Parenting Tips: Who are you without work, children and your relationships?

“I am an editor,” I used to say of my previous profession.

“I am a mother,” I tell myself now.

And then I stop.

I have a child. But is a mother all I am? The truth is I have always been a mother. It is difficult to think of myself outside of that role. I mother my mother; I mother my sister; I work with people to awaken their inner mothers and fathers so they can heal their inner child. Nurture has always been my calling.

But then, is that who I am? It is so easy to derive worth and belonging from our roles in this life. And so we lose ourselves fulfilling what is our calling. Soon, we do not know who we are outside of it. I help people. It is just who I am.

Till I realised that is not who I am. My growth, my healing, me, is beyond those limits. In one glistening moment I saw the truth and it has humbled me everyday. My biggest triumph is not finding my calling. It is that I am okay without it. You see I have found something beyond my calling that drives me.

Me. Just me. I just want to intimately know myself in my darkest moments and never run away.

It is easy to lose ourselves in parenting the child outside of us. And so many of us think the best way to parent is to focus on the child in front of us. I see parents screaming, tired, snappy, depleted; I see parents who busy, running, seeming like they have it all. I see children labeled as ‘difficult’, ‘rebellious’, ‘shy’, ‘anxious’… and parents struggling to ‘fix’ them.