Clothes Horse
photo credit: www.pixabay.com/jackmac34
When I taught parenting classes, I met a woman. A woman whom I really liked. She was witty, funny, smart and just the right amount of self-depreciating. She engaged other participants in the class. She was present, physically and emotionally, for each and every class. She was tortured.
During a discussion on turning over more responsibility to your children, she disclosed her deepest, darkest secret – she still picked out her daughters’ outfits for them daily, right down to the hair clips. She recognized and even whole-heartedly agreed that kids need to practice responsibility and good decision making BEFORE they have to make the really important ones. Clothes were not important. Until they were. And they were. To her. And she just couldn’t let it go.
She was her usual funny, depreciating self as she explained what she called her “psychosis” about perfect outfits. She was seeing rebellion from her oldest daughter (14) and seeking ways to positively deal with it. She recognized that it was starting to impact her relationship with all of her daughters as the oldest spoke up more often and with more determination about being able to pick out her own clothes to wear.
The rest of the parents in the class accommodatingly laughed along with her and affirmed how hard it is to let go, even the littlest things. But I could see the pain in her eyes. This wasn’t a little thing. It felt like the beginning of the end for her. It was the end of her being able to control (and therefore protect) her daughters from the worst that the world had to offer.
Our desire to protect our kids is natural, and by natural I mean survival-of-the-species inherently natural. Our desire to protect our children emotionally comes from a different place. This place starts with us and our experiences as children being parented, observing how other parents parent and our experiences actually parenting ourselves. It is critical that we ask ourselves “why.” Why do I feel so strongly about this? Why is it important? Why am I making myself crazy over socks and hair clips?
In asking the “why” questions, we can start from the foundational place of self-reflection. For the woman in my class, she discovered her “why” was about protection. She began to look at other ways to provide this protection to her girls and began to relax her clothing “psychosis” which lead to an improvement in her relationships with all her daughters.
I have spoken with many parents who never thought about the what’s and why’s. They just knew what they wanted to be and do as parents. Knowing is the very best place to START. But staying at the starting line never gets you to the finish line. Getting the proverbial finish line in parenting (p.s. we’re never really done but let’s pretend for the sake of argument here!), requires thought and planning, exploration and investigation.
I want my kids to be honest, hardworking, fun, productive, healthy adults. This I have always known. I was a bit fuzzy on the HOW and the WHY, and if I’m being honest here there are many days that I still feel a little fuzzy on those two things. I had to take a step back and ask myself why “honest” and “hardworking” were at the top of my list. These where the things that were important to my parents and my grandparents. I took a deep dive into exploring what was explicitly and implicitly taught to me. I had to look at the things I was still learning as a result. One thing I realized was that the “hardworking” part came with a side dish of “don’t make waves.” I realized how much compliance being handcuffed with hard work has been an obstacle for me to this day. So I had to rethink “hardworking” and make sure I not only teach my kids about working hard but also about standing up for yourself and making waves from time to time.
This is still a work in progress both for me personally and me as a parent. Then again, most of parenting is a work in progress… and a bit of art and magic too!!