Letting go of normal

When I stopped trying to make my kid "normal" or even mask as normal, life greatly improved for all of us.
We're not normal (cause normal is a construct, made up of statistical averages and not actual people!) and our charm and lovability does not rely on acceptable behavior.
There is no stigma to our neurodivergent behavior. We are just figuring out how to meet needs in our house. And we are frank about needs.
Lots of experts want to tell you how certain kinds of kids need certain things and honestly, the thing I needed to tell myself is that I do what works for us, regardless of expert opinion. I ask questions, I listen to my intuition, and I am honest with my kiddo (he's 9, so it's age appropriate for his ability).

Non-coercive parenting (called a few different things these days) is hard, culturally. It is COMMON and ACCEPTABLE to want to mold our children into who we want them to be (usually out of fear) but it can also be SO harmful and traumatizing.
I could write a whole book about my experience, but when I met my kid where HE was at, not where people told me he should be, life improved dramatically.

Mama lets go...of people in the village

It's been a year of loss. There's no two-ways about it. Mostly people that have been staples in our daily or at the very least, weekly, lives. It took me a long time to grapple with each one, and I went radio-silent because loss is hard for me.

• I left a job where I had several good friends that I saw daily and had shared my life with for 4 years! 
• Some of our dearest friends moved to the east coast. 
• K left his classroom of 3 years (with the same teacher, in a mixed-age class). 
• Several really close buddies of K (and their families) left our school.
• We recently lost a young nephew of J's to a tragic car accident. 
• K's current teacher is moving away next year.
• We're slowly clearing out our house to sell it (and hopefully build a new one right behind it).

Just to name a few losses in the last 12 months. :S

We just watched Won't You Be My Neighbor (Mr. Rogers...) documentary and to say that that loss was profound for both J and I, is an understatement.

So here I am. Swimming in the sea of loss. It feels overwhelming, actually.

Who are you parenting?

When I named the blog, "Mama Let's Go" I was thinking of the process of letting go as a parent AND what an energetic/impatient kid would say to his mom. It fit.
But today, in a meditation, I heard a different child's voice calling to a different mama. My voice calling to MY mama.
That thought brought on some tears as I made space to really listen to my own 6 year old voice. I could sense my own impatience, my own insistence, my own energy vibrating through me, raring to go.
Powerful.
My son is the age I was (6) when my dad passed away (consequently, at age 41, my current age). We have an ancestral time spread between us. Prior to my dad's passing, he had a brain tumor that my whole family was navigating at various ages and development stages.
I cannot fathom being able to witness my son's growth, change, unfolding and developing while literally losing my mind to a brain tumor, nor can I fathom my husband caring for me and three other children, one an infant, while also trying to witness and encourage an active, bright 6 year old.
Even now, I am in great health, and have only ONE child, and it can be challenging.
So I feel a lot of compassion for both of my parents.

And I am able to (with a lot of therapy) hold both the compassion for my parents in a very tough spot AND the hurt I felt at not being seen the way I wanted to be or even needed to be at times. It's not about blame, but about realizing that in any situation multiple things are happening.

Sometimes my compassion and understanding for my parents swept away my own hurt and longing. They did they best they could. I did the best I could. No point in getting hung up over what happened in the past.

But that's not what this is. This is simply acknowledging that my 6 year old self didn't have the compassion I have now. She wanted to pull her parents into her world of discovery. She wanted to be noticed, appreciated, and encouraged in her voracious curiosity. She didn't want to deal with cancer, she wanted to take things apart and put them back together and sponge up all the stuff she was experiencing around her. She wanted to process her emotional upheaval and her quickly gained wisdom. She wanted to yell, "Mama, let's go!!!!"

K came home the other day with a drawing he had done at summer camp and I was a bit taken aback. It was drawn by hand from a picture, and included 3-D perspective, a concept that is more generally seen in an 8 or 9 year old. Even as an adult with art school experience, I am challenged by it. After I got over that he had drawn it himself (it took a few minutes) I explained that this was somewhat complicated because of the spatial ability it requires. He was confused about why I was so taken aback. It was just his drawing ability.

Similar things have happened this year that have also been equally surprising:
K can speak in an English accent with no problem (and can even do the Scottish accent a bit too).
His memory is amazing.
His comprehension of complex ideas is pretty alarming.
His physical ability is both advanced and effortless.
His reasoning skills are getting to be as good as mine, and occasionally, he has called us out on double-standard practices.

I'm not writing this to brag, but I'm just pointing out that I have had time and space to notice them! A luxury my parents did not have when I was the same age.

A part of me is parenting K the way I wanted to be parented. It's a common practice to find some healing in that. But it dawned on me that that still doesn't provide me parenting of myself. Sure, I can ask questions and stay curious about K, but I really do need to actually do some of that work for myself to really heal the wounds.

It's good just to even listen to my own voice, even if I can't do anything about it because it's in the past. It's healing to acknowledge that a part of me is still yelling that to my mom, my dad, myself, probably a few bosses, and even a few friends.

Birth story

There's a common practice in the birthing world I'm in to write down and share your birth story, no matter what happened. In fact, it's often healing for others to read if your birth story didn't go as planned.

It's about speaking the truth of it for yourself, to a witnessing and loving group.
It's about hearing out loud if there was something that didn't feel right or empowering.
It's about being present to a deep process that may have (usually does) impact on your life and your child's life ever after.
For each birthing person, it's about what it needs to be about to story the process of birth.

