Parenting can be overwhelming and is also a treasure trove of lessons if we are willing to look deeper than the surface. Today I took my daughter to learn how to ride her bike without training wheels on the bike path by our house. Her father and myself had take her one time before on the dead end that my mother lives on and it had gone… ok. He thought I was hard on her and I thought he coddled her a little too much and wouldn’t give her the space to fall and figure it out on her own. Exactly this is what makes parenting overwhelming for me… not wanting to be too soft, but not wanting to be too hard on her and trying to find the center.
It’s definitely an art and I feel like I am constantly learning how to balance my own parental bike. It was as though the moment I had her, my life’s training wheels came off and it became “go time.” Suddenly the pressure hit and it was about more than just me. There were bigger consequences to losing my balance in life… a whole separate life depended on my ability to balance and ride smoothly. Little eyes peering out from the basket of the handlebars just watching my every move… my facial expressions… my speech… my ability to cope with each challenge life hands me.
It’s a lot for one person to handle… the responsibility for another life. Sometimes I feel that I have to keep it real and be hard on her for her to learn from it. I know I’ve always learned best when things have gotten hard and painful. Some of the most profound lessons of my life and my ability to open up to learning a new way of being came out of suffering. I don’t wish suffering on my daughter, but I also keep it real and blunt when it comes to my style of teaching.
For instance, she is quick to get frustrated and irritable when learning something new. I took her out solo to teach her how to ride a bike today and about 20 minutes in, I was wishing I hadn’t. Her attitude about the whole thing just grated on my nerves. Her inability to follow basic cues, “Don’t turn the handle bars…. Don’t turn the handle bars… see what happens when you turn the handle bars… you end up in the grass when you turn the handle bars” drove me mad. I must have said this paraphrased 100 different ways over the course of 20 minutes. If that isn’t enough to make you go insane, you’re a saint. She got off her bike, proceeded to sit in the grass and cry, then refused to get back up and try again after one run on the bike path from one street to the next.
At this point, I was already exasperated at her ability to “get it” and said, “Ok, clearly we’ve both had enough… let’s go home, I’m not going to sit here moping and being miserable in the grass all day.” Well then it was a song and dance (aka cry fest) about how she wants to ride her bike. We tried a bit more and it was more whining, more crying, more frustration from both of us. I was over it. When she refused to go back to the car, I almost had a fit. We finally made it back to the car after a good 8-10 minute meltdown by her and made our way home. As we pulled into the driveway, I sternly said, “When you get out of this car, you are to go straight to your room, close the door and pick up your mess (from the Barbie’s she was playing earlier in the day).” I literally couldn’t be around her for a few moments and needed some time to cool down and re-center from the whole experience. Thankfully she listened and gave me some breathing room.
I took some time at my computer checking email and diffusing my energy into work, which helped me to shift my thoughts away from frustration and anger. By the time she was done straightening up her room, I was calm. I asked her to come next to me so we could talk about how things went with bike riding. We talked about her feelings and mine. She explained that she felt like “I thought that she didn’t know anything, and I know everything.” I explained to her that I don’t know everything, but that I have more experience with life and riding a bike. I told her that she is 7 and I am 35, which means I have 28 more years of experience that I am trying to give to her because I love her. I also told her that I didn’t want her to have to learn the hard way and was trying to help her so she didn’t fall or crash into a tree.
My daughter is thick-headed and thinks she is older and wiser than what she is. She is just like me when I was a kid… smarter than her peers because she is an only child who spends a lot of time around people older than her and because of this thinks she knows it all. This means we butt heads quite a bit and she often allows me to see traits within myself that need some refining.
For example, today I realized the same pressure I put on myself to “get” things right away is the same pressure I was putting on her in some ways. The frustration she feels in herself is rooted in perfectionism that I also struggle with and am trying like hell to combat by focusing more on being and doing rather than getting it “just right.” When I see her beating herself up, I see pieces of myself beating myself up and it is hard to watch. It makes me angry because I want her to deal with adversity and challenge with so much more love than I knew how to do growing up. Yet, I know, at least for me, this wisdom didn’t come until much later in life after many lessons.
It is tough to love someone so much that you want to force all of your wisdom into their mind so that they don’t have to feel the pain of life. It’s hard to back off and trust that life will care for your child in the same way that it always guided and taught you. As humans, we want to control the process which brings about our own suffering when ultimately we don’t succeed. I’m grateful for the ability that I can see the driving force of all of the anger and frustration I felt today was love… though in the moment it certainly didn’t feel that way. Love has many facets.
She’s 7 and doing the best that she can. In our conversation today, I admitted that parenting is new for me too and I’m doing the best I can. She replied, with all her intelligence and wit, “You’ve been doing this for 7 years,” with an air of, “Shouldn’t you know what you’re doing by now?” I explained that it keeps changing… just when I think I’ve got the hang of it there is something new we learn to do together so it is in some ways like parenting a new child for the first time. I imagine parenting to be like mountain biking (having never actually gone mountain biking). Though you have been before, there is always new ground that presents its own challenges. You must react and adapt quickly to the roots and rocks on the trail or else pay the consequence. Hopefully, I’m reacting and adapting with grace and speed so that the consequences are not too steep and she blossoms into a beautiful human being and I don’t get too banged up in the process.
How do your kids handle learning new things? Are you able to see yourselves in them? How does it make you feel? How have they illuminated areas of growth for you?