Do You Feel Your Personality Slipping Away Into The Parenting Abyss?

You don’t have to do this!

Parenting niches of the internet are getting filled up with stories of people abandoning their old life when they step into the parenthood, and I came here to say that I respectfully disagree with that notion. You don’t have to do this.

Parenting is 50% of how the child is and 50% of what the parents make of it.

I firmly believe that mental health of many mothers suffers because they are trying to play the Idyllic Mom part so hard they draw blood on their hearts. Fathers are getting crushed under the Provider pressure, and everyone is exhausted from running in circles between their family, job and other life circumstances. Parents can be concealing burnout, marital troubles, substance abuse, depression or money troubles from their kids. But their original personality is slipping away in the vortex of all this as well.

Children are not asking their moms or dads to erase their personalities and give up their dreams. Sure, if your past screams ‘violent drug addict’ — then by all means — erase away!
And sure, some dreams are not conducive to happy family life.

But life is not a pass:fail event. Life is a festival of trade-offs.

Let’s set aside the whole shielding-kids-from-the-troubles-of-their-parents conversation for now. Let’s stick with the happy stuff:
I believe that sharing your personality with your kids or affording them glimpses of your life before they came to it is beneficial for the mutual bond.

Parents are not supposed to take out their childhood traumas on their own kids. A therapist’s office or a journal is a much better place for trauma-dumping. I know many stories of how “just trying to spare everyone the heartache” backfired spectacularly — in a bad way.

BUT if our kids see us only as a person who exists to cater to their needs, then the bond will start wilting with their every step to independence.

I heard that you’ll know whether you were a good parent based on whether your kids want to hang out with you even when they don’t have to. But it also means that as parents, we need to give them a reason to hang out with us.

We need to build a bond with our kids that does not rest solely on our servant capacity to them

I can’t tell my daughters that their once beloved grandpa was a narcissist abuser to me when I was a kid. The brute force of this statement serves no purpose to anybody.

But if they ask how my childhood was, I offer glimpses that maybe make a hair-thin fracture in the nice image of their now-long-dead grandfather.

When they asked whether their Dad was the first man I fell in love with, I answered briefly but honestly, and explained why my previous two major relationships didn’t work out.

My kids watched me train for and then run a half marathon. They watch me train for an ultramarathon now.

They listened to me gritting my teeth while I was figuring out my sewing projects making cool clothes for them — I didn’t want to cuss up a storm in their presence, but they got a glimpse of my struggle and frustration, and they shared a full load of my triumph when the finished product fit them and they loved it.

My kids watched me struggle at two very different jobs I started at once in the middle of the pandemic. They watched me crash and burn out to a crisp, then somehow pull myself together.

They watched me do back-cracking exercises because my ribs were twisted out of shape so much that I struggled to breathe.

They watched me crochet cool things for them, and stick to drawing portraits in the 100 Heads Challenge.

I need to show my kids that I have creative needs and a personality and hobbies and interests.

I need to show them that everything is figureoutable, that they need to build and know their worth. That they can do a lot of cool things if they set their minds to it.

I know there are no guarantees, but I hope all of this will compound into grown-up hangouts with them when they become adults.

And that is all the more reason I maintain myself as my own person and make motherhood a huge part of it, but not let it swallow me whole.

Thank you for reading this far. Take care!

Credits:
- This article was originally published on Medium.
- Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash