natural parenting center

drollers

In a couple of weeks, this girl will be turning three years old. As we anticipate this monumental event in her life, we are spending some serious time together searching the net for the perfect baby doll stroller. We have chosen and re-chosen different models and types for many days, now. She liked the Valco Baby Princess Doll Stroller's pram style, but the color black wasn't quite right. For about an hour or so, the Alexander Doll Sweet Baby Nursery Stroller (for the color: pink) was in. Other favorites-of-the-moment have included the Chicco 00067878000000 CT 0 5 Doll Stroller(two handles and pink with hood), Graco Mirage Doll Stroller (pink, hood, with pink tray in front), the Classic Pink Baby Doll Carriage Stroller (5 in 1, including diaper bag, bed, two handled basinette and more), the Double Side By Side Umbrella Stroller (side by side? cool!!), the Graco Duoglider Twin Doll Stroller (ah hem..two hoods), the Classic Doll Twin Double Stroller (she could jog with it), then there was the one where the two babies face each other, and the one which included the car seat, neither of which I can relocate in the Google results right now.

As we go through the differing options, she will point out her top pick of the moment and say, "That one. I want that one for my berfday. Can we order that one for my berfday?" And I say YES.

This girl is not without her baby gear. She has a doll Ergo, sling, wrap, front carrier, a swing and the latest count is twelve babies. And yes, she already has two other strollers. The thing is, she uses them all, all the time. She is crazy about babies. 

It would be tempting, while she sits on my lap and we go through page after page of baby doll stroller results, to remind her that she already has two strollers. I could also highlight the similarities between the ones she already has and the ones she is looking at. When I look through my own eyes, I can sometimes barely see any difference and anyways, looking at all these strollers is getting tedious (Ha...how much time could I spend on the computer looking at what interests ME?).  When I look through my own lens, I might think this is totally ridiculous and borderline insane. My mind might say, "Are you kidding me? You want that cheap hunk of plastic pink crap with plastic wheels and ruffled polyester hood when you have this lovely wooden eco-friendly edition that is much more socially acceptable?"

But, and this "but" may be the single most defining value I hold for mothering, when I stop looking through MY eyes and look instead through HER eyes, I see an entirely different world. It is a world where bubbled pink wheels make all the difference. Where twin seats side by side rather than one behind the other is a life altering decision. In her world, this matters because the "play" she does each day is serious work to her. It is the real thing.

And, when I wade past the content of what we are talking about and plug into her energy, I feel lightning snuggled up on my lap. She is lit up, on fire, electric with the pulse of her own passion. 

We may negotiate letting go of some of what we have to make room for a new item. I may ask questions to help her make the decision based on things I know she cares about more than the whim of the moment. We might talk about money. 

Through all of it, though, this and all the other stuff that comes up a million times a day, I want to press my ear over her heart and hear what is inside there. Not what I want to be in there or what I think should be in there, or what could help me be less embarrassed when people come over or even what was in there yesterday, because today might be different. I want to stoke HER fires.

Empathy. Parenting with empathy. I keep stumbling upon the enormity of this thing, realizing over and over that it has so little to do with saying a certain thing in a certain way and everything to do with the stance I choose to embody as a mother. 

Stretching myself beyond the borders of my own skin to feel into her, into him, into you...it is a generous thing to give mySELF as it shrinks the small, personality-driven me and flexes the muscle of Essence: the joy generator.

Another brilliant book

Parenting For Social Change is a beautiful book, full of solid, well-researched arguments and inspirational stories designed to help us move away from CONTROL of our children, in all its subtle and glaring forms, to step into the enriching practice of SUPPORTIVE parenting.

The implications are far reaching and Teresa has me looking at the sneaky and unconscious patterns and habits of control which I perpetuate. I've been a fan of her website for some time and was delighted to realize she had written a book. She had me with this:  "I try not to use the words my children, but instead have shifted my thinking, talking and writing to the children who share my life."

Teresa advocates parenting in which: 

• children are viewed as full human beings, valuable in their own right;
• the focus is on the present, with the goal being to honor children's humanity;
• transforming the parent-child relationship can create broader social change, thus the child-parent relationship is primary, and;
• the work we need to do is about ourselves as parents, not about changing children.

Our culture operates on the paradigm of control and domination and this bleeds into mainstream parenting. We are surrounded by models of this at the playground, in the grocery store, from our own upbringings. In order to open my own mind and become conscious of these hidden assumptions and beliefs, I need to immerse myself in every available source of A DIFFERENT WAY OF BEING WITH CHILDREN (and with myself) and this book has more than inspired just that for me. 

