When I was 18, I adopted a belief. The belief was that I had “no regrets” because, if my life hadnt happened just how it had, I wouldnt be the person I was today. This gave me great comfort. When I was thirty-five, with a five year old boy and a baby girl, living in a tee pee in the hills of Julian, California, wondering how Id support myself and two children, while still nursing, co-sleeping and committed to seeing them through the storm of a high conflict divorce - I forgot all about the belief I’d adopted in my youth. When I moved to an aluminum trailer and the first freeze of winter froze my water supply, cracked my gas lines, and my two electrical heaters blew all on the same 24-degree winter night, while I clutched my dirty-diapered baby and son to keep them from freezing, I felt great regret. What was I thinking when I got married? How did I end up here? What have I done to my life? Beliefs about my choices and what had been done, as well as missed opportunities, swirled through my mind. Fast-forward thirteen years… when I realized I’d failed to remember my son’s eighth grade orientation; the orientation he’d been anticipating for weeks; the first big step into formal schooling, which he’d chosen to attend after a life of homeschooling. An onslaught of thoughts lambasted this oversight as a gross error, responsible for any lack in his future success. “I’m so sorry, honey. I misread the time. We missed it this morning.” I regretfully shared. His palpable disappointment only fueled my mind’s own stories of incompetence, surfacing from depths of unconscious conditioning. A well of emotion gutted my stomach, clenched my heart and constricted my throat. My mind recounted every past failure, screw-up, and letdown, soon morphing into a laundry list of regrets reaching back far beyond that sub-freezing night on the farm. Peace in the Trenches of Parenting by: Christy Ahna Zahava
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 00:16:42 +0000
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