Ouch!
A few days before I went to pick up my kids from camp, my back went out. I had bent over to move the umbrella over to where it might actually shade my friend and me on the deck of my house in Long Island, and when I came up, I couldn’t straighten up.
“You didn’t bend funny or anything, I saw you,” my friend said later, when I tried to pin the pain on the incident. And I knew that she was probably right. Pain is in the mind, and it is mostly driven by stress. And my kids were about to come home.
It kills me that I was so nervous for my kids to come home from camp that I became so twisted about it that I wrenched parts of my body. Even though I am quite familiar with the connection between my thoughts and my physical self doesn’t mean I can always control it, but at least it allows me to work on what might be bothering me in the hopes of fixing the problem.
The truth is that I am more and more unclear about where I fit in to my kids’ lives. As they morph into their grown selves, I am desperate to give them the opportunity to find out who they are without the saddle of their mother’s thoughts. I don’t want them to think about what I would think, I want them to think about what they think, and the two might very well be different.
Ugh. Sometimes I wish I was one of those parents who had the great confidence to believe that what they thought should be passed along exactly, fed through a tube directly into my children’s brains. But the more I learn, the more I realize there is no One Great Answer, which makes telling my children what I think — let alone what they should think — progressively challenging.
I took an awesome Jungian painting class once where the teacher, Maxson McDowell, talked a bit about Jung’s philosophy of religion. Basically, he summarized, if a specific religion worked for you as a model for life, great, but if it didn’t, well, then you had a big job carving out your own path.
The idea resonated with me greatly. After all, that was why I was taking the class, right? I had grown weary of pretending that Judaism, beyond the foods and traditions, was a philosophy that benefitted me, and here I was, searching in new places for what I might really believe, delving with a paint brush way down deep in the subconscious depths that I was having a hard time reaching by myself, much as I tried.
My quest to figure things continues, and it seems increasingly urgent as my older son prepares to go to high school, as the younger one enters the seventh grade. They need my support. They need my non-judgmental love. And I am trying. But the first step in not judging others is learning how to not judge yourself, and that, I’m finding, is an enormous process.
I can be my own worst critic. The meanest comments heaped on me about this column pale in comparison to the criticisms I heap on myself as I’m trying to write it. What do I know? Who am I to advise others?
I am slowly but surely gaining the confidence to believe that I have something valuable to share. I am driven by the great searching paths of the many teachers and writers I have come across, by the myriad ways they themselves come upon their knowledge and continue to search, and how they share that honest search with others.
As my children are back with me, and I watch them, heart aching with love for who they are and who they will become, my back begins to relax. I have to remember that there is no one right way, and that for me to judge them or myself by some single standard is unfair, not to mention unhealthy. If I stay conscious to the emotions that come up for me as I try to steer my kids, we can learn together.