I tell my birth story as often as I can. I have not written it down. But the telling of it, hearing my words and weaving the tale, gives it eternal life. If I wrote it down, then the story might stay stuck in the past...but as my child grows, it's important that I keep reaching back and looking at how his beginning (including his life in utero) unfolds into the present.

I had a dream while pregnant that K came out using big, long, complicated words, like a PhD at a Mensa meeting. I woke up laughing because it was just like me to have a dream like that.
While K didn't come out talking, he *did* quickly learn to talk and then mastered complex sentences well before the average milestone. That dream was prophetic in a way. The dream isn't part of the birth story, but it's part of K's beginnings. It highlights that our communication was non-verbal from the beginning.

And what I share about the actual birth is that it wasn't an event, it was just another part of our conversation together. We've been communicating for a long time, well before K's arrival into the world. And the storying of his life is co-created.

It's common to say that a type of birth produces a type of person...but what if a type of person creates a type of birth? What if K needed a c-section for *his* story? What if part of my story was letting go of *my* idea of what birth *should* be and allowing what actually is to have a place in the world?
Instead of saying I failed (by not birthing at home, as was my original intent), I could hold space for mystery and reality and start my child's life in acceptance, rather than with an underlying failure or defeat. I wasn't defeated. I didn't fail. I listened. And that listening transformed me in the moment. It allowed me to push myself AND it allowed me to make peace with not my way. And that is a foundation that I want for my son.
I want to create the possibility that I can be in acceptance of not my way.

When he comes to me with something that isn't my way of doing things (as he has many times already!), I can go back to that moment (actually, the pregnancy wasn't my way, either!) and remind myself that not my way didn't kill me. It came close, but it didn't actually. And him doing his thing won't kill me (or him) either.

Stories are powerful and eternal. In them we define ourselves. We create ourselves. We connect to others, we connect to the Divine. It helps us continue to come alive.

Why do I let go?

When I thought of this blog title years ago, it seemed perfectly appropriate, as I was learning about the release of a bunch of things. It's been a great theme at every point in my development as a parent. It applies to physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional concepts.

Recently, on a long drive home from work, I realized that part of my letting go is aimed at making room. I can't keep it ALL. I have to let things go if I am to participate in the flow of life. Simple enough.

But looking back at my patchwork life, I noticed an umbrella theme that has woven into almost everything I've done or wanted to do since I was little:

Engaged connection.

What has kept me interested, creative, willing, in relationships, at jobs, obsessed, and more, is the desire to connect. I'm an ambivert (intro- and -extro). I love reading and writing. I love sharing, stories, laughter, knowing glances. All of that is really fuel for my life.

And I let go, so that I can remain in the flow of all of that. Letting go allows me to share (and release it into the world). Letting go allows me to reflect on it and then move it to the background of my life. Letting go allows for movement, expansion, and flexible re-defining as needed.

I don't want to consume connection, and I want to integrate it. When I allow my empathetic tendencies to reach out, hold someone momentarily, and then let go, I am only letting go of the moment, *not* the way if affects me. That then becomes a part of me and the container (of me) increases so that the next person I encounter with a similar experience can then connect, through me, to someone else with a similar experience. I am a bridge, a channel, a conduit.

I let go to play, participate, reflect, and connect. Why do you let go?

C'mon Mama, let's go!

I have been bursting with this post for several days and now I need to sit down and let it all out.
I want to write some disclaimers, and excuse my behavior, and allow you to set me/the post aside and call me crazy...that's my normal move. If I get too intense, I want to allow you to walk away and assure you I won't be hurt.

But in this post, I am going to say my piece. I am tired of sitting back, in my motherhood, in my parenthood, and just quietly, to a few people sharing my ideas about what's propagating in the society about motherhood and parenthood.

Most recently, I read an article that got me pretty hot. I have been a working mom for most of my child's life. He's been in school since he was 19 months. He goes all day.
I work from 6:30a until about 4:30p. My husband also works full time. He works on weekends, too. We share chores, we have busy lives (we have several spiritual groups, civic groups, family groups, and friend groups, not to mention family swim time, soccer, school parent groups, and our own home chores and a business we run out of our home), and we take time to enjoy our marriage.

My parenting doesn't take precedence OVER the rest of my life. It's a part of my life. I think I am a great parent. I enjoy it, I like the challenges, I like the triumphs, I love the growth. My child, as lovely as he is, is not the only thing I wake up for each day. He is not the axis upon which my world spins.

Call me whatever you like, but I am tired of slinking away when I hear sacrificing moms talk about how their kids are paramount. My kid isn't paramount. I don't share like this usually because, well, because I get silently judged (yes, I can see and hear you...) and questioned and I simply have to be honest about it. My kid is awesome. But if he took precedence over me for any substantial length of time, I would fall apart. I have been conscious of the balance of what I get and what he gets. I'm not telling him he doesn't get to have the world...I'm just saying, I'm not the only one he needs to ask.

For my family...

I'm letting go of my current job. This would normally make a family nervous, if there wasn't a new job on the horizon. Heck, I did this several years ago and it made *my* family nervous (rightly so!).

I am leaving my job because I am finally realizing that it has made me sad and depressed, out of alignment, and creatively frustrated, which has affected my family.
For too long I had allowed myself to think that I couldn't do something else with my skills and that my iterations were unwelcome (well, they were, at the organization I was at).

But I need to take the leap of faith that there's a lot more out in the world for me. I was starting to feel like a bad parent because I wasn't a good example for my creative, bright, unique son. I was starting to do that thing where I'd live/work/exist one way, but tell him to do something different (and hope that he didn't look at my life as an example).

That's silly! I need to live a co-created life, if I want to amplify living a co-creative life. So here I go...