I am a brand new grandmother! I had the privilege of being present in my grandson’s life for the first three weeks of his life.
I want my daughter and her husband to find their own way into being parents, so I kind of hung out in the background, being useful wherever I could. While I did laundry and washed dishes and cooked and walked dogs, or hung out on my computer in the corner, I was doing my best to offer an energy field of quiet presence that they and their baby can tune to, consciously and unconsciously.
When I was a young mother (well, and ever since!) I slowly began to realize that I was going to find myself eating a lot of my words about the Shoulds, the rules that I had inhaled from others about things I would never do, or always do, as a parent. I saw my daughter already doing this too, as she bent to trying a pacifier after all. Or offering expressed breast milk in a bottle, as desperation took over, wanting to get this baby to eat so they both could sleep.
She said that she had heard about being sleep deprived, but that no one talked about what it was from…all the fussing and crying and thinking something might be wrong, and nothing you do helps, and feeling rejected by your baby.
As she and her husband tried to deal with a crying baby at night, they had him in bed with them. But she had been rigidly keeping herself awake every night out of fear that she would roll over on him, or that her husband would. When she feels this way, I can sense her shutting down any inner movement of awareness, any body-felt intuitions that might lead her toward solutions.
We had an intense conversation in the middle of a rather sleepless night about this, after she, sobbing, came into my room with a howling baby. I wanted to say that her whole being is so deeply attuned to her baby, it is really really unlikely that she would roll over on him. And her husband the same.
But finally she burst out, “But I don’t trust myself!”
I thought, there is the core. How does one learn to trust oneself? How does a parent teach a child to trust her or himself? How does a young mother or father learn to trust their own deepest instincts? Or even recognize them?
As I feel into these questions, I understand that it is about learning to access our deep core of sovereignty. It is not even so much a process or a learning, but an “opening to, a dropping into” a sense of your own presence, and your belongingness in the presence of the earth.
As a new grandmother, as an ancestor, and as a minister/priest, I have been considering all this, with a deep creative being-sensing-wondering.
In one of my classes perhaps you have experienced a meditation which invites us to consider our the deep sense of sacred sovereignty at our center.
In this meditation you draw your head into your torso, letting go of your connection with time… then you draw your arms into your torso, releasing your engagement with the world… and you draw your legs into your torso, releasing your connection with space. You float in the open heart-space of your torso experiencing your potentiality, your essential life force, at the heart of each of us as a human. Finally, you extend intentionally from your torso into each space again, maintaining the awareness of your source vitality.
I doubt that my daughter would be interested this meditation, right now in her life. But I could feel that as I intentionally embodied this deep sense of presence, I was creating a subtle energy field that could very gently teach in another kind of way.
Being with my daughter and her new family, I was feeling my way as I imagine an angel might: helpful, holding the intention to be present in the background with wisdom, without preaching or dominating. Being a wizard, “a custodian of boundaries… knowing when to support boundaries because they need to contain something in order to provide focus and holding, knowing when to open them and enlarge them to bring a greater space into being.” (David Spangler)
I was practicing what David calls being an “‘incarnational agent,’ someone whose energy field, presence and actions honor, foster and support the incarnational process in everything and everyone around them.”
What a wonderful spiritual definition of parenthood! Or any kind of partnership.
With my love and blessings,
Rue
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