You wouldn’t know! What do you know! Shut up, don’t talk! Control your anger! Go to your room and think! Who do you think you are? How old are you? I’m twice your age! Don’t cry! Never mind! Don’t worry! Pretend as if you don’t care! This is not worth crying! Men do not cry! Be strong! Be happy! Trust yourself!
Are these sentences familiar to you? Did you hear similar clauses from your parents? Do you use these sentences to your children?
When it comes to parenting, I am wistfully witnessing the family structure of the society we are living in, is mostly parent centered, harmfully protective, extremely intrusive and addictively ruling. We have inevitably became the soldiers of a born in system. Because we’ve been born in it, exposed to its structure, shaped and strengthened with it, the system had became a flag race for us that has been passing from one generation to the next.
When it comes to intervention, we are standing on a level that we do not only intervene the behavior of our children that we are trying to shape according to our own rights and wrongs, we even interfere to their thoughts and their emotions also. On behalf of them, we want to decide when should they rejoice, when and how much should they be sad, what to be unhappy about, what to ignore, what to care and what not to care. No matter how they try to become the person they were born to be, we continue to disrupt their alignment with theirselves with our interruptions.
We are building children who cannot cry freely, who can not express themselves and who can not value what they want according to their extent. We are constantly striving them to be happy; to be successful, to be strong. Children who feel incomplete due to their inability to be their true self, create armor against the outside world with the fear of being unaccepted and criticized. And also trying to be careless at the expense of looking strong. Despite of all this, we expect them to be healthy individuals.
If only we can let our children experience this experiential area, which we call life at its most, instead we consider them as the ‘project’ of our lives and try to prevent them from making mistakes. First of all we must discuss what do we think would happen if THEY make mistake or even maybe we should pursue what do we think would happen if WE make mistake? As the structure of the creation, it is impossible to be perfect and far from excellence we are trying hard to take impeccable steps in order to raise perfect children and become ‘the’ perfect parents.
Do not get me wrong. I’m a mother of three. I have children, eighteen, sixteen and eight years old. My children are as precious to me as yours. But what I’m trying to tell you is; doing this has nothing to do with the value we give to them. Although we do everything only for the sake of their good, don’t you think we exaggerate.
As they are physically born to this horizontal platform, we call ‘earth’; we are deluded by their age which is just a measured number by the linear time and that time which is a creation of our consciousness in a timeless now. Because they are smaller in size and younger at age, we think they are small scaled in most of the areas. While we are still in search where our human evolution begins and ends in existence and overlook that the ‘human’ race is the only breed that is in need of nursing or else left to die. Not considering how tiny we are in comparison within the existence surprisingly we think we can control a system that is impossible to control.
Ignoring the greatness of the creation, we are holding ourselves responsible for their entire experience, unaware that we are actually giving birth to a unique universe from the moment they fall into our womb. Naturally, this relationship with our children turns into an area where we want to write a heroic story of success, an area where we can easily be appreciated or harshly be criticized. We become parents who strive to be perfect and sink as we strive.
Following to these, the most significant part of our noble relationship with our children is; them being the perfect mirrors that reflect us to us. Whatever they are and they are not, they are there to mirror us. They are the smoothest, purest reflectors that show us the patterns in our thoughts, the resistances in our emotions we hold and reject, sides we accept or refuse in ourselves. Maybe you’ll be surprised but when you look at them, you are looking at yourself, when you talk to them, you are saying those words to yourself. If we choose to look at it from a wider perspective, the whole world is already a mirror and everything; matter or non matter, dead or alive, young or old, near or far, we see ourselves… And unless we feel fulfilled, the universe is there to mirror us to us through people, events, and situations.
On the other hand, we should be wide awake that regardless of the helplessness of their self-care skills when they were born, this part of the creation that we carry and give birth, is a universe in itself. When you look at your children, you are looking at a universe which carries all the answers within. With the mistakes they are here to make, the steps they are here to take they are beings who has landed on earth and yet authentically born to be a unique ‘one’ self.
The sanctity of our duty as a parent is hidden right here. We are given the right to guide a fascinating universe and I really don’t know what could be more sacred than becoming the compass of it? But then we should discuss what guidance is, because a compass can never serve as a decision-making authority. It is a vehicle, even it is a sacred one in this case, sanctity can not change the structure of it. If you walk with a compass in your hand you would easily see that it is you who is walking on the road and the compass you hold in your hand is there to guide you. The compass would never intervene to decide where there is a great fondness to the witness, a great respect to the one, on the road, to the walker….
Believe me, our protective, intrusive, controlling structure makes nothing more than to confuse their experience. According to our individual experience, we dictate all the thought patterns, regrets, ambitions and desires, it is not a gift to them yet it is a hindrance for their enlightenment.
Let them make mistakes. Don’t allow them to conceal their sadness. Strengthen their ability to cry. Show them countless times and make them believe that there is an entrance to each and every emotion as well as an exit from them. And the more they enter the same emotion the more they exit they will then learn not to be afraid of them. Let them fall, let their knees bleed. They will surely rise again. Just make them realize that in this road we rise and fall and there is nothing wrong with falling down. Grant them the freewill to enter every experience with excitement and discover who they are. Teach them that they are human and that the so-called structure cannot be perfect. Be the guide to keep them on the road and take every step freely. Let them make mistakes while they are still under your wings. You just let them be. They precisely know why they are here…
