I am back from vacation.  Did you all miss me?  I am feeling grateful and gracious these days (more about that in a later post), but I wanted to talk about what I did on my vacation:  I kept silent quite a bit, I prayed, and I thought.

It doesn’t sound super exciting, does it?  But it was, to me, a time and a moment to gain clarity over several issues that I have been wrestling with this summer.  In some ways, this summer has been a Summer of Muddled Thought, of transformation and growth to be sure,  but at times perplexing and challenging and just muddy.  I guess it really has just been an extension of “The Overwhelming  Year”, if you all remember that post and its follow-up post.

I had two things that really came together this past week and juxtaposed themselves on top of each other. I love it when life does that, don’t  you?

The first thing  was regarding this practice of silence.  Continue reading →

Sometimes we just yearn for peace and all we feel is frustration. Maybe we are frustrated with the developmental stage of our child – you know, that rough patch that we hope will pass soon, or maybe we are frustrated with our partners or spouses.  Our bodies, our lack of exercise, our homes, our less than perfect lives. Did I cover it all? Continue reading →

Part of the Collect for today, Easter Wednesday, invokes a prayer to “open the eyes of our faith.”  In a parenting context, I could not help but think about all the parents out there who feel they really are not good enough; that they should be more, that their children deserve more, that their house is not calm enough or peaceful enough, that their house is not clean enough or that they should do a better job feeding their family.

I think there it is one thing to think about improving oneself; to have in progress and at work the desire to improve something that is challenging or a weaker area in oneself.

It is a whole other ball of wax to constantly berate oneself for not being a different person or for not being perfect.  They need their eyes to be opened in order to have faith and belief and confidence in themselves as a parent.

I understand how easy it is to lose faith and confidence in oneself as a parent.  I can look to the fact that we are having small families in isolation from past generations as part of the challenge, and I can see where the societal  push toward “having it all” (whatever that means) and the use of technology and experts for “instant answers” has truly impacted parenting.  Perfectionism is a much-tossed about buzz word in many arenas of life.

Have you ever felt less than perfect as a parent?  Less than confident?  I am sure we all have!

However, I think really the only thing that can counteract what is going on in the life of the parent at this point in American society is an uprising of the individual parent’s consciousness and confidence.  There are so many mothers (and fathers) I see that berate themselves for not being it all, for not being able to do it all, and I wish that their eyes could be opened to having faith in themselves. 

Good enough is okay.  Children and life with small children is noisy, messy, full of conflict and growth and strife and frogs and wet kisses and squishy chubby bellies and mud. (Okay, I threw some of those things in to see if you were actually reading.  But the frogs and mud do co-exist with children quite nicely). 

Your children only have you.  Rise up and be the best you that you can be.  Don’t get mucked down in the “would have, could have, should have’s” of life but put that game face back on and jump back in the game.

“Whew!  Mommy got angry, but boy do I feel better!  Let’s go have some fun now!”

“I can solve this problem and see it as a gift!”

“I can choose this course of action to help my child and if it is not the right course I will think about it and try something different.”

“This is working great for my family right now and it fits in with what I know about childhood development.”

“I can control myself with my children even if I am angry or upset because I want them to grow up to be a parent who can do this with my grandchildren.”

Keep striving in a confident way; you really can do this!

Live big and love your children,

Carrie

In order to handle the rigors of family life, I have posited in the last few posts that we must think about biography, balance of the physical body and the inner bodies, faith and faithfulness (our beliefs, and how faithful are we in ACTION to our beliefs).  In addition to the things I already mentioned in the first three parts of this series, I want to name some concrete actions you could take to start your own inner work so you can be centered for your best parenting:

