripple out to all those individuals who offer their voluntary acts of service to our community to care for the young, old, infirm, environment and animals, who are whitewashed into the background because they don’t bring gold bullion back home. How distorted have our societal values become when my job, to shape, nurture and guide our future generations, is dismissed as luxurious and frivolous?

For me, I hugely value the consistency and security my children receive to help their confidence flourish out into the world; to enable them to stretch their bungee ropes to distant discoveries and bounce right back again when they need. I know that my choice to stay at home is solely built on nurturing their human potential.

That potential is not about shaping them into the best lawyers or doctors, but to help them know their own happiness now and in their future, to help them have the courage to stand up for truth and honour, love and respect.  And all that is a multi-levelled task; it covers presence, diet, response time, emotional well being, sleep, health & friendships.

My daughter recently described her future to me, when she would leave school, what her career would be, how many children she would have, the usual musings of the young and fearless! But what I heard in amongst her description what that she would take a career break to have children; she has chosen a career that she can step out of and return to when she wishes because she values what me being at home means to her and she wants to offer that back to her children too.  It has been important to her, it has been of value.

There is a wonderful analogy in Heidi’s Children where the grandfather is on his deathbed and asks little Marta to go to the high pastures and pick him fresh strawberries. She does as he bids but, with the encouragement of her friends, instead of returning straight home, she sells them in the town and brings home money which she is told will bring her grandfather greater happiness. The grandfather is furious, for he had been looking forward to the succulent, refreshing strawberries all day, and he demands Marta bite the coin to see if it brings the same satisfaction.

This…

This is where our values are mistaken at times, there is no monetary replacement for nourishment, kindness and love and the most glorious thing about these is that they are absolutely free.

So next time someone challenges me to bring greater value to my family, I might just remind them that I gift strawberries not gold.

Initiation

I was listening to a lecture by Robert Moore the other day and heard him describe what happens to our children when they are not supported through to adulthood with the appropriate initiation.

An appropriate initiation meaning a rite of passage supported by the elders of the community that delivers the teenager into their authentic strength, their self belief and their burgeoning knowing.

Robert Moore described how men without initiation have a tendencey to lack the wisdom to handle their natural aggression; it has not been tempered or guided with the knowledge of the elders. This is a big topic of conversation on social media and the world stage right now. Men and their aggression. I’ll come back to that…

He then went on to say that women without initiation have a tendencey to fall into the space of victim; they are not empowered in their self belief and inner strength. Bingo!

Aggressive Men / Victim Women…. is that not the constant narrative on twitter/facebook/instagram etc at the moment. The topic du jour.

Except that we are looking at it face on, rather than behind the scenes. I have heard very few voices who actually understand where this dynamic is coming from, reaching back to our ancestry and forward to our knowledge of psychology to bring forth this vital information.

Our society is failing our children by not supporting, creating and delivering this aspect of transition, from child to adult. We can continue to spend the days verbalising on social media or we can take action and begin to change the world with a true and meaningful understanding of how to achieve that.

Healthy initiation (and university style trauma is definitely not that!) is a critical piece of the puzzle of healing.

 

***

 

I personally know of three global organisations that help to create that process of initiation for men & woman, no matter what age:

The ManKind Project

Woman Within International

Women in Power

Me, Myself, The Snob

I was brought up to be a Snob. Not with any real conscious intention, but just because that’s the way my family’s beliefs lay.

I believed that people who said ‘hay’atch’ instead of ‘aitch’ for the letter H were intellectually inferior; I believed that those who called supper ‘tea’ were common, likewise if napkins were called serviettes. I believed there were strata in society between humans and that our family was thankfully nearer the top than bottom.

I believed this because generation after generation of my family had all believed something similar for far too long.

At 18, I left my privileged echo chamber of private school (and I say this not without gratitude for the experiences and opportunities it provided) and fell into the real world. Not the real real world mind you. Public relations could hardly be called that, but a more culturally diverse environment than I was used to for sure.

In this world, the two A levels I had scraped were deemed major qualifications rather than the desperate failures by my family and academic peers. I was mixing with people whose backgrounds afforded me a window into lifestyles and upbringings that contrasted drastically to my own (and I, who thought I came from the broken side of the family, the rough edge of posh).

And then I dived further… over the years I waitressed and travelled and met more and more people who showed me over and over again how ridiculously narrow my familial belief system had been; how I had been raised to judge people by meaningless standards instead of learning to look into their hearts and meet them human to human.

I see that my family had no malice in their own judgements, they were products of their own upbringing, a continuation of the lineage of pomp and snobbery and done with as much kindness and love as those beliefs can afford.

But now I am entering a new era, a time and age where my own children are beginning their natural formation of opinions about the world around them and I am constantly checking in with myself as to the values I am modelling. Am I carrying old, unhelpful, unkind, judgmental beliefs that I am passing on to my kids or am I shifting the familial system to compassion, acceptance, difference and diversity? I know what I wish to model, but I’m sure my parents thought similarly too, I bet they thought they were raising progressive kids through their own shifts of self awareness and yet I feel their burden of unnecessary opinion heavy on my back.

I feel reactive and triggered by any form of superiority, be it qualifications, age or otherwise. I know now that the humblest and wisest of voices can come from any direction, without a cloak of ego announcing their arrival.

I wonder how my children will view me in another 30 years, what they will perceive to be antiquated notions and what they will choose to do differently.

As I say to my clients, as long as we are moving forward, no matter how slowly, we are still moving forward.

On, on I step, smashing my institutionalised snobbery, one day at a time.

