Bees with Her Bare Hands
Dream On, Volume 5
April 1
Today is my daughter’s 12th birthday, and it has me wondering about how I’m doing at parenting this beautiful, bright, sweet child of mine who leaves a trail of books in her wake, who rescues bees with her bare hands. A few years ago, I wrote a piece about how to support children on their path of self-acceptance, and in honor of her birthday, I thought I would read my own advice and see how I’m measuring up.
The modeling of self-acceptance: so-so. The active listening: sometimes stellar, other times an outright fail. Not putting my ideals and ideas onto her: so-so. The apologizing when I mess up: well done, mama. The shining a light on her strengths: nailing it.
The truth is, being a therapist who often works with adolescents, children, and their parents is quite different from parenting them. I tell this to my patients all the time: we can have coherent conversations about the ways to engage with or support your kid in the rational moment created in my little guest house office. But in real life, in the overstimulating heat of the moment, it’s much harder.
One of the sources of my lackluster parenting moments lies in my struggle with losing sight of the impermanent nature of life. When my children are struggling or going through a phase, I find myself, like many of those I work with, imagining that this is going to be the rest of their lives. When working with a kid as a clinician with objective perspective, I understand that we are getting a glimpse into certain parts of the child that they may need to tend to throughout their lives — but it won’t always be as acute or intense as it is in this moment.
In parenting, I lose sight of that quite often. I know that growth isn’t linear, and that we cycle through certain issues in our lives time and time again, gaining deeper understanding of who we are and how we move through the world. The hope is that we evolve well enough to manage the parts of us that stir up trouble with grace and perspective.
Yet it is painful as a parent when our children suffer, and so we want to fix it, ignore it, or will it away. We get locked in, despite knowing how fleeting it all is.
On her birthday, I marvel at the wonderful person she is and the person she is growing into. The marveling is married with heartache and longing for the versions of her that have gone as a new one unfolds. My husband and I, like many parents I know, send each other pictures and videos of our children throughout the day that pop up in iPhoto. Round cheeks and pot belly smeared with fingerpaint, tiny voices with soft r’s, fat feet spilling out of sandals. Sometimes I can’t even look at them. It hurts. It takes my breath away. The fleeting nature of it all is almost too much to bear — and then, begrudgingly, perhaps mercifully, I am pulled back into the drudgery of it all: the noise, the meal-making, the bodies and snacks spilled across the minivan seats.
People joke that toddlers were made ridiculously adorable so that you don’t ditch them somewhere out of frustration. Perhaps that is why the daily act of parenting is so intense, so demanding — we are brought back to earth by the endless dishes, stream of school emails, the mysterious rash, and negotiations over homework. The grit of it all is in place so that we don’t dissolve into a puddle of longing, or hold on so tight we crush them. We are mercifully, messily brought back to earth by the work of keeping them alive and loving them.