Prologue—mkz

The fiercely protective love I feel for my children has propelled me to do the inner work we call mindful parenting. This inner work has yielded unexpected gifts and pleasures. It has helped me to be more present for the day-to-day richness of being a parent. It has also given me a way to see my children more clearly, to see through the veils of my own fears, expectations, and needs, and to see what might be called for in each moment. Bringing mindfulness to my parenting helps me to see myself as well, and gives me a way to work with the difficult moments and the automatic reactions that can arise so easily in me at such times, reactions that can be limiting, harsh, or hurtful to my children’s well-being.

Although I have never had a formal meditation practice, I have always needed some time and space for nondoing, for being still, in silence. This was especially hard to find when my children were little. Moments of solitude and inner reflection would come as I lay in bed in the morning, awake but unwilling to move, aware of the images from my dreams, sometimes clear, sometimes elusive, receptive to whatever thoughts visited me in that place somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.

This was my inner, self-nourishing meditation. It brought some balance to my outer meditations—the ongoing, moment-to-moment awareness, the tuning, responding, holding, and letting go that my children needed from me.

Meditative moments have come in many forms—sitting up in the middle of the night nursing my newborn, soaking in the peace and quiet, feeding her as I am being fed by the sweetness of her being; or walking with a crying baby, finding ways to soothe and comfort, chanting, singing, rocking, as I work with my own tiredness; or looking into the face of an unhappy, angry teenager, trying to discern the cause and intuit what might be needed.

Mindfulness is about paying attention, and paying attention takes energy and concentration. Every moment brings something different and may require something different from me. Sometimes I am blessed with understanding. Other times I am at a loss, confused, off balance, not really knowing, but trying to respond instinctively, creatively, to whatever is presented to me. There are deeply satisfying moments of pure bliss, when a child is thriving and glowing with a sense of well-being. There are plenty of difficult, frustrating, painful moments, when nothing I do is right, and I feel completely at a loss. I’ve found it especially hard to see clearly with older children. The issues are much more complex and the answers rarely simple.

But what I have come to see is that each time I feel I have lost my way as a parent, when I find myself in a dark wood, the ground rough and uneven, the terrain unfamiliar, the air chilled, there is often something to be found in my pocket when I finally find my way back. I have to remember to stop, to breathe, to reach in, and look closely at what it is.

Each difficult moment has the potential to open my eyes and open my heart. Each time I come to understand something about one of my children, I also learn something about myself and the child I once was, and that knowledge can act as a guide for me. When I am able to empathize and feel compassion for a child’s pain, when I am more accepting of the contrary, irritating, exasperating behaviors that my children can manifest, try on, experiment with—the healing power of unconditional love heals me as it nourishes them. As they grow, I also grow.

Rather than being a disadvantage, my sensitivity has become an ally. Over the years, I have learned to use my intuition, my senses, my emotional antennae to try to see into the heart of whatever I am faced with. An essential part of this is attempting to see things from my child’s point of view. I have found this inner work to be very powerful. When I can choose to be kind instead of cruel, to understand rather than judge, to accept rather than reject, my children, no matter what their ages, are nourished and strengthened.

This kind of parenting is trust building. I work hard to maintain that trust and the underlying feelings of connectedness that have been built over many years of hard emotional and physical work. Moments of carelessness or the unconscious surfacing of old destructive patterns are betrayals of my children’s trust, and I have had to consciously work to rebuild and strengthen our relationship after such moments.

Over the years I have tried to bring some awareness to my moment-to-moment experiences as a parent: observing, questioning, looking at what I most value and what I think is most important for my children. Although there are myriad aspects of parenting that are not touched on in this book, it is my hope that in describing this inner process to you, we can evoke the richness of experience and potential for growth and change that reside in mindful parenting.