• Create a space in your day for meditation and prayer.  It may be that you do this whilst you nurse a baby or in the shower.  As a parent, you may not really get even fifteen minutes to yourself to sit quietly, so you have to be open to cultivating a new kind of practice that entails quieting your mind whilst moving or doing something else.  This is just a season; children do grow!
• Watch your computer habit.  Most mothers I speak with use their computers as an escape tool at times.  Force yourself to be present even if you don’t want to.  If you are trying to escape because you are tired, bored, resentful, work on trying to fix the root cause of those feelings with action, not escape. 
• Practice cultivating silence in the home when you can.  Less words, more warm smiles and hugs, soft humming, silence and reverence together.
• Work in the arts:  music, painting, sculpting, crafts, reading all build up your reserves of energy. 
• Have an area of your own personality, will that you are working and striving to cultivate.
• Spend time in nature.
• Have rhythm in your life.  Keep striving for this if it is a difficult area for you.  Write down what you want to do in the area of rhythm, and do it for forty days.  If you “fall off the wagon”, get back on.
• Keep in mind that each minute is a new start.  Keep striving and going.
• Balance your year by season – there are some seasons where we are move active in outside the home activities and some seasons where we might be home more.  Look at your year.
• Look at your monthly rhythm – many women feel tired around the time of their menstrual cycles, and it may be worth it to plan this into your monthly rhythm as much as you can to honor that time.  This is a beautiful time, not a time to be medicated and rushed through.
• Where are your “no’s” in life?  What are your boundaries for you personally?  No’s help maintain balance, no’s help us find the time to be home and centered for our own inner work and parenting in an unhurried manner.
• Wake up before your children.  If you are rubbing your eyes and the children are already fighting, making a mess, helping themselves to what is in the kitchen, then the morning is not off to the best start.
• Keep a day of rest, a Sabbath.  This is important during the weekly rhythm.  You yourself must hold how to do this. 
• I think it is important to work toward being objective in parenting. Many times if we can just pull back and look at things without so much emotion, we find the right answers for our children.   If we can let go of guilt, which does NOTHING to move any situation forward, we can reach more joy in our homes. 

Many blessings,

Carrie

For this Lent, I have been reading the words of our Early Church Fathers and I have also been doing a Beth Moore Bible Study called, “Believing God:  Experiencing a Fresh Explosion of Faith”.  I think this is one of the best Bible studies, if not the best study, I have ever done.  If you like Bible studies and haven’t done this one, I encourage you to check it out.

One thing that Beth Moore mentions in this study is the difference between faith and faithfulness.  She writes, “……I conceptualized faith as believing God, while I tended to imagine faithfulness as obediently serving God and keeping His commands.  Though faith certainly encompasses serving and obeying God, I am opening my spiritual eyes to the fact that faith is the root of all faithfulness to God. In fact, we might say ultimately, faithfulness – serving and obeying God – is the outward expression of  an inward fullness of faith.”

Let’s apply this to parenting for a moment, shall we?  I think this is an important part of inner work and personal development in parenting.

Faith makes me think about belief.  So what are your beliefs about parenting?   If you homeschool, what are your beliefs about homeschooling?   Have you elucidated this for yourself and your family?  This does take time to figure out, but one must at least make the effort to think about it.

And then,  the question becomes, does this faith, do these beliefs that you carry in your heart about parenting  translate to what you do every day:  are you faithful in the details, in how you make these beliefs reality in your own home?

This is not about perfection.  No one is perfect.   There are always mistakes and things we wish we didn’t do.  There are always times of challenge.  There is always learning and growing in parenting.  Even if you have been through one particular developmental stage with five children, that sixth child is an individual or his or her own and it will be different.  So perhaps part of faithfulness is also forgiveness.  Forgiveness when you do something the way you didn’t want to do.  Forgiveness for being human.  Forgiveness for being fallible.

But perhaps faithfulness in the details also means having a plan, having a vision, and most of all,  overcoming our own inertia and weakness.  For me personally, for that, I have to ask my Creator.   We have to WANT to not be stagnant, we have to want to grow and change.  We have to work, and tweak things as we go along and discover.

I think the other part of faith in parenting is having a self –confidence that you can indeed be faithful and show these beliefs concretely in real life and in  your real actions.  How many times have we heard, “Actions speak louder than words”?  That is truth. 

How confident are you as a parent? You are the expert of your own family.  I believe there are some essential truths to work with in childhood development and parenting, but the application may look different depending on the family.  Perhaps thinking about your beliefs in parenting and  how your life would look if you could strive to be true to what you believed would lead you to increased authenticity and confidence.  Perhaps this would lead you to stop comparing yourself.

So, what do you believe about parenting?  About homeschooling?  How do you find forgiveness for yourself? How do you use your beliefs to be more confident in your parenting?

Many blessings.

Carrie