Some relationships break up when the couple remains childless. Some couples are only together because of the children. Some relationships undergo their first major rift at the birth of the first child… Children have enormous power. Children carry the hope of a family and are its mirror. Children don’t need friendliness, they demand real closeness, and so they bring out every inadequacy in their parents and transform every relationship. Children demand utter commitment. With seismographic precision they reflect in their behaviour what their parents really believe, not just what they say, and what the parents’ relationship is truly like.
I’d like to venture into the realm of statistics one more time to illustrate a phenomenon which our society is only very vaguely aware of. In third place on the list of reasons for divorce is: ‘Changes after the birth of the first child.’ When did the problems between you and your partner start? When did you lose your appetite for sex? Since when has your partner been having affairs? When did your marriage lose its sparkle? When did the love disappear? I don’t know how often I have had these questions answered by the same sad, guilty look and the words: ‘Since our baby was born.’
I don’t think there is much awareness in our society of the true impact of childbirth. A friend of mine who had a baby several months ago rang me recently. She said, ‘You know, nothing can prepare you for this. You cannot possibly believe it beforehand, let alone understand it. A woman who has given birth has nothing in common with one who hasn’t.’ My friend had just spent a whole night looking after her feverish baby while suffering from cystitis herself. In the morning she was totally exhausted, but she was amazed at herself, at how she was able to go beyond her own limits with regard to the baby, how she was able to keep on giving even though she had very little left.
When a woman is pregnant nearly everything in her body undergoes a change, from her hormones to her skin, her hair and her cravings – not to mention her emotions, which seem to be on a rollercoaster. Within days mothers-to-be find themselves trapped by a network of regulations: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t lift heavy items, don’t do this or that. Everything is about being considerate and responsible and selfless with regard to the invisible new life inside them. And they put on weight, continually and involuntarily, and rarely only around the midriff – and for today’s women self-esteem is often linked to their looks and their body. Nearly every woman has tried out a diet and more and more women have cosmetic surgery. It is mainly women who suffer from eating disorders. And all of a sudden they are pregnant, and every concern about their looks is supposed to vanish overnight. In the same way they are expected to find it perfectly easy to give up smoking and drinking, to exert restraint and to take things easy as well as to accept disadvantages in the workplace.
And then there are the partners of the pregnant women. Only very few of them are likely to have had a clue about the women’s emotional life before, let alone about one on a rollercoaster. Particularly well-informed men will have heard something about premenstrual tension. Apart from that, the emotional anarchy of the other sex is probably rather alien to them. And all of a sudden those men are supposed to become fathers. For months on end nothing is even visible, let alone something that men can have feelings about. Their own bodies are the same as ever, as are their hormones. They don’t suddenly have fluid retention; they don’t feel sick when they see meat. Men continue to live as before – yet they are now expectant fathers.
This unequal distribution of energy culminates at childbirth. Women suffer the most incredible pains of their life; their whole bodies seem to be ripped apart by the contractions. And men watch from the sidelines like war reporters.
The birth of a child is least understood in terms of a marriage. This is exactly the moment in many relationships when a deep rift opens up between the partners. The fatal thing is that this moment is so existential, so extreme, that afterwards there is only very little awareness of this emotional abyss.
At this threshold between life and death women often feel completely abandoned. And men feel helpless at the very moment where there is actually something real to be brought to life. This is an elementary experience in human life – and only very few couples experience what they have wished for. Most women feel a deep disappointment and anger that often only surfaces much later. ‘My husband kept running around nervously,’ is one of the milder comments. Some men faint. Those who have always tended to run away at a crucial moment hide behind their video camera. Some men drop off with exhaustion during a prolonged birth. Some keep on asking the doctors and midwives for the latest facts and figures. Some get drunk. Some go straight from the delivery room to their lover. Others begin an affair while their wife is still in hospital.
Many women lose the respect of their husbands after childbirth, sometimes unconsciously. Even if her partner was there all the time holding her hand, a woman is likely to have felt lost and isolated. Some women are angry in a strange way, refuse to be touched by their men and ask them to leave. Childbirth reduces women to their naked physicality and forces them into complete self-awareness. All kinds of issues surface from the very depths of their emotional and physical being. They are forced to be completely passive and fully present. In such elemental abandonment we Western women quickly feel lost, cut off and angry about the ultimate truth of womanhood: having to receive and accept new life, to be exposed to an enormous power at every contraction. All we can do is open up to this life force. We can’t do anything else – can’t decide or change or understand anything. We can only go with the flow.
