I did so many things wrong.

Let’s see. I know this is meant to be the title since its persistence has brought me here to the keyboard. But where am I to go with it? What would I change about the way I raised my kids if I had a do-over?

Ha! Just about everything if I’m honest. I think I’d move them off grid and raise them on a homestead. Maybe get them a classical tutor? If they were interested enough. I think I’d prefer them to know how to procure food in a way that nourished the Earth–and how to build things, with their hands! I think so much of our insecurity lies in our dependence on money to get our needs met.

Huh. That went a weird direction quickly, didn’t it? But what the hey, it’s true for me. (Or part of me at least, turns out we’ll circle back to here later in this article.) Thing is, I strongly considered this life path during the time surrounding my first pregnancy. We were on the “Raw Milk Underground”. I’m serious! It was a thing!! I fantasized about having a ranch and growing our own food and learning all the things.

But the truth is, it intimidated me out of my mind. Once my daughter was outside my body, motherhood intimidated me in a similar way. I was both bored and terrified. It messed with my story of myself. I couldn’t believe this was the most common way women lived their adulthoods since the dawn of time. That here I was in my mid-30s just discovering how profound an experience it was to be responsible for this completely helpless, beautiful being that had come here through me. So determined to do it right, yet being faced almost daily with choices I didn’t know would be so hard! Again, imagining all the things–but lacking the energy, the know-how, the will to make them happen. As usual, the fantasy being better than real life.

I thought about my sisters who’d started having babies in their early 20s with both gratitude and jealousy. Thankful that I’d had many years of a childless adult life but also wondering what it would be like to not know adulthood as anything other than motherhood. Would it have come easier to me without this other full story of who I was? Ultimately, I concluded I wasn’t cut out to be a SAHM. Convinced myself my family would be better off if I was a career woman.

So, I returned to full time studies (I was so very comfortable in a classroom. Here I understood the game and played it well. Aah, story of competent self restored.) I continued in the classroom, only at the head of it now–still a bumpy ride but if I poured everything into it, I could get by in this story of me as a devoted and meaningful contributor to the social fabric. We teachers were well-respected for the sacrifice we endured to educate the next generation. (Shush to that inner voice whispering, “you’re faking it. This isn’t really what you’re meant to be doing.”)

My children genuinely enjoyed being part of the afterschool programs (we practically lived at the school) while I hustled to ensure my lessons were engaging enough that I wasn’t spending all day, every day peeling kids off the ceiling. Certainly my work was important if it required this much of me!

Why am I sharing all this? Well, I think it’s to acknowledge that I lacked some mothering skills. I wasn’t always present when I was with my children. I didn’t teach my own kids all the things. I didn’t check in enough. I gave them too much freedom, too many experiences, not enough responsibility, too much of this, not enough of that. I questioned myself when things got hard. I didn’t question myself when I should have.

I don’t think I was a bad mom. But was I a good mom? I could have been a better mom. Would that have changed anything? Maybe. We might have a whole different set of problems right now. Because humans have problems. It’s what makes us human. Obstacles to figure out that will shape us and grow us. Otherwise, we’d move through our days like the other beings on this planet: instinctually. Flowing with life, drawn to food, shelter, even play. Becoming food one day.

I was a human mom. I did my best. Did I wound my kids? Yes. Of course I did. Because that’s what human moms do. Accepting this truth requires grief at the same time that it is incredibly freeing. Even if it was possible to be a perfect mom (which it’s not) and I managed to do all the things a good mom would do, that would be wounding in its own way. Setting an impossible bar. Creating a shoe size way too big for a human child to step into. To avoid Icarus’s doom, she’d have to shield her eyes and keep her distance.

Did being the mom I was lead to my daughter joining the hordes of kids navigating life these days through a transgender identity? I imagine my certain brand of mothering was a likely factor. Combined with other factors like the time and place we parented in, the way my girl is inherently wired, the way humans will protect themselves from a wounding world through the personas our ego will create for us—I believe she had little chance of escaping this cultural phenomenon.

If I think about this through the lens of fate and destiny—a story I personally find quite helpful—I see all those factors as my daughter’s fate. The things she didn’t choose that were to be part of her experience. I see this identity as an obstacle that is hers to move through in order to realize her destiny. Something about this experience is important to that destiny. I’m not sure how; I can only make guesses at the lesson(s) she’s meant to learn through it. My puny human vision is limited in its scope. But whether or not I like it or can predict the ending, it’s happening. I think trying to make that about me is unhelpful—at least it sure seemed unhelpful when that’s what I was doing.

So what is her experience asking of me? In our situation, I think it was a bit like how I described motherhood. A common human experience with profound feelings attached to it: individuation. I suspect part of why this came into our lives is to free us both. To get clear on where she ends and I begin—and also on how, at the same time, we remain forever connected, with me being always the mom, her always my daughter. To help me embrace what it means to be human and a mom: the inevitable confusion, disappointment, pain, loss and grief, the ache that reminds me that I’m alive and that I feel.

Along with the discovery that security isn’t to be found out there in the human world. If I’m honest with myself, I know that I would have done plenty of other things wrong had I made that homesteading fantasy come to pass while my children were still young enough for that to be their childhood. Life would have found other ways to humble me, to remind me that the answer key is a moving target. Aiming to be good and get everything right is a distraction that could only ever take me further from what actually provides steadiness.

I didn’t see that last part coming—that the target I was aiming for was keeping me a stranger to myself. Once I did, nothing looked the same. I couldn’t keep scrambling to meet some nebulous target of correctness anymore. And strangely, I didn’t have to. From this new angle, I could finally rest—trusting myself with even the hardest realizations because some part of me had already started sensing there was an order to all of this, bigger than my own management of it, even if I couldn’t see its full shape.

Now I’m clear that being human means that I live inside a story. A limiting story–as it must be, because I’m pretty sure the whole story would cause our heads to explode. But knowing the story exists gives me the freedom to allow all the joy, all the awe and delight that comes my way without defending against the rug being pulled out from under me. Because this I feel pretty damn certain of: unimaginably hard things will continue to happen. Will they annihilate me or expand me? Both probably.

Being humbled all the way to my knees has freed me to be “the fool” in the Tarot sense of the character: that silly fellow who steps into the unknown with curiosity and wonder. Knowing there’s a much larger story I couldn’t possibly have orchestrated on my own allows me to surrender, to remember that this is all much bigger than I am, and all I have to do is love my whole self and show up that way (which includes boundaries that convey my integrity and loving presence for those in my orbit) and trust there is order.

Sounds so simple, huh? Ha! I’m here to tell you that it is not. What it IS, is an orientation. One that I have to choose on the daily. One that sometimes I forget to choose, and I’ll be going along and suddenly, I’m feeling it: the familiar anxiousness, the free floating fear that manifests as those gnawing, erratic butterflies in my belly signaling “protect yourself, discomfort ahead”!! See my articles, On Suffering and On Evil.

Maybe the only way to be human is to do lots of things “wrong”. A concept that wouldn’t exist inside the mind of say, a deer or a frog. Or even a less wild being like a dog. This human life. What a wild, spectacular ride. Buckle up because who knows what adventures and tragedies have yet to unfold! I only know this: the way ahead lies suffering—and all the other parts of a human story: the awe, the wonder and delight, all the fun parts I’m bound to miss out on if I let the fear of doing it wrong determine what comes next.

Photo by Chris de Tempe on Unsplash