Mid-summer I was in the throes of a triggering and history revisiting renegotiation with my ex-husband over our custody arrangement. I like my ex-husband, but I can say with conviction that I did not like his lawyer. When it was all said and done it was like getting divorced twice from the same person. An experience I would not recommend. I began grieving the fact that I was going to have less physical time with my daughter and spiraled with concern about all the daily emotional, mental, and physical components of her life. For me, it felt like a double whammy: She was at a normal developmental transition from dependent child to world-exploring teen at the same time as we were diving into a change to our actual physical proximity. If you read my book, you know that my oldest and I were a party of two for the first four years of her life, so we’re close. Peas and carrots close. Toast and butter close. Cream in your coffee close. So, I was feeling very vulnerable about the change. Don’t misread anything about the value of her other parent here. It is a good thing for my child that her other parent desired for her to be in their life as much as she was in mine. I am speaking about my own experience with an unexpected change that I was emotionally unprepared for. Navigating this adjustment shook me up and subsequently shook-up other parts of my life creating a bit of a snowballing effect of “whammies”. My capacity for coping was at an all-time low. The best way to describe it is to tell you that I felt like I was trying endlessly when I was in fact all out of ‘tries’ and that feeling seeped like an oil spill into every aspect of my life. It was a greasy type of feeling that would not wash off my hands and left a film of sad, mad, and stressed everywhere I went.
Here’s the part that matters if you’re interested in connected parenting: While this was going on for me, I was still required to be acutely present to my younger children. This relationship focused type of approach to parenting is hard, hard, work and it requires a lot of time, energy, and effort. If, like me, you create an environment at home where you hold space for your children’s emotions and patiently understand that their expression is communication as opposed to bad behaviour, they will expect that to be the norm regardless of what is going on for you. Developmentally informed, connection-first caregiving is a long game and when you have kids in the early years it feels like you’re in the first inning of a full contact sport. When they express big, you get closer. When they are dysregulated, you share your calm. When they feel angry, sad, or frustrated you encourage them to get those feelings out. And that felt almost impossible to do when I was emotionally wrung out from my own adult experiences. I really wanted to default to Behaviorist methods that would have given me short-term, yet momentarily satisfying, results. Staying committed to attunement and presence with my children while desperate to be alone to cope with my own “stuff” was one of the hardest aspects of this time for me. Staying in the game was a massive daily effort.
On my best days I didn’t feel confident writing content about connected parenting and on my worst days, I wished I could take the whole book back so none of you would have ever read any of it. It takes a smidgen of confidence to put what you think and feel out there, and I was all out of smidgens.
One delightful week around Thanksgiving while chatting with friends it was suggested to me that I was a multi-layered onion and there are, in fact, some people in the world existing as potatoes. People who aren’t deeply feeling their way through every experience and then analyzing the thoughts they have about those feelings. If I had a dollar for every time since that conversation that I have wished I could be a potato, I would be looking out my office window at the ocean instead of the side of my neighbor’s house. I just wanted to take a break from trying to unpeel myself for the betterment of my children, my marriage, and my own evolution. I just wanted to take a break from feeling so much.
By Christmas months of trying while being out of tries caught up with me and I unraveled in the middle of my kitchen while attempting to serve Christmas dinner. I would say that there in my kitchen, I arrived at what, St. John of the Cross would call, the dark night of the soul. All those months of wishing I could be a potato had done nothing to prevent me from the unpeeling that had begun months prior.
Could I skip over sharing this part with you? Yes. Could I keep this not-so-pretty part all to myself and just show you the “after”? Of course. But that doesn’t feel very authentic. Or very honouring of how much I value connection in my relationships.
So here we are. Although I feel humbled by the last year of my life, I feel certain that each of us can try again and again in as many messy and uncomfortable ways as we need to. We can move forward without having it all figured out. If you, like me, have had a season of struggle I hope you read this and find a companion in your efforts to stay afloat. I don’t know if life comes easily for anyone (all the time), but I know that it can be lonely to feel like you’re the only one unravelling. You’re not, I’m in it too.
Are we tough cookies? Are we onions? I don’t know.
But I know for sure that I have never been, nor will I ever be, a potato.
–Michelle