Through this post I challenge you to figure it out what is the biggest challenge of your life? If you already know, CONGRATULATIONS! If you don’t know, at least try this exercise. There are chances you discover maybe the most hidden wishes or impotences or frustrations or sorrows, cause this is life, with good things and not so good ones. But what can we do? At a certain moment in history someone opened a box, called “Pandora Box”.
This exercise worth all your effort to see beyond appearances, habits and comfort.
I tried it. And all I can tell you is that the exercise itself is challenging. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do it anymore. In fact, I do want to do it, maybe not every day, but from time to time it makes me feel good.
Long before getting married and to have a child/children I noticed based on what I saw around me that the biggest challenge in a lifetime is to raise a child. Not like a number, but more like a principle.
If you have a job that doesn’t suit you from whatever reason, you can change it. You have some degrees and you see that they are not enough, you can obtain other ones. You have a company and big problems with the cash-flow, you can start searching and finding solutions or you may close it and open another one. You have health problems, you start searching them in your physical and emotional bodies and you can fix them or not and accept the end- death. And so on.
But when you have a child things are different. Much more different that those life situations you face.
A child’s life is like a straight way road. You are not allowed to go back, you are not allowed to turn around, you are obliged to move forward. The way you move forward has effects on your child’s life and in the same time on yours as a parent.
Someone dear said once that the desire to have a child is selfish. Yes, it is as long as you resume on “to have”. But when you assume the responsibility for what that child is and will become after years, “to raise” a child becomes the biggest challenge in a lifetime. This is my opinion and it is confirmed to me every day. And this responsibility comes from the first moment after the child was conceived.
Passing over the the period of pregnancy (I will write about it another time), as a mother, direct involved in the process of giving birth to a child, you face a moment when you have to take a first decision: you want to feel your baby on your skin right form the first second or you want to see him/her only after few minutes, when he was cleaned from blood, packed in a disinfected, white sheet with the smell of hospital? After that, from the same perspective of a mother which gives birth, the moment comes when you have to decide: you want to stay with your baby non-stop in that hostile environment that a hospital is for both mother and baby, or you want to go to a room and rest after the exhausting labor or surgery and the baby to be left in the care of medical personnel? And so on for the rest of your life.
We are the sum of our choices and decisions we make every moment! As much as this will hurt, it’s true! And when it comes to a child, the consequences we and the baby endure and very big.
Going on with the things that happen to one that accepts and lives in a “system” you have to decide: when you go back to work, who will stay with the baby, are you taking him/her to a kindergarden, are you looking for a nanny and so on. These decisions are not easy to take at all.
But when you decide to leave the “system”, because this is what I feel myself and Pedro did right from the moment we decided to go to Piracanga, the decisions are taken every moment both for you and your child. Inevitably, spending all our days at home with Nadia we observe her, just like she observes us. And every decision we take regarding our behavior or words we use it affects her, although we don’t want that all the time. This is the moment when you start to feel more and more intense the effect of your own choices and decisions.
And in one morning you go to the bathroom and after you wash your face, you see yourself in the mirror and right in that moment it strikes you: what did you do yesterday or 2 days ago with your child, for your child, in front of him/her or while he/she was sleeping. And you realize that this life as beautiful it may seem from the outside it’s actually damn hard. And you also realize that your own child transforms to a mirror that you have in front of your eyes all the time, day after day. And sometimes you see on that child-mirror the good parts, but also the mistakes, all the decisions or your own life “luggage”.
In those moments you have 2 options: to ignore what you see in the mirror and live your life as it is or to change something and become a conscious parent. if you choose to become conscious you start analyzing, debating, thinking, worrying, judging, feeling sorry, crying, enjoying, laughing, figuring our that the child in front of you teaches you how to live (again) your life: in the present. Using some other words, you start becoming what he/she is: pure, loving, smiling, present, forgiving, curious, happy, with an incredible capacity of learning, venturesome, brave, unique, confident.
The challenge of raising a child in a conscious way has its ups and downs. The most important thing is to see them as small challenges for being better every day for you, your child or your family. This is a decision that every one of us can take, either to be conscious parents or some parents that “make” or “have” a child.
What kind of parents are you or want to be for your children?
