Parenting - It Is Not Too Late
By Sandra Couts

Have you ever wondered what your life like would be had your parents interacted with you in a different way? Have you ever thought that some of your problems are directly connected to how you were raised as a child? Most people have asked themselves these questions. Studies have shown that there is a direct link between the choices we make in our lives and how we were parented.  Without a doubt, our parents play a significant and valuable role in our lives. Realizing the impact parenting has on each of us, gives us an opportunity to understand ourselves as well as to create healthy interactions with others.

 The purpose of this article is to look at the complexity of what it means to parent and be parented while demystifying the idea that parents are infallible. The purpose is to honor the significant role that parents play in our lives while understanding that ultimately it is up to us to choose how we want to live our lives.

The fact that we have all been parented by someone establishes a commonality between us.  This someone could be an adoptive parent, a grandparent, a relative, a neighbor, a step parent, staff at an orphanage, our biological parents, or a friend of the family. Parents pass on their various beliefs and perspectives, influencing who we become and what we do with our lives. Regardless of what our parents may believe or think, the other commonality between us is that we want to be loved, accepted and recognized, especially in regards to our parents.  

Defining what it means to parent gives you an opportunity to realize the important role that all people play in parenting children. Whether you have children or are seeing parenting from the eyes of a son or daughter, you can probably grasp how your parents have influenced your life.  Parents are people-people are not perfect. Yet many parents live under a strong pressure to be perfect. At the same time, children live under a heavy pressure to be ‘good and perfect ‘, in order to feel loved and accepted.

 Realizing the impact that parenting has on our lives allows us to make positive changes towards healthy interactions. Awareness is the first step in the cycle of understanding and change. The following information brings awareness of what it means to parent and be parented. The bulleted replies come from a handful of people, some who have children and some who do not.

The first question is: What does it mean to parent?

• To parent is to love and understand children. Many people equate parenting to being an authority figure, someone who knows what is best for their children no matter what. Children get lost in the equation, treated as if others always know what is best for them.
• To parent is to give children nurturing, support and unconditional love.
• A parent is someone who expresses his or her love for children through physical touch and verbal acknowledgment.
• With kindness and compassion, a parent supports you in being who you are.
• A parent teaches you how to express your feelings in a healthy way through modeling the expression of his or her feelings.
• To parent is to provide a safe and loving environment where another human being can learn how to effectively live on this planet.
• To parent is to take the time and energy to be fully present with children, giving them direction, guidance and support according to their potential, their individual challenges and their physical, emotional and spiritual needs and desires.
• To parent is to be willing to find healthy ways of interacting and engaging in one of the most complex relationships on the earth.

The second question is:  What are two significant qualities that contribute to being a loving parent?

• Patience and understanding
• Acceptance and allowing a child to be fully who she or he is
• Nurturing and support
• Unconditional love and true acceptance of a child’s strengths and their challenges
• Caring and nurturance
• Respect and kindness
• Compassion and honesty
• Acceptance and fun
• Love and healthy boundaries

 It is not too late to understand that in their humanness, our parents guided and taught us according to their understanding of what it means to be a parent-sometimes limited by how they were parented. With this understanding, we can effect change in our lives.  It is not too late to learn from the mistakes of our parents or to learn how to parent ourselves as adults. Most of all, it is not too late to learn new and different ways to love, nurture, accept and parent children and ourselves.
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The following books can assist you in connecting with the parent within you as well as learning how to parent in new ways.

Nurture Your Child’s Gift: Inspired Parenting by Dr. Caron Goode
Connection Parenting: Parenting Through Connection Instead of Coercion, Through Love Instead of Fear by Pam Leo
Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason by Alfie Kohn

Sandra Couts MSN, RN, CNS is an Intuitive Counselor, Certified Full Wave Breathing Facilitator, Author, and a Certified Parent Coach.  For more information about her services or to make an appointment for a phone session call her toll free at 1-866-501-2555.

Mother’s Day
By Jennifer MacLellan

Ever since Susan was a little girl, she envisioned herself having a husband and four children—two boys and two girls.  In fact, she had very few aspirations other than being a wife and mother.  Married at twenty, her plan was to have a child once she received her university degree and worked for a few years helping children in need. She would be twenty-five then, the perfect age, she thought, to start having children of her own. She’d be the young, hip mom who people would look at and say, “What? You look too young to have four children.” However, when her first marriage ended, the pregnancy plans were put on hold. She was twenty-four, newly single and not concerned about having a family at that time.

A half year later, on a lazy summer’s afternoon, she was lying on the couch halfheartedly involved in a taped, guided visualization when she fell into what she describes as a trance, a cool breeze brushing her skin before her head sank deep into her pillow. In this altered state, she saw herself in a lush forested park on a bright spring day. She was holding the hands of two children she knew were hers, not the four children she had envisioned since she was a little girl, but two—a girl who looked to be four years old and the boy, two.   Susan and these beautiful blond angels were dancing in a circle, laughing and singing. In the background, she saw a man’s silhouette. She couldn’t discern the face but she felt his loving presence. She luxuriated in those moments with what she assumed was her future family.