In my experience it is near enough impossible for a man to do everything right at childbirth. And in my mind hardly any woman comprehends that, by nature, during this existential creation of life, men are on the sidelines. Men don’t feel what women feel. For them, everything is more or less normal. They can see that something unimaginable, painful and frightening is happening to their partners, but they cannot feel it themselves. Most of all, they can’t do anything. They can only be there and try to be compassionate.
Men are used to taking action, being in control, making decisions. During childbirth they can’t do anything, can’t analyze, influence or even really help. After talking to a lot of men about this issue, I’d like to summarize as emphatically as I can the quintessential male experience of childbirth: helplessness, powerlessness and exclusion. I would also like to plead for more compassion from women. Women are kept conscious by their pain and are practically forced to be present in their bodies – nature has very cleverly made certain of it. But I swear, dear sisters, if we could saunter off, faint, hide behind a camera, get drunk with our mates or fall asleep in order to avoid the horrendous pain of the contractions, we would!
For many couples childbirth could become the birth of true love, because during those hours you don’t meet beauty queens and brave heroes. What you meet is an elemental life force, and this expects one thing of all participants: acceptance of what is happening. Women have to go beyond themselves like never before in terms of commitment and endurance. And men have to acknowledge their unimportance as ‘movers and shakers’. They have to accept being reduced to the role of a spectator, while life gives birth to itself. There is nothing to gain and to desire; it is a meeting of female pain and male powerlessness. It is a time to show deep compassion for the extreme situation of the other person. And once two people have experienced each other in this most extreme and hidden corner of their being, an unimaginable reward presents itself immediately – there is a human being where before there was none.
The first thing this little person does – after giving great happiness to its parents by simply being there – is cry. Babies are nearly always hungry. From the very first moment they are needy and demand our unconditional physical, emotional and mental presence. And nobody has told us that the animated, blissful, pure and true power of a child is one of the strongest challenges for a relationship.
Infants don’t think about what they are doing. They are simply doing it. When a baby cries, its whole body cries, right down to its tiny toes. And when a baby laughs, its whole body gurgles. Children don’t pretend. Children don’t ask whether certain behaviour is appropriate. They are what they are. They keep on demanding whatever they need. The less we can give them, the more they will ask.
Once children have arrived, all our inadequacies become apparent. We want to give the little ones everything and find out that sometimes we haven’t got much. From day one they want immediate contact and attention and for us to be occupied with them the whole time. As they always demand our whole being, all the gaps in our own hearts become apparent. Like flowers growing towards the sun, children continuously turn towards love. And if we have not received true love ourselves, we cannot give any. The flow has been interrupted. No matter how much we try to give or to compensate, we are painfully aware of our own inadequacies. Deep inside we feel guilty and withdraw behind work and other duties, or we develop into first-class leisure organizers. But children will always prefer even an imperfect but truthful life to withdrawal or a false picture-postcard family.
Of course, we only want the best for our children. And when our life isn’t going that well, we try even harder. Yesterday we had a furious argument with Daddy – well, today’s birthday party will be really fun. For days we’ve had no time for the children. Then this afternoon we must go swimming together. And then we realize that the noise at the birthday party is getting on our nerves and that we don’t feel like making fairy cakes at all. In the pool we think of the work that needs doing and during the water fight we nearly have a panic attack.
If we really do make contact with our children, we are always aware of it immediately. Then things are easy. We giggle with them, find their stories exciting, want to go on the water slide again. In moments like that we have something to give to our children. An evening spent playing a board game with them out of duty is just a sacrifice. We might feel guilty if we don’t. But deep inside our children know this very well. They have very sensitive antennae for falseness. When they sense it, they start niggling to gain attention. When they sense the emptiness of their parents’ hearts, they feel utterly worthless inside.
There are two escape routes from such lifeless or laborious situations. Either you are honest with your children and say ‘I don’t feel like playing this game at all. I just want to curl up with a book and have some peace…’ or you say ‘I am really tired. I can’t do the fairy cakes today – can you help me please?’ or you tackle the situation with your children in all honesty and truthfulness with yourself: you acknowledge that you are absent-minded, strained, tired or numb. Once you stop using your last bit of strength to play the exemplary father or the loving mother, once you confront your inadequacies consciously, you might not experience an exciting or funny evening with your children but you might find some real closeness. Once you consciously confront your feelings, or the lack of them, amazingly enough, something begins to flow. And children sense that too. If you are aware of your inner reluctance, show your weaknesses and still say ‘Oh, I’ll give it a try,’ then sometimes unexpected things happen.
