Whole-istic Parenting
By Lu Hanessian

I've always liked kaleidoscopes. Not just the insides of them, but the idea of them. The fact that you could turn it and catch a million angles of something your naked eye can't see. The kaleidoscope of motherhood is like that. Angles I never thought to consider until my children made a case for them.
Look at it this way, Mom.
Look at me this way, Mom.
Look at me, Mom.
Look, Mom.
Look.

So, I look. I try to look beyond the obvious. Beyond my own filter. Beyond the preconceived notions and that float like pollen, making my eyes water. So that my sons are not the sum of their needs, or their behavior, or their dried out markers, or their leftover sandwich crusts. To look beneath their moods and overreactions and see what they are not telling me, and listen to what I am telling myself. To get the whole story. The whole truth.

Whole-istic parenting is hard work, not just because of our children's needs but because of our own. If we could ever realistically get ourselves out of the way, parenting would be pie. (Humble pie, but pie nevertheless.) It's not so much that we are in the way, but that sometimes we get sidetracked and derailed by our own fears.

What makes this journey of mothering so powerful in all its bliss and heartache is that we don't often realize how much of our own biases, anxieties, histories, and unresolved wounds are tangled up in our perceptions of our children and their development. They have no idea that our tone of voice may have less to do with them and more to do with our own preoccupations, the business we are trying to get off the ground with no money, the lack of support from a spouse on a parenting decision, the bone-tired fatigue that makes the dawn of a new day feel like midnight.

What's so hard is to know all of this and carry on with a clear conscience and light heart, to toss off the baggage of guilt and shame and regret like deadweight and use our human-ness as teaching tools. How many times have I apologized to my children for the way I misunderstood, jumped to conclusions, lost faith in the process, in the moment, in them—in myself?

They are laughing at the kitchen table, one with his front tooth missing, and the other with his curly hair knotted in the back from deftly avoiding the comb. They are whole, with a purity and authenticity of self that we yearn for as adults. In a way that I can only imagine I once was back before I knew anything about disapproval and doubt and loss.

Whole-hearted mothering of our children involves parenting with our whole hearts, not just to love them like primal mothers, fiercely and fearlessly compelled to protect them, but to see our children in context, in their world, through their eyes. This leads us to their truth, untainted by our own.
What is that behavior in that moment saying about where he is right now? What is this power struggle about at this time in his life—in my life?
How can I stop that behavior without shaming him, offering him a tool instead of a timeout?
How can I parent without prejudice?
And how much judgment do I harbor toward…myself?

Whole-hearted parenting requires something else from us: the courage to care about ourselves. Mothers give. We feel our deepest peace when our children thrive.
And what about us?
How do we thrive?
How do we develop and grow into our whole, healed selves?
Through trial and error. Through the power of our children's voices. Through their intuition. Through our own calling.

The more we have faith in the process, the more we find our peace, the more we bring that peace into our daily living, the more our children feel that peace and have the freedom to say their piece.

So I keep searching. For answers. For questions. For untruths and misperceptions. I look through the kaleidoscope of motherhood, and try, with any luck, to discover the unexpected angles of what the naked eye can't see.

© Lu Hanessian 2006