Last week I chatted with Danica Marie on her podcast Raise the Room. Danica’s work uses Human Design to offer ways of better understanding ourselves and our children. Her podcast listeners, called Roomies, look at the parenting journey from a conscious perspective and work to raise the positive energy in any room they enter. Danica is also a teacher and a West Coast Mom of boys.
After Danica shared my Human Design with me (spoiler, I’m a Generator), one of the many things we chatted about was what the year after writing a book was like. I explained that while I was writing Crummy Conversations, I was under the false impression that as I wrote and re-wrote I would be putting a neat little bow on the living and learning that I was writing about. Then I would launch my book, wipe my hands on my metaphorical apron, and move forward with my life accomplished and unburdened by the load I had previously carried. Incorrect! Instead, spending a year amercing myself in my work on attachment, attunement, connection, and empathy (along with my own lived experiences in relation to those constructs), cracked me open just enough for a mess to spill out.
Like the conversation I had with Danica, I’ve had other conversations in this post-book-launch era where there hasn’t been a lot to hide behind, like ego or bravado—But sometimes I sure wished there was. You really can’t “armor up” emotionally (as Brene Brown says) when you’re talking about being seen in relationships. And if someone writes a model that suggests that we want children to feel and express their feelings as a means of decreasing compounding trauma and increasing resilience, then said person better walk their talk when it comes to the inevitable ups and downs of their own life experiences. Even if that type of vulnerability does leave one (me) feeling a bit like they are bleeding out, in the middle of the street, naked, while wishing their chosen literary genre was Fiction.
Here’s what I’ve learned from this experience of being further cracked open emotionally:
- Continuing to do the work to grow ourselves up as we grow up our children takes a lot of continued courage
- Being real and honest on public platforms like social media and podcasts can be uncomfortably vulnerable
- Being present to our children and ourselves when life is at its messiest is really, really hard
- These uncomfortable cracked open times in our lives present opportunities to figure out how to let the light in, for ourselves and our children
And perhaps most importantly, if we want to have the capacity to facilitate crummy conversations with the children we care about, we need to have the willingness to facilitate crummy conversations with ourselves.
If this resonates for you and you’re interested in hearing more, you can listen to my guest episode on Raise the Room here: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/raise-the-room/id1684805544
-Michelle
Photo of me in my natural habitat, taken by my oldest this weekend. Crack and all.