A wise man used to say, ‘The opposite of “good” is “well-meant”.’ Your empty sacrifices to your children become particularly painful when one day you expect something back from them. Now not one of the little darlings will voluntarily put the plates into the dishwasher, even though you organized perfect birthday parties for them for years. For days your youngster has answered back, been angry and not listened to a word you said, even though you’ve still made him cups of cocoa and tidied up after him, while secretly wanting to show him the door. You always went without because of your children. You didn’t go to parties, you reluctantly abandoned your career and went to bed early every night because the little ones wouldn’t go to sleep otherwise. And now you don’t feel well and none of your children asks how you are without explicit prompting. Now it’s your birthday and there isn’t a cake or a surprise present in sight. Now your children accompany you to an important event and spend the whole time behaving like morons.
I know, the truth is bitter. But this is a harvest of empty seeds. It happens when you have sacrificed yourself, acted out a part, insisted on empty rules of behaviour. Whenever you have given because you thought you ought to, nothing of any substance has got through to your children. There is only one way to bring genuine and fulfilled human beings into this life: be true to yourself. Once you start expressing yourself to your children, complete with all your weaknesses and inadequacies, they will know who you really are. And slowly but surely you will be able to give them more energy and real fun than you ever could with all the well-meant parental role-play.
In a recent film, a cold-hearted and rigid mother tells her son, ‘When I feel something for you, then it is as if I reach into a bowl with fishhooks. I can never pull out just one. They are always tangled up. That’s why I’d rather leave it.’
I think that we can do no greater favour for our emotionally starved children and for our own caged hearts than bravely reach into this bowl of fishhooks.
Another excursion into the realm of shadows: everybody has a stack of qualities they are unaware of. Everybody has strengths that were so strongly judged or condemned when they were growing up that they became forbidden. We all have a very comprehensive mechanism that bans such strengths completely from our thoughts, emotions and behaviour. It is our partners who remind us of them again. They often act out those repressed qualities with incredible perseverance and precision. They are sloppy, unreliable, obsessively tidy – everything that we find unbearable.
Even if this surfacing of our unwanted shadows is very painful, we should be grateful when they demand a place in our life again. Long ago we put heavy chains on those parts of ourselves and sent them into exile. But if we want to live a truly balanced and authentic life in the present, we need our shadows back – even if we long ago projected them onto others and now seemingly abhor them. The shadows contain important gifts and talents that we need for our development and our happiness – and sometimes for that of our children as well.
If in times of crisis, argument, separation or divorce parents weren’t so focused on the polarization with their partner, they would be able to recognize that their children urgently need precisely what they cannot bear in their partner any more. It is necessary for their development. Sometimes it is even important for their survival. The tragic thing at this point of a relationship is that we are not only unaware that the shadow expressed by our partner is part of us and condemn it or hate it intensely, but we can’t recognize that our children urgently need this aspect in order to remain centred. If we are always dutiful and on time, for example, our children urgently need a bit of chaos so that there is at least a little space for their playful creativity.
If, after being engaged in a power struggle with our partner for some time, we finally separate, we can’t do our children a bigger favour than to really use the distance positively. Now that we have a bit of safe space, we should deal with our partner’s hateful qualities and integrate them into our lives as consciously and lovingly as possible. If you found your partner’s chaos unbearable, for instance, then allow yourself a bit of chaos now and again. You don’t have to tell your partner. Then your children can find some peace and don’t have to dissociate themselves from all those qualities that you had to dissociate yourself from as a child.
It’s no use avoiding talking about your partner with your children – the important thing is what was important for us as children: the atmosphere. This matters – and children hear particularly clearly what you don’t say. If you are resentful and battling for some peaceful co-existence with your partner inside yourself, then it is better to express this to your children. Only then can they look for some peace within themselves rather than send their love for both of you into separate camps.
Nora showed me particularly clearly what happens to children when their parents are at war. Nora is a young woman in her early twenties. She came to me with an eating disorder that had ruled her life since her parents had separated. She had her own flat but often went to see her mother, who had remained in the former family home. She would barely have arrived before she was secretly eating everything that she could get hold of. Often she even stole money from her mother’s purse. No matter whether she had just left her mother’s house or her father’s flat, immediately afterwards she had to buy large quantities of food and have an eating orgy in her own flat, only to vomit everything out again.
