Parenting Archives - Page 13 of 17

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Navigating Transition

Julianne HarveySeptember 27, 2016Leave a comment

Do you ever feel like you are swimming and swimming but you aren’t actually gaining any distance? You are simply treading water. Not drowning, so that’s positive, but not exactly setting any performance records.

What is this damn obsession I have with being impressive? Why isn’t it enough to do the best I can in my own small world for those I love without seeking a grandiose level of some invisible acclaim which probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference to me even if I did receive it?

I long to pull back the focus of my life, to go from wide lens to a smaller, more pointed perspective. When I was in the hospital last month it became easy to see what really mattered. I made a set of decisions then to let go of the stupid, piddly shit that hangs me up on the regular.

But now life is back to normal and those niggling insecurities are creeping back. I am aware of them, which is a healthy sign, but I hate wasting any energy on them when I feel like I settled this issue while at my worst in an uncomfortable hospital bed.

As a family, we are in the midst of of big life transition as we move from one province to another. It’s messy, uncertain, wonderful and frustrating as hell. For the most part, the kids have both excelled, managing a ton of upheaval with grace and good humour.

I’ve done well too, provided I don’t creep the performance bar ever higher for myself. When that starts to happen, I’m sunk. Gentleness is the key here. The goal is to enjoy life. To laugh and to build in time to rest. To work, steadily and slowly, without expecting fireworks every day. To show up. To be patient.

Transition is challenging. It requires a lot from us. Managing my own expectations is a full-time endeavour. I have to remember that I’m likely doing better than I think I am. It’s not as fucking difficult as I make it out to be.

So we continue. One foot in front of the other. The sun sets and rises the next morning, offering us yet another chance to learn what we can from the unique journey we are on. Process takes a lot of time. The seeds don’t bloom unless they are tended, and flowers never appear overnight. We have no choice but to struggle through the hard times to make it to the easier ones.

In Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth

Planting Seeds for Confident Kids

Julianne HarveySeptember 12, 2016September 12, 2016Leave a comment

Last week, my kids started at new schools. This summer, we moved to BC with the vision for a fresh start for all of us. Life is short, the world is big, and we don’t like to stay in the same place for too long.

I knew that both Ava and William would be fine, but the only way to be sure is to jump in and experience it for yourself. They’ve attended the same schools their entire life to this point, in small-town Alberta, so this would certainly be a different experience.

William’s school has about 200 more kids in it, but Ava’s new high school has 1900 students compared to around 350 where she attended before this. That’s a massive change, but we could see that she was ready for it.

It’s healthy to challenge ourselves by embracing a change. New experiences offer us a reboot; a chance to rebrand how we are with other people. It’s so hard and yet so good at the same time.

I’ve enjoyed watching both of my kids flourish in separate ways this past week. They have proved something to themselves. Pushing through our anxious butterflies is what moves us to the next level in our growth. Without a bit of external pressure, it’s far too easy to remain complacent and comfortable, a state that eventually leads to boredom.

My job now, as the parent of a ten year old and a thirteen year old, is to transition from hands-on mother to cheerleading coach. Our kids have to take the reins of their own life. They must be free to make their mistakes and celebrate their triumphs. This world can be a ridiculously scary place but it’s equally full of joy and beauty.

We cannot shield them from it. Our task is to walk alongside as they experience every type of emotion, serving as their tour guide to life by explaining our own journeys as a light for them to navigate theirs.

They don’t have to follow in our exact footsteps. What was right for us might be wrong for them. Our kids need our support, experience and ideas. They don’t need us to intervene, protect or to make their decisions and bear their consequences. This is how children learn (and adults too).

I’ve loved this past week. Watching Ava and William bloom into their new environments has inspired a surge of gratitude in me for the early work we did as parents. Confidence and resilience are not traits you can summon by snapping your fingers. They are seeds that grow over years of careful tending and watering. When you pay attention to that, eventually you see the most incredible and exciting results.

