This is the post where I lay bare how I have not shown up for my kids. This is the post where I am more honest than I may have ever been before. If as you read this it resonates and gets icky or painful, please stick with me. I now have the skills, tools, knowledge, and support to do better. I am now doing better. Not perfect, imperfectly better.

Spoiler Alert: I am full of peace and so is our home. 

Second Spoiler Alert: Sometimes my peace is mixed with some dysregulation and fear, but more and more the peace is louder. My children are happier. Our relationship is stronger and I am so grateful to be on this path of growth, planting rainbows everyday. 

Saying, “It’s not you, it’s me,” is not always an easy thing to say, especially when we know that it is our anger, our dysregulation, our lacking that is the root of rupture. As a mom, I would often silently blame all the hards of parenting on my kids. 

It must be them, not me, right? I mean, they are the ones demanding dinner every.single.night. They are the ones not helping with the household tasks. They are the ones not listening the first or fourth time to go brush their teeth. They are the ones lollygagging when we needed to be walking out the door five minutes ago. Clearly, it must be them.

Well, it turns out it wasn’t them, it really was me. Wait, what? Yep, it was always me. Even though I had read lots of peaceful parenting books and blogs, even though I had thrown “time outs” and sticker charts out the window when my oldest was three, and even though it often didn’t feel very harmonious in our home, I thought I was an Intentional, Conscious, Peaceful Parent. After all, my children have never felt a slap or hit from either parent in their lives, no one yells at them everyday, they have only been sent out of the room once in their lives each, the messages they have always heard have been positive, “Be kind,” “Choose love,” “Gentle hands,” “Hot touch,” ‘It is okay to feel your feelings, all your feelings are valid,” and have been told “I love you.” more times than any of us can count. Even with all of that and more, I wasn’t parenting peacefully. 

Ooof, this is painful to admit. My heart is heavy and full of grief when I think about the times I yelled at them, the times I allowed myself to become dysregulated and parented from fear or power, the times I did not show up for my most beloved children. Love keeps no record of wrongs, so I do offer myself grace and self compassion, but their little developing brains certainly do and did keep records of my many mistakes. Their little neurons have built a complex web of associations that have told them too many times how unsafe they have been because mama was mad at them. This hurts me to the depths of the deepest nooks and crannies of my soul.

It was not until I stopped being angry that parenting is hard and stopped being angry that my kids behave like kids and started accepting those two truths with humility, curiosity, and love that I was able to start repairing my relationships with my children and start parenting peacefully, intentionally, and consciously. That was the shift that along with listening (to my kids and my parent coaches), showing up, and learning to bring equality and power to my children that has brought joy, connection, and so much peace to our home and our relationships. 

That is a lot of nice words, but how does it work? Step one for me was simple but profound. How many times have I seen a meme telling me my cell phone was bad for my relationship with my kids? How many articles have I read telling me to turn my phone off more often? How many times did I turn the Focus Mode on on my phone, only to turn if off for the day? So many. But it was not just my phone, it was all the distractions…laundry, dishes, cooking, my job, text messages that had to be read and had to be sent, my own desire for relief from being needed. Along the way I stopped listening. 

I still listened, just often while “just sending this message to my client” or while chopping food for dinner or while thinking about any of 1000 other things. Then my parent coach from Jai institute said something that finally made me be able to tune out everything else when my kids speak. 

She said, “Listen intently to your children.” She suggested that when my children speak to me I get tunnel vision and look at my child and listen to my children as if they are the most precious gem in the whole world who have brilliant thoughts and ideas. And then she added the words that were the divine intervention I had needed, “Because they are.”

Immediately I knew I could practice that skill. It was something so real and so powerful. I love my kids and they are indeed the most precious gems in the world. I could do this one small but giant practice. She told me I didn’t need to do it every time they spoke because, well obviously. Right? However, if I started doing it for even ten seconds once a day, that would be a strong enough start to snowball and build upon. 

That was the very first step I took and there have been countless steps since. I am a work in progress. I am showing up imperfectly for my kids every single day and I now have so many more tools and skills I use each day. I was never broken. I did not arrive here to this place of learning to parent in need of being fixed. I came here ready to grow and the growth feels like rainbows bursting out of every fixture in our home. It feels like peace, joy, connection. And I am so eager to share this journey and knowledge with you.