CRUCIBLES OF PARENTING
1月
25日
LEARNING THE SKILL OF BEING ONE'S OWN HEALTHY PARENT
This morning, we sat around the breakfast table and started the day with drawing wisdom cards and reading them aloud. The best one said: “Grow through what you are going through.”
With the passing of my spouse and the dealing with the courts in our life, the questions of "parenting" is front and center.
So what is the outcome I want of all the “crucible experiences”?
When our first daughter was born in 1964, I spent most of my waking hours that first year, looking at this miracle that a year ago was nothing but an egg in my ovaries and sperm in Sam’s epididymus.
As I thought about how I wanted to parent, I decided that there would be a good chance for me to see some of my great grandchildren in my lifetime. What kind of adults do I want to see and what kind of mother and grandmother do I want Lynette to be to achieve this?
So, Sam and I agreed that we wanted to see healthy, kind, responsible, resilient and integrity in outcomes. One of the tools we studied was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The other thing that became more and more clear and important were our Japanese Heritage values - honesty, trust, hard work, family, harmony with nature, education.
Therefore, Sam and I read, took classes, looked for good examples and allowed failures. From our Japanese Heritage we teach the "Daruma Principle" - Nana korobi, ya oki (fall seven times, get up eight times. We did our best as physical parents while our girls learned to parent their own inner child.
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