We often go through our parenting experience with a tension, a struggle or feel it’s super-hard, and there can be all of these at play at any one time. Why the struggle? Is it possible we are trying to be all things to all people and forgetting or perhaps not valuing what we bring to life and those in our lives?
Do we appreciate the gold that lies within, or does it all feel like a chasm of struggle?
​When we start to un-pick the tensions we feel in that struggle, we can often identify that there is an underlying ‘gap’ of confidence, perhaps a comparison about the way others parent and we turn to the plethora of books that confirm our inadequacy and that the 'struggle' is real.
​This lack of value for ourselves and what we bring to life and to the role of parenting is a pernicious virus. Most of us were raised to dismiss or criticise ourselves first and to value anyone before we consider ourselves at all.
A lack of self-appreciation can create a hardness or toughness and stops us looking at the beauty and the gold in ourselves. Rather, we can fall into battling and criticising ourselves and forget to appreciate what we bring.
We have not valued the need to value and,
we have not appreciated just how deeply we need to appreciate
We have been tricked into thinking that valuing and appreciating are trivial, and yet the lack of valuing and appreciating is often at the root of our issues. So, what does valuing and appreciating actually look like?
Could appreciation be that we hold ourselves as
deeply, deeply, precious?
Could we appreciate to our bones what we bring to our life
and everyone around us… to our world?
If we make this a practice for ourselves, we will be able to model it from the inside-out to our children and break the pernicious cycle of struggle that has become so accepted as normal.
Image by michel kwan from Pixabay​
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