My life also depends on hers
"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." – Elizabeth Stone
Indeed, she runs around with my heart on her sleeve. Could I have ever imagined the depth of bonding love such a fellow creature would fire up in a body that I once unknowingly determined my own?
Of course, boundaries are here to emphasize the ongoing responsive “othering” that is part of mothering and fathering. The selflessness that parenting can teach you is a highly intimate experience of the self. No relationship comes as close as this one, just a couple of minutes pass and my name (yes, to her it is a name), MAMA! the one she rightfully clings on to, echoes through our living room. My attention is high jacked, and for a good reason. My attention is her witness and at times, I fail miserably in acknowledging her powerful presence. Equally so, parenting can feel overly demanding, our interaction intensely chaotic or her needs rather pressing. Attachment patterns are all over the place and every day is a learning process. Mental clarity is challenged by tiredness, the relational knots only deep emotional investment offers us, and the shaky – and grateful - work of parenting together. It is an unconditional love, a rather factual gut feeling, that keeps me ready to provide whatever is needed. It entails a dynamic inner dialogue between a growing awareness of fruitful boundaries and the power of a sensitivity that perceives rather than judges.
The level of conscious delicateness that is part of this relationship is silencing the outer spheres of my ego's social influence. Sorry guys, I have something more significant to attend to. I imagine a child friendly world in which ‘we’, in the form of more tightly knit communities, take care of the readily growing, little human beings. Awkwardly allowing myself an expanding loving kindness: every child is a reminder of life’s energy extracted from us as a collective, unique in his, her or their way and ultimately a test for everybody whether, as one might say within spiritual contexts, an elephant can actually pass through a needle.
She points her finger and I immediately try to see the world through her eyes, frequently becoming aware of what I do not know, every time providing bits of borrowed maps of the world while hoping to cherish her felt freedom to fly around unburdened by these maps, by all the particular, symbolized ways of being human that might not be hers.
Radical honesty about the depth of bonding is a social, mental and cultural challenge. I would not like to glorify nor surpress when speaking about this connection. Its intensity knows many shapes and nuances, many stereotypes, and false representations, certainly all the emotional colors found on the spectrum of our interpretative possibilities.
My life also depends on hers; this is how it feels. A deep dependence that I consciously try to guide and let go at the same time. It is the most potent stuff out there if you learn to stay present with it, if conditions allow you to. And once I do, that potency, at times, cuts away all the babbling, disintegrating habits, and tendencies, forcing attention on the here and now embodied by her particular life.