In Culture, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Uncertainty

Julianne HarveyAugust 23, 2016August 22, 2016Leave a comment

Uncertainty is a part of life for everyone. We can defend ourselves against it, using strategies such as denial, manipulation and over-confidence in our ability to control outcomes, but at the end of the day the result is the same: uncertainty is always a factor.

I’m a Type A personality, so I find uncertainty to be an uncomfortable bedfellow. And yet as I practice going with the stream and not against it, I discover a fresh source of peace and contentment. When I believed I was the centre of the universe, by squeezing my eyes shut and willing certain things to occur, I felt more in control of my circumstances. But I paid a high price in stress for this make-believe certainty.

It was never real. Not then, not now. It’s the equivalent of a toddler standing in the middle of the room with her chubby hands pressed against her eye sockets, shouting, “You can’t see me!” I’m embarrassed to say I lived more than three decades of my life with this as a worldview. But the older I get, the clearer my uncertainty becomes.

I’m more certain now in my uncertainty than I ever was in my certainty. I’ve said that before and I’m sure I’ll state it many more times before I’m through. The sheer relief of admitting out loud that I don’t have the answers and I never really did is liberating. It’s the bubbles in a freshly-poured glass of Prosecco. It’s the helium that allows you to soar above your surroundings and see the bigger picture.

Uncertainty means you need faith on a daily basis. It requires you to let go of your preconceived ideas about how any experience or relationship should go and invites you to surrender to what is and not what you want it to be. Living this way allows you to recognize that you are one part of this world and not the whole shebang. You play a small but valuable role but huge amounts of this life are above and beyond what you can influence or manage. And this is more than okay.

I am practicing staying in each moment I am in. I don’t allow myself to forecast far into the future any more, for too much will shift and change and I’ll be forced to re-evaluate anyway. So I may as well just decide once, when the moment is upon me, instead of having fifty outcomes mapped out. It simply takes too much energy to live that way.

If you need permission not to have all the answers, please accept this from me. You are not the world’s Wikipedia. As Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” We are marvellously complete, all on our own, but we must live this life to the best of our ability day by day. We don’t have to see around every upcoming bend, simply because we cannot. The job is too big and we are defeated before we begin.

It’s lovely in some ways to live in this age of instant information, but it messes with our natural rhythms. We aren’t sages or fortune tellers. We aren’t certain of what is coming. What we do have is our natural intuition, our sense of humour, our huge, warm hearts that can love without measure. We don’t have certainty of what will happen next or a set prescription for how others should behave.

We are responsible for ourselves and for our dependent children. We can let the rest slide from our shoulders. We can walk away from the drama and the fears of others that spread like wildfire if we let them. We can learn to live with uncertainty; to talk ourselves through it the way we get our kids through difficult situations. By breathing, discussing it in a calm manner, eating a bowl of chips or some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Uncertainty is part of life. We may as well embrace it instead of fighting it.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Laser Focus

Julianne HarveyAugust 12, 2016Leave a comment

An interesting thing has happened since my appendix ruptured two weeks ago: I’ve developed laser focus. Before I got so sick and spent a week in the hospital recovering from post-surgery complications, I would look at my life with a long-range lens; fretting over this or that and always planning way out into the future.

Laying in a hospital bed alone changes all that. You are poked and prodded at all hours of the day and night. You fight for your very dignity as a human being, grateful beyond measure for the kindness of specific nurses and doctors. Your illusions of control melt away, water under the bridge of your own failing competence.

I learned in the hospital to take my recovery minute by minute. I’m not throwing up violently at this second? That’s a win. Five days of an awful NG tube, rubbing my throat and nose raw and meaning I can’t eat or drink until every vile, trapped thing in my stomach is vacuumed out so my nausea abates? The morning the doctors finally say it can be removed, I cry with the kind of joy I thought was only reserved for my wedding day or the births of my two children.

Life is chock full of wins and losses. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses. In these last two weeks, arguably the most challenging of my life so far, my line of vision has become intensely small. Focused and specific, instead of generalized and broad.

