The Conscious Parent

In the course of raising our children, many of us become almost
unrecognizable to ourselves when we look in the mirror. We see in the
lines around our eyes the incident when our child slammed the door in
our face because we didn’t buy them a video game, the occasion they fell
and broke a limb, and the day we thought we had lost them at the fair. If
we look closer, we also see in these lines the joy and awe of all it means
to be someone’s mom.
We may find we can’t help ourselves when we grumble about our
children while washing the dishes, complain about them to our own
mother, blame their inadequacies on our spouse, or bemoan our luck that
we, of all the people in the world, produced such a “difficult” child. Only
another parent knows what the eye roll truly means, resonates with “who
knew children were so much work,” understands “thank goodness the
house is empty for a while,” and can appreciate “I’ve got a few hours to
myself.”
For many mothers—as well as for fathers who bear the brunt of raising
a child—parenting can be emotionally, psychologically, financially, and
physically draining, yet few of us ever honestly share how exacting,
incredibly tough, and emotionally burdensome we find it. So invested are
we in being “good” parents that we would be embarrassed to share our
feelings with friends and family. Because of our fear of being judged, we
tend to hide the degree to which we feel torn asunder, shredded, and
psychically distorted by the demands of our children. Consequently,
most of us walk the path of parenthood feeling alone, truly believing we
are abnormal in our occasional longing to be who we were before we
became a mother. However, were we to reach across our mantles of