She called her state ‘hanging between my parents on a rubber band’. If she was with one of them, she couldn’t be with the other. There would be a sudden ‘Stop’ sign inside her and she wouldn’t be allowed to get closer. Once she said, ‘I am supposed to be able to talk to my mother since my father moved out. But it is only words. Without being prompted my mum will say that she accepts him. But really she is always angry with him, no matter what he does. The worst is when she wants to hug me. Somehow it’s like touching a hot stove, she’s so tense and empty. It’s like starving. With my father, on the other hand, it’s like choking on my own vomit. He is more relaxed than my mother, but every time I’m happy just to be with him, he starts talking about the old days, or he claims he’s doing something important, or he isn’t there at all.’
During our work together Nora wrote a letter to her mother which unfortunately she never sent:
You won’t believe me, but I don’t really care that much whether you live with Dad or the other man. Really! You think that all I want is you to get back together again. But that is not the case. What makes me so ill is your hypocrisy. You never really talk about Dad. But even so, every time you mention him it sounds as though you think he’s made a mess of something again. If you nag at Dad without really talking about him then all I want is to be off. It’s as if there’s no place for me there. By now I really don’t care whether you are with Dad or with the new man or another one or no one at all. What I don’t want is your anger, your fears and your empty hugs. I am bursting. I want to vomit. I don’t want to force you to go back to Dad. That’s not the point. I just don’t want to feel so bloody hungry and sick any more.
Nora’s description is a good illustration of the fatal impact a separation can have on a child. Something always has to be sacrificed in order to keep something else. One person is there but not the other. Often one is good, because the other has to be bad. In truth there is no light without darkness – one can’t exist without the other. Equally, one isn’t right and the other wrong. Nora and other children still carry the memory of the true power of love inside them. Love doesn’t sacrifice, love embraces, increases, shares and lets flow. Love never rules anything out.
Nora truly touched my heart. Her way of describing her feelings reminded me of one of the elemental truths: children embrace everything without knowing it. If they are forced to exclude something, then inside them something is forced to freeze or to fight for survival. Nora sometimes said, ‘I love both of them – and I don’t care whether they live in the same house. To me, we are all one.’
She is right. On a deep spiritual level we are all one. We are all connected to each other, whether we are geographically separated or not. Children are the expression of this connectedness. In them, two people have merged. And in them two powers form a new unit. And as long we don’t accept the seemingly dark parts in our partner, then we not only freeze out love but we also cause the same thing to happen in our children.
Whenever you say after a crisis or separation ‘I never criticize my partner in front of the children. I don’t have arguments with them in front of the children,’ you are only reassuring yourself. Maybe you aren’t really doing it consciously. You might not say ‘Your father is an idiot’ or ‘I can’t stand your mother’s nonsense any more,’ but children suffer on a more subtle level. Sentences such as ‘Was watching telly all you did at Dad’s?’ or ‘Well, your mother wants it like that’ always communicate only one thing: ‘The other parent is wrong.’
What wears children out is a more or less silent power struggle about attitudes and concepts. Nearly all separations involve contrasting concepts of ‘videos and MacDonald’s’ versus ‘You have to practise the piano’ and ‘You have to eat your greens!’ One of the partners defends the territory of strict rules, high morals and political and social awareness. The other can be playful, tolerant and sloppy. The more acrimonious the separation, the more extreme the ‘organic veg’ vs ‘fast food’ battles in the family.
A recently separated woman claimed that she had found evidence of her partner’s inadequacy: ‘My children feel better as soon as he’s gone.’ Her partner, though, claims exactly the same when he is alone with the children.
Marriage is not a solution. Separation in itself is not a problem. What is important is what we think about the marriage and what we believe about the separation and our partner. If we believe that separating will traumatize our children, then our children will be traumatized. If we criticize or despise our partner when we are still living together, then our children, in their all-embracing need to love, are torn apart. If we relax as soon as soon as we have put some distance between ourselves and our partner, then our children will relax too. It is not a situation in itself that is a problem for children, but the way their parents deal with it. The most important truth here is that separation doesn’t really exist. We can only really free ourselves of something by accepting it.
For that reason, if you have to separate, it is better to separate in love. The biggest favour you can do your children after a divorce is to seek forgiveness and try to understand your partner. That way your own life and that of your children will settle down again. Your own personality will develop as a result and your children will feel more grounded.
