loving dysfunction. our oxymoronic families. wrapped up in everyone's script are the highlighted scenes. that summer on grandpa's boat. in the shadows are the scarred trees of our lives. a baby that failed to save her parents marriage.
education and relationships unfold those blueprints. give reason to why the architecture looks as it does. the youngest child has to speak up if she wanted to be heard.
having a child forces us to revisit the script. tend to the scarring to reduce old triggers.
thus I begin here. my journey to stop screaming at my child. by healing myself.
i have a night stand of books I carry with me. one is this book by Dr. Laura Markham. her words below:The famous psychologist D.W. Winnicott said that children don't need perfection from their parents; all we need to do is avoid harming them, and to offer them the “ordinary devotion" which has always been required of parents.
But unfortunately, most parents don't find this quite so easy.
Because, first of all, there is nothing ordinary about devotion. Devotion, as parents know, is walking the floor at 2am holding a screaming baby with an ear infection. Devotion is putting down that delicious novel to play a board game with your kids. Devotion is forcing yourself into the kitchen to make your kids dinner after a long day, when all you really want is to curl up on the couch and return a phone call to a friend. Devotion is taking off your jacket on a cold night to tuck it around a sleeping child in the back seat of the car.
This ordinary devotion is the same intense love that has caused parents throughout human history to hurl themselves between their child and danger, from flying glass to snarling wolves to enemy soldiers.
But even if, most of the time, we express our devotion in our willingness to put our children first, it is still not easy to be a "good enough" parent.
Because even we devoted parents often inadvertently scar our children. This includes parents who adore their children, who would be completely heroic and self sacrificing if the situation called for it. The reason is that while we would never consciously hurt our child, so much of parenting, like every relationship, happens outside of our conscious awareness.
The truth is that virtually all of us were wounded as children, and if we don't heal those wounds, they prevent us from parenting our children optimally. If there’s an area where you were scarred as a child, you can count on that area causing you grief as a parent -- and wounding your child.
thus I begin here. my journey to stop screaming at my child. by healing myself.
