Getting Real

By Lu Hanessian

“How’s it going?” she asks.

She’s chewing gum, making plans for the weekend, while her baby snoozes in the trendy stroller with stripes and techno wheels.

“Fantastic!” you chirp. Stifling the urge to dive into a mailbox headfirst and scream long and loud in your best Fred Flintstone way.

You’re faking it.

Oh, we’re good at that, aren’t we? Pretending to lis

ten when we’re distracted. Wearing a phony smile when we’re down. Swearing by a conviction when we’re really feeling choked by contradiction and self-doubt. Judging other mothers when we secretly lie in bed at night worrying if our choices will backfire down the road. Or next week.

Did you ever think you’d carry that precious babe for nine months, vigilant about what you ate, how you slept, clinging hopefully to every grainy black and white screen shot…and find yourself here, traveling along the mothering journey, mired in lies and illusions and fears and anxieties and disappointments and regrets, and stuffing it all down somewhere so that nobody—even you—can’t see it?

Millions of moms unintentionally numb out, overwhelmed by the pressures of a culture obsessed with impossible perfection, fixated on our flaws and deficits. Your kid is having a low blood sugar meltdown at 4 pm in line at the grocery store and you feel as though your response to him (and his reaction to you) will show everyone within earshot just what kind of person—what kind of parent—you really are. You feel judged. So you judge your child (he’s misbehaving)—and yourself (I’m a bad mother)—along with everyone else.

We aren’t aware of this cultural co-dependence. It’s a dynamic. We get caught in the mythologies and mindsets of other people’s making, and we’re too tired and anxious to question things. Which leads us to more doubt and more empty feelings of confusion, phony smiles, maternal masks of omnipotent confidence to camouflage the fact that, deep deep down, we are quivering in the fetal position hoping nobody blows our cover.

We defend our position. By pretending.  I call it the “defense of pretense.”

We tend to perceive ourselves and our kids from the outside in. Or we hover over our lives and observe ourselves and our kids in the third person. Either way, we are parenting in a kind of loving detachment, pretending to be here when we’re not. Pretending we’re enjoying the ride when we are riding the brakes. Pretending we’re not really desperately wondering how to keep our own light on—so that we wouldn’t feel this kind of forgery.

And so here we are. At a magnificent crossroads.

How do we get real in life, in love, in motherhood?

Where do you get stuck? Explore there.

What do you long for? Linger there.

What terrifies you? Dig there.

What thrills you? Scratch there.

What inspires you? Live there.

Pretending is the fallout of our unmet needs, of creating a disconnect between our illusions and our reality, of living by someone else’s standards and expectations and trying feverishly to fit inside their comfort zone, even if it means reduce ourselves and stay small if only to quell and perpetuate their fears too.

The gift of getting real—of being perfectly flawed—is that our children receive a deep, abiding and mostly unspoken message from us about their own humanity, their own authenticity, and their transcendent capacity for growing “up.” Growing upward.

Getting real is an exercise in humility. And a humble heart invites a life of authentic joy, a nourishing gratitude, and a genuine love that connects us even in its beautiful imperfection.  

Copyright 2006, Lu Hanessian All rights reserved.