I am convinced that we are all healing links in the chain of evolution. We are on this planet to heal the story of our parents. And our children are here to heal our own story. That is emotional evolution. Year after year I can recognize in my own family how wonderfully this works. My husband and I acquired all sorts of quite different attitudes, habits and patterns from our families of origin. We both discarded a lot of them quite early on. In some ways my husband didn’t fit into his family system and I didn’t fit into mine. We were different, and every time we bravely stood up for ourselves and trusted our own hearts rather than acquiesced to the demands of the family, every time we went our own way successfully, something in our families of origin was healed.
Children only have to rebel against the painful and dark places in a family. I guess my fairly anxious mother nearly had a heart attack quite often during all those adventures and escapades I went through in my youth. I know that she often wanted to hold me back by threatening and sanctioning me, but today I recognize that she can find peace because I ignored so many of her fears and limitations. She can see now that many of her fears were ungrounded. She realizes that things she thought impossible really can happen. In spite of all her former anxiety, today she is proud of me and she herself is a bit freer from her own constraints because I grew beyond her without suffering any damage.
But there are all kinds of constraints, fears and pain in a family that are so elemental and deep-rooted that we are just not conscious of them. We took them on board as children and simply thought that life was like that. When I was little, for example, there was always an underlying fear of poverty. We were always scrimping, saving and shoring things up for fear of trouble in the future. At the root of it was that both my parents had suffered hunger and poverty as children. My husband, on the other hand, experienced a totally different belief system as a child. His family’s principle was: ‘The family must never be questioned. We have to stick together at all costs and demonstrate this to the outside world.’ During the first years of our marriage we had a kind of religious war. For my husband it was unthinkable to talk about our problems with someone outside the family. If I did this, it was an utter betrayal of the whole family. And to me it was equally clear that his carefree and feckless living for the moment would ruin us.
By now you know my creed: we all urgently need from our partner whatever we find most objectionable and unimaginable. For a second time I would like to take this book as an example. Today my husband is supporting me wholeheartedly so that I can write page after page about our marriage and our family and make it known to the world. And I am working fewer hours as a therapist and trusting that we will not starve in the future.
As this chapter is about children, I am thinking of our daughter. Whatever my husband and I have healed already is a safe foundation for her. It is as if a little plant can grow ever better because the environment has improved – as if the sun is out more often, there are more nutrients in the soil and the quality of the water is better. So the little plant gets stronger and realizes that the world is a place of abundance and growth. That is what it is like when father and mother appreciate the differences in each other more and more and integrate them. Then a child experiences diversity and connectedness at the same time.
When our daughter was born there were many difficulties. Her birth, her entrance into this world, was strewn with obstacles. From day one she had bad colic and only found relief when we carried her around on our shoulders, rocking her around the clock. A very good friend sometimes came for an hour or two to give us a break. Then as a small child my daughter was never able to play on her own. She never slept on her own and demanded attention all the time. Sometimes it was unbearable. Sometimes all I wanted was to run away. I remember when my husband and I went on a five-day holiday for the first time and I counted the nappies that I didn’t have to change.
Today I know how much our daughter mirrored the tension in our marriage at that time. And today I can see in my balanced, cheerful and independent daughter that the children heal together with the parents. If the parents are involved in a power struggle, there is a power struggle inside the child. If there is anxiety and tension in the family, there is anxiety and tension in the child. No matter how subtly it is expressed, if one of the partners rejects something strongly in the other, the child feels that a part of itself has been rejected.
Our daughter has many of my husband’s characteristics, but she also has qualities and talents of mine. In the same way that my husband and I have grown closer together over the years and can accept and appreciate each other’s qualities more, so the different polarities in our daughter have connected. Over time she has become calmer and doesn’t dither as much, and there are fewer absolute issues with her. She can also surf between my husband and me much more easily and tap into whichever resource she needs at any given moment. In quite an obvious way she knows to do maths with Daddy and writing with Mum. But on a deeper level, too, she knows that she has various resources at her disposal. Recently she told a friend: ‘My dad is the one to be silly with, and with my mum I can talk to the angels.’ As for fast food, Dad is the first port of call, whereas if she wants to sleep over with a friend for the third night running, she sees to it that she gets Mum on her own before she asks for permission.
This wealth of possibility gives space for a child’s personality to develop fully. But true stability, in my mind, doesn’t come through diversity but through the acceptance and valuing of their own individuality. I can’t say it often enough – children are love, and in order to be themselves they want to love. On a deeply unconscious level they are only allowed to love what their parents love. Their own love is not allowed to transcend the love of their parents. That is the price that all children pay in order to remain within their families.