Goodbye My Friend

In the early hours of the morning, my beautiful friend Kim left for spirit. She has left behind, not only her amazing little family, but also her legacy of kindness and wisdom. 

Kim and I met in our early 20’s, both hostesses in a restaurant on the eternally cool Kings Road, Chelsea. She was just a couple of years older than me but had already travelled and explored so much that she carried this worldly aura. I was frippish and naive to her calm and sense. It would have been easy for her to be disdainful of me but instead she embraced the best of me, she’s always done that. 

We whiled away the hours with humour and candour; our friendship honest and simple. And then she left to travel some more and our paths diverged. 

Some 10 years ago, through the gifts of social media, we reconnected across the world; Melbourne to London. We watched each other’s lives as we dived into love & parenthood and the crazy all consuming discoveries that flow with that; we engaged in light comments and philosophical discussions here and there. 

And then she got sick, she was told she had very little time, and we plunged right back into that friendship we had left behind at our hostess stand 20 years ago. 

She has given every ounce of herself to be around for her family for as long as possible, she has walked this illness through three and half years and I have walked alongside behind the written word of our messages as we have shared our loves, our fears, our histories and our hopes. There is nothing like the shadow of death to focus our hearts to truth. 

As she did so many moons ago, she saw the best in me through every conversation, she offered wisdom won through pain and joy and I know she offered that to everyone. One of her fears as she neared the end was that her children might think she had not ‘fought’ hard enough to stay alive and it breaks my heart that she could even consider that of herself when she loved them so passionately and absolutely. She raised herself up and away from her own childhood of pain to offer them the very best of herself because that is the strength of woman she was. 

And now I have had to say goodbye to one of my closest and dearest friends despite not having as much as hugged her for two decades. That is love, that is friendship and that is heartache. 

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

I wrote recently about my kids bickering (A Ruthless Mirror) and how I know that I need to model some more consistent kindness & patience myself before I can really ask much more of them. 

I sincerely believe that our children are reflections of those closest to them and if their behaviour is errant in anyway, more often than not, the adjustments can be made by owning our own shadows and influences. 

But it can feel rather hard and exhausting to feel that weight of responsibility when facing challenging childhood dynamics. Unless of course there is a counter balance. 

This balance would be the ability to see and own the reflection of their gold; their kindnesses, their humour, their generosity and love. 

And I caught myself the other day being unable to hold that gold. I realised the message I told myself was that all their gold belonged solely to them, they were born that way and it was in spite of me rather than with-the-help-of-me that they expressed their brilliance. Yet I would happily flagellate myself when their shadows and darkness expressed themselves too fiercely. 

So to balance my own self-criticism I am going to allow myself a little bit of accountability for all their deliciousness too. I cannot, nor do I wish to, claim it all, for I have witnessed how much they have brought with them in their own souls; but sometimes there are moments when they reflect back to me the positive influences I have had. So now I will absorb these moments, wrap them in love and tuck them into my heart to help me harmonise our little unit. 

I will remember that all is welcome, the good, the bad and the ugly; I will remember to keep on shining my own light to rebalance my darkness. 

And I will be proud of me just as much as I am achingly proud of them. 

I Need A Man

There is a huge part of me that is sitting in anxious resistance to this title but I also know that now is the time to walk through this barrier and embrace a new paradigm. 

I have spent 40 years of my life adamantly claiming that I don’t need a man to be happy or complete or to help or support me. It’s an added nicety that I’ve had one by my side for the last 13 years, who has fathered my children and kept food on the table (organic at that!) and a roof over our head. But in my head and in my speech I have still maintained that I have never ‘needed’ him. 

In fact, in some ways that was a part of our success so far, the fact that I didn’t need him, but I did want him. Need is the ultimate vulnerability and hey I wasn’t going to give into that without a fight! My mother brought me and my brother up mostly single handedly from when I was 8 years old; she was fiercely independent, DIY-ed her way around the home and shunned the lesser skills of her masculine counterparts. She could do a better job and so often that was absolutely true. 

But I have finally clicked. I don’t just want a man, my husband, but I need him too. 

As much as I can take on most of the skills, often assigned to the masculine, there is one thing I absolutely cannot do for myself. I cannot create life. 

No matter how I choose to conceive; in or out of relationship, with or without the actual presence of a man, naturally or aided, personally or anonymously, I still NEED a man’s sperm to unite with my egg in order to create life. 

It was this flash thought that made me reconsider my stance on needing and wanting. In light of the energy of radical feminism, blanket equality and other passionate discussions on gender roles or otherwise, I realised how much my refusal to ‘need’ my man is damaging my relationship with him and with the masculine. 

If I ‘have’ to need him in order to create life, I can either consider that need and minimise it to crude function or I can enlarge it to the more spacious picture of balance; two sides, two offerings, two parts to make one whole. 

By allowing myself to need him, I can expand this idea into exploring where we can support each other within our own personal strengths and weaknesses; to be the yin to his yang and work as a whole unit rather than just as connected individuals.

All of this makes deep spiritual sense to me now.

How much have I been holding and carrying simply because I have refused to need him? Now we can share our loads with respect and harmony, acknowledging our united power and grace whilst balancing our souls. 

I am curious to take this back out into the world and let myself openly need others too; to offer my willing vulnerability as a partnership in so many ways, with my children, with my friends and peers and, most significantly, with the masculine. Just because I can do and achieve something on my own does not mean it is the best or most enlightened way for it to be done.  

Nature offers me constant visual reminders of the beauty, significance and necessity of duality and, as I choose nature to be my guide, I am proud to say how much I need my man.