This article is kicks off our Whole Life Parenting series, which offers practical tips to meet the needs of both parents and children.
It’s spring. Time to think about renewal, visions, and growing the lives we want.
Do you want to have a life in addition to having a child?
I think that’s perfectly reasonable.
What do you want that life to look like?
Between school, the babysitting coop, and my work with Awake Parent, I talk to parents quite a bit. I’ve noticed that many parents, particularly parents of young children, are pretty much consumed with parenting. Parenting is their life.
If that’s what makes you happy—cool! Congratulations on manifesting exactly what you want.
However…
If since becoming a parent you have found yourself:
- Wanting more time with your friends
- Not finding enough time with your spouse or partner
- Not knowing whether or how you might be able to date or have romance or sex in your life
- Wanting to be more caught up on your reading
- Neglecting self-care rituals
- Lacking exercise
- Either giving up your boundaries too easily, or enforcing them more harshly than you’d like
And…
You would like that to be different…
…you are not alone!
Parenthood can be the most consuming undertaking of your whole life, and few resources show us how to balance things. For all its talk of family values, this culture offers precious little in terms of built-in structures for support, relief and balance.
Luckily, we can create our own structures and practices. When we stand back and rethink things like social time, self-care, and exercise, we can find many, many options for structuring these activities in ways that allow us to have more of what we want in our lives in a way that also nurtures our children.
When we replenish ourselves by meeting our human, adult needs, we bring a stronger and more able self to our children.
The first step is to decide to do it. A friend, a single mom who scarcely gets out more than once a year said to me, “I don’t know how you have time to do all that you do,” I told her it was because I decided to.
Okay, no fair, I decided long before I had a child that I would only have a child with someone who truly saw him or herself as a full-time parent, so I could also have a whole life as a parent. And I was fortunate enough to find someone who saw himself as, and agreed to be, a 50-50 parent. We continue to co-parent in this spirit, even though the relationship between the two of us is no longer what it was.
I am very fortunate. I had seen way too many examples of families, even progressive families, in which the birth mother simply took on everything, sometimes including a full-time job, while most or all of her former life fell by the wayside.
I knew I wanted a different form of parenting, one in which being a parent was an integral component of who I was, but not the one determining aspect. Given my strong calling to give birth to books and other creative projects, I had decided that being a 50-50 parent was the way to go. That intention helped me create structures that would allow me to parent in the way that met my needs. Now I have time with my child, and also time to do other things, some that involve my child, some that do not.
Still…my first step in creating this life that I wanted was to envision it, and then decide I was going to have it.
In the coming weeks, as part of this Whole Life Parenting series, we’ll be sharing practical tips on how to meet your needs as well as your children’s needs. Many, many sources tell us that the first step in creating things the way we want is to get specific about what we want. So, let’s do it now: With specific detail, What kind of parenting life do you want?
Please feel free to share your answers in the comment box below. We’ll try to incorporate your wildest dreams for yourself as a parent into our upcoming posts.
I can’t wait to hear them!
Warmly,
Jill
Thanks for this Jill!!
I totally resonate with the need to have my own life alongside family. It took a lot of personal growth work to realize that it is possible and that I can create a life that contains enough fun for me and my family, together and separately.
I have taken great steps in creating my career again after kids and I was just deciding that now I want to somehow add in creativity and some kind of study- at least more reading time!
My vision is to start a comedy band with some girlfriends, we will get together and practice once a week and eventually perform, not sure where yet.
As far as study and reading goes, I am going to participate in a Buddhist study group, where we read commentaries on Buddhist sutras and discuss them. This group meets about twice a month with reading assignments in between.
With my daughters, I actually thought of you, Shelly and Jill, as I am wanting to work on my reactivity to the ways I get triggered by them. It feels absolutely imperative to create change around this.
I get triggered when they don’t listen to my requests, when I have to repeat myself over and over.
I’m sure I could find better ways of getting their attention as I initiate communication and also be more patient, not expecting their response to be immediate (especially with my older daughter Eva,6-almost 7, who is a dreamer and gets really wrapped up in her imaginary world).
Recently I also found myself getting triggered by them getting in my personal space while I’m working at home. Eva will try and climb up on my chair and on my desk to see my computer.
It’s been a confluence of things this week as it’s been spring break, the kids are at home and I still have work to do, plus some P.M.S..
So I’m aware that the kids may want more attention than I’ve had for them and I’ve had less patience than I might at other times of the month…urgh!
Thanks for being here,
love,
R. Moon
Hi, R. Moon —
I enjoyed reading all that you shared. I’m glad for you about your pursuits, so different, and yet I imagine, complementary.
I do truly understand about getting triggered when you don’t get responded to–it happens to me fairly often! One thing I find helps, when I can manage it, is to turn around my goal–if I am trying and trying and trying to push things in a certain way, what if I tried–gasp–the opposite!? When it occurs to me, sometimes I try tuning into my son, or the person who’s not responding the way I want. It turns out they have a whole other set of needs I can discover.
The nice thing about this option is that it sets me up for success–if I set out to, as Dale Carnegie put it so well so many years ago, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” I’m a lot more likely to get cooperation. I might also be more likely to get someone interested in understanding me, once they feel understood.
Warmly,
Jill
We really got serious about this about 6 months ago. Agreed (again) to have a date night but also added something else–a “me” night. That means that we each have one night per week to go out with our friends, go somewhere alone, or really whatever we want. Date night is self explanitory. This has been good for each of us. Where we need to improve is in asking our inlaws to watch the kids. We do a lot for them and I don’t think it’s asking too much for them to watch the kids for us one night per week.
Hey Christian, I’m glad to hear that you’re reaching out and asking for help with child care when you need it. Being with kids takes a LOT of energy, and everyone (no matter how much they love hanging out with kids) needs a break sometimes. I also LOVE the idea of a “me” night. What a great way to create some structure that will ensure you get some time to do whatever you want at least once a week. Thanks for sharing this!
Shelly’s last blog post..Serve-yourself snack gives you more freedom