inquiring parent

One night when my elder daughter was about eighteen months old, she and I were upstairs getting ready for her bath. She wandered out onto the landing and stood on tiptoe peeping over the stair gate. In a sing-song voice she called out, “Jeh-eee!” (My husband’s name is Jerry.) She stood quietly for a few moments, and then she said, “Oh-uh.”

What a funny thing to do, I thought. Why is she doing that?

A few nights later it was bath-time again, and I realised I’d forgotten the little blanket she took to bed. My husband was downstairs in the kitchen, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out to him (yes you’ve guessed – in a sing-song voice.) After a while I realised that with the kitchen door shut and radio on he couldn’t hear me. Feeling a bit stupid that I’d ever imagined he might,  I said, “Oh-uh.” 

So now I knew why she did it. 

Of course I’d been aware that children copy adults: I’d seen her clap when I did, heard her repeat songs we’d sung to her. I’d seen that she wanted to carry her own little backpack like everyone else when we went on holiday with her older cousins. Yet somehow I didn’t, till then, realise how closely she watched, how much she absorbed, how in some ways she knew me better than I knew myself. 

Children are like mirrors to the unknown depths of ourselves. We see our own behaviours and sayings repeated in them, and it’s not always what we want to see. I felt like a terrible mother the day I heard my child scold her dolls for not going to sleep. (Even now I feel the urge to explain myself to you, to tell you in detail about the sleepless nights that led me to that. But you can guess: you’ve been there too, if not with sleep issues, then with some other.) I have also experienced moments of amazement upon realising that she had absorbed what I saw as the good in me, like the time, aged 2 or 3, that she crouched down, and said to her little sister, “I love you. Even when I’m angry at you, I still love you.” 

And of course, we too were once children, we too once absorbed all that our parents were and did. My daughter may have stood at the stair gate and called her father’s name because she wanted to see him, but did she have the faintest idea why she waited a few moments and then said ‘Oh,’ in that particular way? Do we adults have any idea why we believe half the things we do?

In some ways it’s easy to see that patterns of being are passed down through generations – we notice that we react like our own parents did when our child refuses to do as bidden – or more likely we notice that our spouse does! What’s harder to notice is that this happens because we go on believing thoughts that aren’t even ours, that are passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes we even think we are doing the opposite of what our parents did (and when we think that we usually believe ours is the right way). Yet underneath the reactive actions could be the exact same thoughts our parents had. Nancy Friday describes this in My Mother, My Self. She writes about how women she interviewed often believed their lives were very different from their mothers’.  “Mother lived in a house, the woman I was talking to lived in an apartment. Mother never worked a day in her life, the daughter held down a job. We cling to these ‘facts’ as proof that we have created our own lives, different from hers. We overlook….that we have taken on her anxieties, fears angers; the way we weave the web of emotion between ourselves and others is patterned on what we had with her.”

As I’ve written on the ‘About’ page on this blog, the best way that I know to open out from thought patterns that have existed for generations is to use The Work, the process developed by Bryon Katie. (There will be other ways that work for other parents, and I invite readers of this blog to use the comments section to describe what works for you.) When I read Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is, I was at first surprised to read that she realised she didn’t think, she was ‘being thought’. For me now, what that means is thoughts come unbidden into my mind, and I have a choice to believe them or not. I’ve found that when I believe things should be a certain way, far from bringing what I want, this creates stress and prevents me from being able to find other solutions. It’s as if my mind is so stuffed full that there’s no room for other possibilities, and using The Work loosens up whatever barriers there might be to finding new solutions. Instead of frantically believing I have to know the answers, when the old thought patterns get undone it’s as if the mind relaxes enough to naturally open up and allow new possibilities. We become like children again, ready to learn – only now with some choice in what we absorb!