Parenting and Letting Go
Motherhood is an endless cascade of letting go.
It is always teaching me the valuable lesson of impermanence and how to befriend the constant ebb and flow. It seems like right when I get comfortable with an age or a stage and find my groove in parenting, things change.
Maybe I’m sensing change because summer is coming to an end, and it was a fun one since restrictions from Covid were mostly lifted. Maybe it’s because I had my first legit sex ed talk with my almost 9 year old daughter.
She started 3rd grade a few weeks back and suddenly matured overnight. Just last week she wanted all the ‘baby stuff’ gone from her room and did such a deep clean on her room. It looked like she took a master course in Marie Kondo’s superb purging style of organizing.
Together we sifted through once-loved dolls and dresses, revisiting and cherishing memories, and letting them go one by one. I see her crossing the threshold into tweendom with eye rolls and OMG’s, and can’t help but feel the need to grieve the end of her early childhood.
Another chapter ending; a new one beginning.
Never-ending transitions and releasing is not just a part of this pre-adolescent stage, but has been here since birth. I held her tight after a traumatic birth, and all the years since have been endless nourishing, molding, shaping, attending to. And I can’t forget to mention the endless serving of snacks. These moments that have been strung together to make up the past many years have been lovely, draining, and heart-touching all at the same time. Each moment serving as a passageway into the next. Some moments are more significant and profound because they’re more memorable, more painful, more joyful, more fearful, more impactful on the heart, the nervous system and the soul.
Pema Chodron’s quote:
“to be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
A part of me never liked this quote. The part of me that wants to hold on and find comfort in things staying the same. This part wants safety through predictability. This shouldn’t be discounted, since this is an important part of feeling secure and regulated. This consistency in relationships is essential to how we create secure attachments.
Yet a wiser part of me understands this quote and when I allow the words to sink into my deeper well of knowingness, I remember the truth of each moment truly being a gift. To feel safe and open enough to fully take it in, is the work I get to keep doing.
When I can show up present to whatever is here and turn towards it, the moment feels like it’s truly lived. But like Pema says, to feel this aliveness also includes the understanding that it ends. Its form will change. Children will grow up and not need us like they used to. They will grow and age, just like the rest of us. Can I continue to befriend each stage, tend to the emotions as the messenger and visitor they are, and let go with grace.
So while I continue to make the nest as comfortable as I can, I can also trust that when the eventual falling from the nest happens, both myself and my child are given another opportunity to learn to fly.