For me, our daughter is a soul of her own born into our family. We cannot really educate her or give her anything beyond learning to love and to accept more and more aspects of other people and of the world. But this probably makes her, too, feel valued as we come close to the true nature and the depth of her soul.
I am sure our daughter, with her wonderfully witty and strong nature, has been born for a good reason. Her soul, too, is embarking on an adventure and in the course of her life she will heal a lot in her father and her mother – far beyond what we are able to accept from each other today, far beyond what I can even imagine…
The last paragraph would have been a good ending to this chapter, but I can’t exclude another aspect of having children: abortion. So far I have tried to describe what an enormous revolution it is for a relationship when a child is born. And I have mentioned how many relationships don’t survive this revolution intact. Sometimes mothers and fathers fear the massive power and the changes a baby would bring into their life so much that they don’t want the child to be born. There are numerous reasons against children: the relationship not being strong enough, the possible disability of the child, the fear of responsibility, the circumstances or the job situation… I have heard many a reason and in all cases have learned something baffling – even in the case of a very early termination, it is always about a child. What I am saying is that a termination is not simply a quick medical intervention removing a cluster of cells. Every time a person dies. And when a person dies, it is in our nature to say goodbye to them and to grieve appropriately.
I am saying this regardless of any church dogma or religious morals. My view is based on my experience with clients. For me, abortion has always been a helpful option provided by modern medicine for an emergency. I have never had the slightest unease about it for a good reason – my IU device slipped and I became pregnant by a man I didn’t know very well. Then one night, when I was alone in bed, I experienced a sense of connection that I had never felt before. I woke up with the feeling that there was somebody inside me. Of course I thought, ‘That’s stupid!’ But I couldn’t get back to sleep because the feeling was so intense. Then came the sudden thought: ‘I’m pregnant!’ And again: ‘That’s rubbish! You have the IU thing, and your period isn’t really late.’ Yet, after a second night with equally strange sensations I went and bought a pregnancy test. It was positive! I went to my gynaecologist. She confirmed it. Now came the question: ‘Shall I have a termination?’ If my friends had ever asked me, I would always have said, ‘Yes.’ And now everything inside me was shouting, ‘No!’ After half an hour of pros and cons I was absolutely clear, from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet: I would bring this child into the world regardless.
I thought this experience, this unambiguousness, was a personal exception, my own individual inexplicable emotional truth. I didn’t draw any conclusions about the pros and cons of termination per se. Since then, during my years as a therapist I have learned that apart from the birth of a child, the major reason for a relationship being poisoned and destroyed is a termination. Most women are surprised when they discover that it was this event that brought about the death of something in their relationship.
One couple made the issue particularly poignant. The man had urged the woman to have an abortion and during our work he repeatedly talked about ‘the abortion’, while she talked of ‘our Clare’ and wept with grief, even though it had happened six years ago and the two had had another child since. Working with this couple, I understood more clearly than ever before that at the moment of conception a soul appears between a couple. In this case it was ‘Clare’. The two people concerned had never talked about the episode, but their sex life had dried up. The healing process that unfolded during our sessions was very painful but very clear: all it needed was some mourning and acceptance of this soul. When the mother was allowed to express her grief and the father was finally able to say ‘our daughter’, peace and closeness suddenly surfaced between them again. One day the man finally said, crying, ‘My Clare.’Then the woman stopped crying and order was restored within the family.
I have found that with nearly all abortions it is important to appreciate the soul that has come and gone, to say goodbye to it and to mourn it sufficiently. With modern people and high-tech medicine this is not always an easy process. But in all the cases I know of, when a termination was carried out in the belief that it was simply a cluster of cells that was removed, something died within the woman or the relationship until the soul could be mourned. Sometimes women have told me with embarrassment that after a termination they have had the feeling that the child has lived on. If they are still with the same partner, they often feel as if the child is standing between them.
To state it clearly one more time: I am not against abortion for moral, ethical or dogmatic reasons. I believe there are situations in the lives of mothers and fathers that more than justify an abortion. Only I have learned that we have to take that step consciously. We have to appreciate the being and say goodbye to it.
This chapter is called ‘Children of love’. By nature, children find their way into this world because two people conjoin physically for a moment. In most cases, therefore, children emerge from an ecstatic connection of two people linked by their hearts. Of all the attempts to describe this amazing, unique process of creating life, Kahlil Gibran’s words have always moved me the most:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself,
For they have their own thoughts.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You must house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you
cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them
like you.
For life does not go backward nor tarries with yesterday.7
7. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Arkana, London, 1992, p.22