inquiring parent

It’s been a long, long time since I posted anything on this blog. There are reasons, including travel, illness in my extended family and in myself, the death of a friend… and yet, none of those is really the reason. I haven’t exactly had writer’s block, since I’ve filled journals and worked on some fiction, but I’ve probably had something like ‘writing for publication block’.

I had been half aware that as people began to post favourable comments it seemed to take me longer and longer to post. The possibility that having an audience meant I’d got stage-fright seemed too much of a cliche, and yet something was clearly stopping me. So I began to look at what thoughts came up whenever I considered posting an article. I noticed a recurring thought: They think I’m better than I really am.

Is this true? I have no way of knowing of course, but that doesn’t stop my mind running off into painful fantasies, imagining people thinking that I’m some sort of saint or wise woman, when really I yelled at Lolo last night because she yelled at LB, who had been yelling at the cat. (I’m making this up, but you get the picture – we do still occasionally have such scenes in our home.) And of course in this blog I’ve written about the rough as well as the smooth in our family – but again why let the truth get in the way of a good dose of self-flagellation?

As often happens, several factors in my life have converged to provide the understanding I needed. I caught a virus a while ago, and illness lingered on in the form of exhaustion. People kept telling me, “You need to take more care of yourself.”

I was resting, and eating healthy food, so I couldn’t see what else I could do. Then I watched a video on The Option Institute web-site. http://option.org/index.php In this Barry Neil Kaufman described how he and his wife developed a way of communicating with their autistic son on the boy’s terms.  It took all day every day for months, and then one day their son put his arms around his mother’s legs. He later went on to not just leave autism behind, but to help other autistic children. An interviewer asked about the commitment parents have to make to do this. “Have to is a very funny word,” Kaufman said, and went on to explain how people often say, “What a sacrifice, what a burden.” Kaufman didn’t see it as a burden, and likened what they did to Picasso producing a piece of art. Instead of sculpting stone they were sculpting a human being, and it was beautiful.

As I heard this, I realised my illness had nothing to do with how much I did, and everything to do with how I did it, in particular with the thoughts I still beat myself with. Doing the Work means I’m already aware of many of these thoughts, yet I can also have a tendency to think that because I do The Work so I should be able to cope with any situation. So I focused on the way I talk to myself. What I noticed were several hidden beliefs, all telling me the same thing in different ways: I’m not good enough.

One lovely thought I uncovered was: “I shouldn’t think that what I have to say is so special, so different.”

As I wrote this in my journal, a new understanding came to me. Maybe what I write is not so different, but part of the joy I experience in reading other people’s experiences is the recognition. It’s seeing myself, or at least my fears and understandings, reflected in another’s writing, and feeling that what they’ve written applies to me, it’s seeing that others go through the same (or a similar) process of doubt and growth. A few days after Lolo was born, a nurse took me aside and described the mixture of guilt, shame and fear that mothers of premature babies feel. Everything she described I was feeling, and hearing that I was normal, and not some sort of monster-mother, made it more bearable. Perhaps as someone else reads the process I go through, it encourages them to continue with their own process. This was always my intention when starting this blog, to walk through the process together. As I began to get readers I guess I also began to get expectations, and to think I had to live up to those expectations. No one else created those expectations and no one else needs to dismantle them. My writing doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly innovative, stunningly advanced. The value of this blog is in its ordinariness, in my ordinariness.