The Conscious Parent

perfection, we would discover a kinship with other parents and realize
we aren’t at all unusual for having such feelings, just human.
No one understands the mix of devotion and anguish a parent
experiences unless they have gone through it. Sometimes languid with
unquenchable love and at other times haggard from inextinguishable
fatigue, there are moments when we are so committed to our children
that we forget we even exist, while at other times we fantasize about
running away, leaving them in their dirty clothes amid piles of
homework and a messy room. Of course, the moment we begin to dream
of lying on a beach sipping margaritas, we are likely to feel ashamed of
ourselves.Children preoccupy a mother, or a father who fulfills a similar
role, almost a hundred percent of the time they are together. We are
either taking care of them, entertaining them, or worrying about them.
Little wonder our relationship with our spouse undergoes drastic change.
Our body becomes unfamiliar territory, our emotional equilibrium at
times resembling that of the insane as we find ourselves sleep-deprived,
short-tempered, financially drained, and on occasion transformed into a
tyrant.
The day inevitably arrives when the realization comes to us, “Gosh,
I’m just like my mother!” Or, translated, “I have become a control
freak.” All those times our mom yelled, “Why can’t you just do as I
say?” suddenly make sense. We can also empathize with every parent
who has lost their temper with a screaming child on an airplane. Before
we became parents, we exuded a superiority that said in effect, “If I were
a parent, my child would never behave that way!” Now we feel sympathy
for the parent and want to take the child and lock it in the bathroom.