In the meantime, Susan was determined to travel and be independent.  She was to be a wife and a mother.  She had seen her future, so without any fear of time running out on her dreams of motherhood, she booked a six-month trip to explore Europe.  The trip was not to be, however. The day after she bought her plane ticket, she met Ben and Susan’s plans of being the well-seasoned traveller quickly dissipated to make way for a different kind of journey.  In a very short time, she knew they would be married.  A couple of years into the relationship, she accidentally became pregnant—twice—in a four-month time period, miscarrying both times. Her emotions over losing the exhilarating feeling of having a life growing inside her and the chance of actualizing a childhood dream were difficult to manage at times. To help overcome the initial feelings of loss, Susan and Ben created a symbolic ceremony to honour these children that were not meant to be and moved forward. 

The next two years were spent in a whirlwind of socializing as Susan convinced herself of the freedom and fun of their double-income-no-kids status.  But then images of the two children she saw in the visualization a few years earlier began to resurface in dreams shortly before her thirtieth birthday.  The primordial urge to be a mother swept over her, wave after relentless wave. Detours into the baby sections of department stores became a common occurrence in her trips to the shopping mall.  She headed directly to the tiny, softly coloured cotton sleepers, the kind decorated with fluffy bunnies safely nestled in the thick grass or sleeping bears cradled in the arms of the pale moon. She clutched them to her chest, praying that she could dress her babies in these soft, sweet clothes. Even though Susan realized that their lifestyle and their headspace at the time were not conducive to being parents, she could not make those maternal pangs dissipate no matter how many parties they attended or how much she tried to shop those feelings away. The urge was so strong to fill the emptiness, to create a life, to be a mother, that she ended up buying one of those sleepers, a blue ribbed cotton one with a picture of a tiny Winnie-the-Pooh innocently chasing bees.  She headed home to tell her husband she wanted, no—she needed for them to try to create that family they had dreamed.

At first, they had a healthy attitude about getting pregnant—if it happened, it happened, but that was easy to say at the beginning as they had gotten pregnant so easily a couple of years earlier. Four years later, they decided to get tested and discovered that in vitro fertilization was the only way they would conceive.  Susan can recall sitting in the doctor’s office, listening to all of the invasive procedures her body would have to undergo if they were to have a child.  She reasoned with herself that she would do whatever it took to be a mother. While she heard herself agreeing to each step, her body received a different message that this was not the path she was going to take.

Intense periods of nausea came three days before her first procedure. Susan rescheduled the appointment and the nausea went away, but returned a few days before she was to go to the fertility clinic. The nausea was now accompanied with a piercing headache and cramping that felt like two giant crabs had clamped onto her ovaries, stubbornly refusing to stop pinching and twisting.  Susan thought maybe she had caught a virus, so she postponed the appointment a second time.  Despite priding herself on her intelligence and intuitive sense, Susan had to endure a third round of intense pain to wake her up to the fact that IVF was something she was not supposed to do. She cancelled the appointment for the third and final time. The symptoms went away.

She was numb for several months thinking about how a lifelong dream would not be realized. She looked into foster care and adoption but the nausea, the headaches and the cramping came back.  Time and self-exploration helped her gently let go of the idea that a child was ever going to call her “Mom.”

Always envisioning herself as a mother, Susan believed her life would be incomplete without children.  But life went on for Susan and Ben as they worked to redefine their relationship with each other and with themselves. Three years later, she truly feels pleased with how her life has evolved. Susan is able to acknowledge the fact that she will never be one of those women who receive a card, a class-made gift from a school-aged child, or a mug that says “Best Mom in the World.”  And despite well-meaning relatives and acquaintances thinking otherwise, she is okay with that.

She doesn’t doubt that her life would be enriched if they had a child. However, Susan has come to a place of understanding that she is meant to be a mother in a different way along with countless other women like her who love, nurture, listen, encourage, console, mediate, educate, guide and attend to those in need on a daily basis.

So another Mother’s Day will come and go and she will buy the cards for the women in her life who are mothers, genuinely feeling appreciative of the selfless, generous gifts of love they have shown over the years. But Susan will also say a silent prayer of gratitude for the awareness that she (as well as a growing number of women who cannot or choose not to raise children of their own) is not barren or incomplete just because she is not a mother in the way society acknowledges and celebrates.
It is true. Susan is not a mother, yet she is maternal. She did not give birth to a child, yet she has given birth to great love, gardens, inspiration, stories, and dreams. She has not devoted her life to raising children of her own, but she has devoted her life to helping them heal and grow. Susan is not a mother, yet her life continues to be a rich and blessed journey.

Jennifer MacLellan, B. Ed., is an intuitive and an educator who is passionate about laughing, love, spirituality and the power of words. For any comments or questions, please contact her at jennnymac@shaw.ca.