Mastery not perfection
Recently I read this post by Deborah Macnmara where she writes that emotionally mature parents are “parents who grow again and again for the sake of love.”
She then goes on to say that “emotional maturity is movement, not mastery,” which made me nod in agreement and chuckle at the same time.
You see, for years I've talked about the work of healing while parenting, which very much involves cultivating our own maturity, as precisely a path to mastery.
Healing while parenting as a path to mastery
This path of parenting that is transformative, and not simply transitional or disruptive, requires teachings, practice, and community* if we want to move forward in meaningful ways.
Mastery in this sense is not something that we seek instead of movement, but rather, it is movement.
We don't arrive at some final point where we are no longer susceptible to veering off our path, making mistakes, or feeling stretched to the limit.
Rather, our mastery unfolds as we move forward, occasionally realizing our increased agility, greater capacity, deepened understanding, and a calmer knowing. We also find ourselves with more capacity to give, providing ever wiser guidance to our children and supporting others on a similar path.
Parenting isn’t just about winging it, or learning a few tools, or healing yourself and hoping it “trickles down” to your kids. It’s a path that involves all of those things and more.
It’s a path that never ends, even as you begin to walk it with greater mastery, and it invites you to grow in ways you never would have otherwise.
This process involves learning, unlearning, practicing, making mistakes, making positive changes, and also expanding your capacity and realizing your potential as a parent, but also as an entire person.
One reason it changes us so much, is that we learn things about ourselves that we otherwise may never have even considered.
How playful or not do you believe yourself to be? What do you do when someone you love is expressing their feelings of dissatisfaction with you? Which emotional parts of parenting feel like a chore more than others?
For example, you might learn a broad range of parenting tools that you know are effective and necessary to your relationship with your child. But as you practice in the day to day, you find yourself relying a little too heavily on the ones that help you to play and delight in your child; and avoiding tools like loving limits or holding space for their sadness or rage.
Or conversely, you might notice yourself defaulting to setting a firm limit most of the time, and tenderly holding space for your child's tears of disappointment; and rarely venturing into the equally necessary territory of playful limits, playful parenting or rituals of delight.
So even if you have learned the tools, you then go on to learn about yourself as you notice how you use them. Practicing gives you the chance to get curious about why you feel the way you do about these tools. Practice also extends the invitation to stretch into the areas of parenting that feel less comfortable for you. And having a community that practices alongside you, will help you to stretch into better parenting without tearing.
Another thing that happens on this path, is that the events that occur along one part of it, matter to how the events further down the road unfold.
In other words, the way that you show up for your child today, will matter very much to how they will be in relationship with you when they are older.
And conversely, if you miss the mark in important ways in their early years, the tween and adolescent years bring you plenty of opportunities to revisit and attend to the hurts that linger from those early ruptures and misattunements.
For example, if you set loving limits often, through connection and in a way that conveys safety to your child early on, this will help them to trust immensely in you when they are older and you need to work with new limits and skills that they are likely to have difficult feelings around.
And conversely, if you relied heavily on punishments and rewards in your child’s early years, and these cause distance in the relationship during their tween or teen years, you can still learn loving limits now, which will help to revisit and build the trust that was undermined when they were little.
It’s never too late. And it's certainly never too early.
Whether its setting limits, responding with attunement to their bids for care and connection, bringing playfulness into the relationship, or knowing how to hold space for their most vulnerable and difficult emotions–the teachings that you acquire and the practice that you commit to in their early years will lead to the mastery that can sustain your child’s changing needs through adolescence and adulthood.
{{ subscriber.first_name }}, if this sounds to you like a lot of work on top of the impossible load of parenting in today’s world, you're right. It is.
There is no other way to say it. Childhood requires an immense amount of care and connection from loving adults, which requires emotional, material and physical bandwidth that most families don’t have enough of. For generations now, we've been overstretched by the pressures of a hyper-individualistic, capitalist dominant culture, on top of the standard emotional and physical strains that the human experience comes with.
And so we do what we can. Oftentimes, in an isolation imposed by our society that provides grossly insufficient support to parents.
We at least learn the teachings, even though it may be impossible to put them into practice the ways we could if we were in a community of caregivers (or even with our partners o coparents on board, at least).
And we refuse to do it alone where our circumstance permits.
That's why the Healing Parents Course isn’t only an invitation to learn effective parenting tools–it is an invitation to set the example of leaning into learning and mutual care wherever we can. It's saying to our children, “I’m going to my class now. Where I learn things about how to take good care of myself and of our family, and also, where I am with people who care about me and my needs.”
We set the example for our children of valuing ourselves as whole people and valuing the work of caregiving, despite the ways in which the dominant culture devalues both of these.
This is what taking this course is about. More connection and care for your children, and for you. A path to mastery. And a refusal to do it alone.