When you don’t eat or drink for 7 days, that first taste of apple juice is the greatest sensation on earth. That spoonful of vanilla pudding that doesn’t come immediately back up. The Arrowroot baby cookie, consumed at 2 am in the milky darkness of the acute care ward with soft snores of other patients filling the air around you, was like the finest of gourmet meals to me.

My senses are awake again. Thoughts of digestion and standing up to get more water and planning out my next snack consume my day. I don’t kiss my children while thinking about my to-do list any more. Now they are so precious, standing in front of me in their summer pajamas with their hair wet from a shower, and they deserve every ounce of my attention and focus.

How many times have I heard the saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”? I truly didn’t understand it before, but I do now. I was a person who needed to learn to slow down, and I don’t do anything by half measures. I have been brought low by this burst appendix, the “lazy bowel” that followed surgery, then the large blood clot in my wrist from my last IV once I returned home.

Each challenge must be faced in turn. Everything else falls away. The big picture shrinks to the next hour: what I will eat, if I’m sleepy enough to have a nap, what do the kids need. I’ve learned that this is more than enough. My gratitude rises, as if on a float, to the level I allow for it. My blessings, in the form of family and friends, the ones you can really count on, become crystal clear.

The rest fades away. It truly does not matter. I am changed, from the inside out, from this hard-scrabble season of pain and struggle. I am enough for this challenge and the ones that are sure to come after it. I can endure the toughest experiences and so can you. I’m not interested in fixating on some pre-set idea of success in some far-away future anymore. What I have is this day, this moment, these people; this ballooning, expanding, growing love inside me that spreads into every corner of my small but significant world.

In Culture, Minimalism, Parenting

Living with Less

Julianne HarveyJuly 5, 2016July 3, 2016Leave a comment

Since February, we’ve been living with less as a family. We’ve all worked at de-owning (a step above de-cluttering) by going through every drawer, closet, cupboard and surface in our home, garage, shed and vehicles.

It feels fantastic. I’ve learned that to get at the essential, you must clear away the unnecessary. Minimizing is a process of paring down, cutting back, eliminating what you don’t need so you can better appreciate what brings you joy and freedom.

As a culture, we are inundated with physical possessions. We are told that the marks of success are material: a new car, a huge house, lots of furniture, the latest technology and gadgets, shiny toys in the garage and driveway. But everything we buy has to be paid for, maintained, stored, used. It depreciates overnight and clutters up our lives.

Getting rid of our excess possessions has brought us liberation. We did it little by little, in fifteen minute to one hour increments of time. We started with the easiest areas, like kitchen junk drawers and linen closets, then moved on to tougher things like clothes, photos, books, CDs and DVDs. By the time we got to the kitchen, it wasn’t hard to give away extra bowls, spatulas, corn cob holders, measuring cups and fancy teapots that hadn’t been touched in a decade.

If we don’t use it, we donated, sold or junked it. No more holding on, organizing and moving items “just in case”. We love The Minimalists’ 20/20 rule: if you can replace it in 20 minutes drive for $20 or less and you don’t use it regularly, get rid of it. This rule helped in moments of indecision.

We also repeatedly asked ourselves, “Would we pay to move this item?” In previous house moves, we packed up anything and everything without discriminating. Now we are intentional about what we want to bring along into any future stage of our lives. When the kids outgrow their toys, games, movies and music, it’s time to let them go, not drag them along to clutter up a new season.

Living with less also means not bringing in mountains of fresh stuff. We automatically buy less now. We practice saying “no thank you” to the free gifts we are offered in stores or at events. We attempt to purchase only what we need and use instead of impulse items we’ll later have to sort and toss.

I’ve enjoyed watching our kids absorb this minimizing mindset as well. On a recent trip we browsed in gift stores but felt no impulse to buy any items. Ava and William are now motivated to save for certain things they really desire instead of buying what’s in front of them.

I love these changes in our family. Clearing away clutter gives more meaning to what remains in your home, your life, your soul. It’s beautiful, freeing, inspiring. I’d love to hear your stories of living with less. What benefits have you experienced?