What Parenting Taught Me About Letting Go

I cried so much in the months after I had both of my two kids.

I cried in banks, in coffee shops, and lord knows every room of my house. I’m not actually sure who cried more – me, or my colicky babies. It wasn’t quite post-partum depression –I prefer to describe it as the everyday gut-wrenching, confusing, disorienting, sleep-deprived vertigo of parenthood.

Meanwhile, here I was, a meditation practitioner for almost two decades, with no clue about what my carefully cultivated spiritual practice had to say about this massive life shift.

During the many sobbing phone calls to friends, most of whom don’t have children, they would often tell me to “take care of myself” and “practice self care.” I was at a loss. HOW? All my old methods of caring for myself no longer applied. What does self-care look like when “the self” has been cracked open to include small babies for which you are responsible? How much can a bubble bath or manicure help in that situation?

What helped was, in a sense, getting back to mindfulness 101: letting go. Here are three examples.

1. Letting go of my old sense of self

Part of adjusting to new parenthood is relaxing into the stretched and morphed boundaries between ourselves and our babies. If you breastfeed, this becomes especially clear as your baby is literally eating food made in your body. Even if not, the baby’s sleep schedule, wake schedule, poop schedule (or lack thereof) becomes etched into your existence, whether you like it or not. The baby and you are not separate.

Getting comfortable with these stretched, blurry boundaries takes time. It is like the formation of a new skin that sometimes feels itchy and uncomfortable and sometimes smooth and delicious. In my experience, just understanding that this is what is happening helps.

2. Letting go of how things used to be

Life changes forever once children enter the scene. My body, my capacity for love, my capacity for anxiety, and certainly my expectations about what life was about. At the heart of this, for me, was a well of grief for the life that was no longer – my life pre-motherhood. No more late nights with friends, spontaneous camping trips, lazy, sleeping-in on weekends. It was not like that life was SO amazing, and it was not like my new life was so bad. In fact, a lot of the times, it was wonderful beyond words. But like any loss, the abrupt change needed to be grieved. A friend of mine once said that grief is the admissions ticket to love. That is certainly how I felt.

I suggest making lots of room for the grief. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you or your baby or your parenting. It is just as much a part of the process as diapers and bottles.

3. Letting go of how great parenting is supposed to be

In the throes of one of the most difficult weeks of my life, when my newborn was experiencing gastric distress and crying uncontrollably for hours, and my one-and-a-half year old was suffering with a high fever, I got a card in the mail that said, “Raising Children Goes By in the Blink of An Eye, Enjoy Every Minute!”

Great, I thought. So now it is not enough that my life is awful and this situation is unbearable, I am also a failure for hating every minute of it.

In fact, the problem was not with me but with those false expectations, inflated by popular culture.

In reality, parenthood is literally made up of the nastiest, green, slime-like poop blow out coming out of the cutest, most delicious and adorable baby in the world. It’s all mixed up together. Part of what is so exhausting and overwhelming is that confusing push-and-pull – the part of you that loves your baby so much, your heart feels like it is going to shatter, right alongside the vivid fantasy of leaving town forever and never seeing that crying mess of a miniature being again. The zombie-like, bone-level exhaustion right next to the high of having a newborn asleep against your chest.

Letting go of the myth of parenting makes room for the messy, but often beautiful, reality. It means noticing when you are struggling with life, adding resistance where there doesn’t need to be any. Can you relax into the madness? Can you soften into this bizarre new life?

There was one kernel of truth in that greeting card: for better and for worse, this time does not last forever. If you’re a new parent, you will survive this, and in doing so you will find strength within you did not think you had, and a love you did not think possible. You can do it. You’ve got this.