There are so many rich quotes I want to share with you. Here are a few (in hopes that you will read the book, too!):

"I asserted my need to control through the food my family ate: no fast food, no "junk" food, only one piece of a sweet or sugary treat and only once in a while. When I look back at this need to control, I know that so much of it was a desire to regain the power I lost as a child. I still struggle with this loss and have to work to not use the loss of control over my own life as an excuse to exercise it over those around me."

"All children want the love and approval of their parents and will often do anything to ensure that they get them. When we, as parents, try to control a child's emotions, we strip her of who she is in that moment and require that she push her emotions down rather than allowing the feelings to flow."

"In looking at the impact of parental influence on children's eating behaviors, researchers have found that restricting access to certain foods and pressuring a child to eat more might have the short-term result of getting a child to comply with the parent's expectations. However, in the long term coercion and control have the opposite effect. For example, when access to food is restricted, there is evidence that in the long term children tend to eat when not hungry, do not have the ability to self-regulate their diet, and tend to gain weight as well as have a negative self-image."

"We should treat children with the respect that all human beings deserve simply because it is the right thing to do. How we treat others in our lives is a reflection of our own humanity. If the children in our lives experience control, domination and oppression as a result of their status as children, we all lose as human beings."

If you ever have thoughts in your head such as...

...are they just manipulating me?

...they can't treat me like this.

...but if I let them then they will just take advantage.

...I can't control them so I must be a horrible parent.

...They are just testing my boundaries.

 

Or any of the other million false ideas which run amok, being misinterpreted as "truths" and you just KNOW in your heart and gut that there must be a different way, then this book will help to show you just that. Teresa challenges our fears and the norms of oppression in our culture, demonstrating how harmful they are to children and reminds us of the worthiness and immense value of being a supportive parent: for our children AND our own well-being.  Once you've decided that you feel compelled to let go of any habit of control (which you probably already have otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog), then the work of dismantling your own dark fears and furies begin (and continues...).

This is the place where I want to be with you, to hold your hand as you shed that old, too tight skin and allow something else emerge, radiant and raw. It is scary and beautiful, this path of liberation.  If you want it, its yours. 

Listen to an interview with Teresa here.

Wondering...

Are we promoting narcissism when we ask our kids..."How would you like it if someone did that to you?"

For many parents, the intention is to help a child understand someone else's feelings, maybe they even have empathy in mind, and yet, it seems this strategy might create the opposite effect. It's a rhetorical question which is shaming to a child. It may break the trust and connection between us. 

I've done it and it has felt horrible. In the moment, I am angry and maybe afraid of what the other parents are thinking. I'm fearful that this child I love will "turn out" to not be empathic if I don't "teach" that lesson. I'm falling into the abyss of unconsciousness, automatically following the unquestioned parenting norm. Ugh. 

Any movement in the world that is born of fear or anger is a movement better left undone. Something inside us is begging for our tender attention and softness. It's always about us. 

What does your soul want?

When you do things from your soul, 

you feel a river moving in you, 

a joy.

Rumi

 

Group Phone Consult!

It's on ladies. 

via talkfeeleez.typepad.com

This is SO worth every penny and every minute. One hour for $20 to get better-than-anything-you've-ever-heard perspectives on sibling struggles. Go for it!

cucumber salad

Inspired by our neighbors, one of whom owns Missoula's Best Asian Restaurant-Iza, we made this fresh cucumber salad the other day.

Three cucumbers, peeled and chopped

Crispy almonds, chopped, about a cup (or you could pan roast almonds instead)

Handful of beansprouts

Sesame oil, tamari, lime juice, celtic sea salt

Chopped fresh basil and cilantro

It was the perfect combination of crunchy and tangy and salty and fresh. We loved it. 

Also, this week...

Another morning feast which included french bread made with little baguette rounds. I've never done that before, but we'll be doing it again, for sure.

Warm days, water balloons, filling up the pool, swinging in the hammock and other spring/summer delights. We delivered "gifts" of water balloons to our neighbors, this morning. If you could have seen their faces...and then it's like I could see them let go of the adult "what am I supposed to do with this" and remember the child-pure-life-is-sweet-and-fun as the big grin spread across their faces. 

I am constantly lit up from the inside because I get to live with children. In the middle of other-than-grateful feelings, I drag my mental self back to this stunning realization because it is, beyond any scrap of doubt, the best time of my life.

Thank you doesn't begin to say it.

bloom

Oh just look at this. These native species, in bloom, surviving torential winds, boiling rains, frigid snow and the continual relentless creep of invasive plants. Tenacious in their hold on the little spot of earth they inhabit.

Like self-adoring thoughts holding out against the invasion of not-good-enough thinking.

Yesterday, having stayed up late the night before, I was weary and beaten down before my eyelids opened. Witnessing is the most fantastic thing, though, because it pulls me out of my immersion in the tight, constricted space that a sleepy mind insists upon, where I find it almost impossible to be kind.

Perhaps the hardest thing about sleep deprivation, which ALL mamas know oh so well, is that it jolts us back into our primal brain where all habitual, conditioned thought patterns live, central of which is self-loathing, yes?  Our conscious brain, abundant with how we want to be, becomes a distant whisper.

Yet the witness saved me. I fell down the deep hole of self-hatred when I caught a glimpse of myself in the full length mirror of the library bathroom. Immersed back into a panicked state, sending out drowning texts to girlfriends, things were black and too familiar. Disconnected from myself, disconnected from my children, blind to the glory of the day around me.

Quickly though, I stepped outside of myself and looked down. Witness. Within seconds, I was free again. Doing cartwheels in the field with them, lifting our shirts to let the sun kiss our bellies. The native realization of who we really are, surviving.

And they felt the shift, devouring the aliveness I could now offer up.

I love you, mama, till my dying day. I love you. I love you. I love you.

 

Eating God

I have been a compulsive eater for most of my life. Essentially, this means...

::I ate when I wasn't  hungry

::I ate past feeling full

::I didn't what I really wanted

The number of books that I've read about what I should eat could earn me an honorary doctorate in something, maybe Eating Rules. Each rule set comes with a tidy label, too..vegetarian, macrobiotic, raw foodist, Nourishing Traditions or Weston A. Price, blah blah blah. I wrote about my declaration of shedding labels here. Funny thing is that you can find evidence for EVERY WAY OF EATING IMAGINABLE. I'm talking about honest to goodness "scientific proof" for the validity of eating any food or following any food eating system possible. Isn't that a little curious?

Most of my eating has been for the purpose of losing weight or changing my body in some way. That means restriction of some sort which is always an automatic set up for bingeing which is always an automatic failure of said original goal. The problem for me has been that ALL of these rules are external and equate to me giving the authority of my own body over to outside experts.  

I remember being 12 years old and eating cookies and spitting them out to try to get the taste without the calories. 

Being pregnant was the first time that I can remember that I ever let myself actually want what I wanted and have it. The power of giving myself that kind of permission to TRUST MY BODY, to trust every craving and to eat food for pleasure, to savor without counting fat grams or calories, was radical. It is radical. 

The problem with any expert advice is that  ALL of these rules are external and equate to denying the authority of my own self. When I read Women, Food and God, I wept. A Lot. Relief, regret, inspired, scared, simply being moved by the beauty and honesty of Geneen's writing. 

Then I began to look at these children I love.  Geneen has seven Guidelines for eating which boil down to this:

1. Eat when you are hungry. Eat what you want.

2. When you are not hungry, feel your feelings.

When we eat like this, it is like we are Eating God. We love ourselves with food. (Why not love ourselves with EVERY thing we say and do and think? But we'll save that for the E-Course-two days left to sign up.) That is what I want to give these children: an unwavering trust in themselves and their bodies.

It's certainly not the kind of parenting advice we see too often, let alone witness first hand. Thankfully my dogged hunt for inspiration in this arena has turned up some gems like this and this and this. 

So, we are starting here with a new tradition of Morning Feasts:

They wake up excited and ask, Can we have another feast today? Though, honestly, it could just be that we are all actually outside eating in the sunshine that is just as nourishing and fantastic.

Letting them choose what they want to eat feels scary and thrilling to me. Is this another adventure in radical trust, like the computer watching episode? I don't know. I keep coming back to trust and autonomy and I am willing to play at the edges of nurturing their inner authority because I know that the strength of the safe and loving container within which I hold them is powerful.

The dominate paradigm of control is not working for our planet, and I am not willing to perpetuate it within our family by standing guard at the fridge. There are ample opportunities for children to come up against the limits of living in a physical body in a physical world and I will stand by them as they navigate these experiences of authentic adversity (more on this to come), rather than create unnecessary power-over experiences which build resentment and anger and block their own intuition and self-trust.

In the meantime, may I move from fear (terror?) into trust that they know what food their body needs and when. May I nurture their inner knowing of how to love themselves with food. One step at a time as we see where this leads us.

 

 

run with a view

These posts offer up a single snapshot taken during a run, offered to share with you a sense of this place we call home (Missoula, Montana) and an appreciation for this body which, through some miracle, moves me through space each day.

However you move your body and wherever you live, if you would like to share your own snapshot here, please do. 

 

 

magic in twenty minutes a day

You can shift from struggle and frustration to MAGIC in your relationship with your children with 20 minutes a day. That's all. That's what this E-Course is asking of you. That's all. Twenty minutes  a day of wholehearted attention. Become your own beloved and then watch that fulfillment spread to your children. Let yourself have this. 5 days left to sign up. 

xo