Who do they need us to be?

updated thoughts on responsibility

Typically, I publish a podcast episode on Sundays, but while I’ve got a few recorded conversations with wise and courageous stoic mamas awaiting publication, I wanted to share some thoughts that feel rather urgent to me at the moment.

These thoughts have been poking at me for awhile now. My article Responsibility has remained on this Substack’s “most popular” list since I published it in January. And I stick by most of it, but some of my thoughts have shifted in what feels like important ways this year as I’ve learned more about Neufeld’s attachment ideas through the Attachment Matters conversations, and as I’ve developed my understanding of Jung’s ideas on the Mother Archetype and the Mother Complex.

And then came the amazing Walk With Mom guest post, The Third Path, which brought home to me that it’s time to clarify and update my position on our responsibility as parents. In that article, she identifies three “empowering ideas” gleaned from the SMP that she found helpful:

-I am not responsible for my daughter’s happiness or her experience of life, only my own.
-I have the choice and the opportunity to grow into a fuller version of myself as the mother my daughter needs right now.
-My own despair is an essential part of the challenge that life is presenting to me. It’s up to me to be curious about it, to observe it, and to ask what it can teach me. I’m still working on this. For now, I imagine that despair is my invitation to become a stronger, better mother, which helps lessen its power so I can lean into the kind of life that I want with my daughter

I’m so humbled and grateful to know that these ideas are penetrating the conversation, and that parents are recognizing there’s a way that they can reorient to this situation that feels healthier for everyone in the family.

But the wording of that first statement about responsibility created some alarm in me. Not that I disagree with it, but that there are some implications in its current form that I would want to avoid if I were to talk about responsibility now. Walk With Mom and I had some discussion about this prior to publishing, and because this was how she understood my message (which is totally legit, and if you read Responsibility, I think this is indeed what was communicated in that piece,) and it was this idea in this form that empowered her, we agreed to not edit the wording.

So how have my thoughts changed since writing that article in January? Just what is our responsibility to our children who are trans-identified—or our children in general? Are we responsible for their happiness or their experience of Life? I’d now say the answer is complicated.

We absolutely play a role in how they experience the world. According to Jung, all humans will develop a Mother Complex (a cluster of thoughts, memories, emotions, and other feelings that they will associate with “the mother” and that will live in their unconscious) and this complex will affect how they experience and navigate the world. The Mother Complex is formed early in life and will have a big impact on whether they experience the world as friendly or hostile, so yes, we want to be lovingly responsive to the needs of our children when they come into this world.

Modernity makes it really difficult to be as responsive to the needs of our babies as we’d like—we, as parents have competing demands and cultural influences that will diminish our capacity to fulfill this responsibility, let alone the fact that most of us lack the support system necessary to ensure our needs are being met so that our care can cascade from a place of fullness. Yet, even if we show up perfectly in this role, there are other factors that will influence this complex. We know this based on how differently multiple children from the same family are impacted by their Mother Complex.

So what do we do with this information? Beat ourselves up for not knowing about this or for the external forces over which we had little or no control? Or for potentially falling short of being perfect mothers when our children were infants? If we’re looking at this through the lens of responsibility and what’s best for our kids, I’d encourage asking yourself, “To what end?” What might be a more productive approach that would benefit both you and your child? And here, I’d like us to return to Walk With Mom’s list and look at her second point:

-I have the choice and the opportunity to grow into a fuller version of myself as the mother my daughter needs right now.

There are some lines that Rose repeats throughout the Attachment Matters conversations. One of them is “We are their best bet.” I know you don’t need to be reminded that no one can possibly love our children the way we do—or tolerate their messes the way we can. We did it throughout their childhood; little did we know that those poopy, vomit-y, snotty, even bloody messes that our love for our kids enabled us to address were just preparing us for the even more messy experiences that were coming down the pike.

In previous generations, we’d have thought we were about done with the messes, but that’s not the world we raised our kids in. It’s also important that we don’t just jump into the mess with them and take over the clean-up. We need a new relationship to their messes. And we need to be mindful of the message we send through the way we respond to those messes.

So, if it were me, I’d even word this one a little differently and make it a stronger statement:

-I have the responsibility to grow into a fuller version of myself as the mother my daughter needs right now.

What does that bring up for you? Does this resonate as true? And does it apply if our kids are grown and out of the house? Maybe we always have the responsibility to be growing into fuller versions of ourselves? Walk With Mom’s daughter is a young adult. So’s mine. I think it’s this last part that we need to be careful about “the mother my daughter needs right now.” What does this mean? Who do our daughters need us to be right now?

Back to Walk With Mom:

-My own despair is an essential part of the challenge that life is presenting to me. It’s up to me to be curious about it, to observe it, and to ask what it can teach me. I’m still working on this. For now, I imagine that despair is my invitation to become a stronger, better mother, which helps lessen its power so I can lean into the kind of life that I want with my daughter

What kind of life do you want with your children as they come of age and do their best (yes, I believe they’re all just doing their best) to figure out who they are in this upside down world? Is it conditional on them being who you want (need?) them to be? Does it position you as their best bet? The one who will welcome them back into the fold when (if?) their world falls apart?

This third point also communicates that Walk With Mom is reorienting to the situation by using her difficult emotions (despair) as an invitation to become “a stronger, better mother.” As she practices this, not only will she “become the mother” her daughter needs right now (a strong, stable woman in the world who’s got the emotional capacity to handle the messiest of things her children may bring her,) but she’ll transform her own life as well.

Once we develop this different relationship with our emotions, there’s little by way of external circumstances that can destabilize us. This also frees us from the fear that steers most of us through life—avoiding discomfort and the things that scare us. We begin to see and experience things very differently ourselves. We won’t get everything we want, but we do get more Life. I’m not talking about more years, I’m talking about more richness. More awe and wonder. More tolerance for the painful things because we now understand that they make the beautiful things so much more beautiful.

Do we have a responsibility to model this for our children? Does changing our relationship with the sources of our pain help relieve us of the responsibility to steer our kids away from theirs?

Just who is the mother your child needs you to be? Do you have a responsibility to ask yourself this question?

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I didn’t attend the Genspect conference (which I recognize some of you think is irresponsible of me; maybe I’ll expand my thoughts on this another time) but I heard that Dr. Julia Mason encouraged parents to be quiet enough to allow their children to “hear their own niggling doubts.”

I want to be clear that from my perspective parents do have a responsibility to honestly communicate our safety concerns to our kids and I agree 100% with Dr. Mason—we have a responsibility to do it in a way that doesn’t drown out their own inner voice, which btw, probably sounds a lot like you, their mother, the one who has the responsibility to love them most and be their forever relationship—even when they’re rejecting that generous invitation.

Photo by guille pozzi on Unsplash

I want to express my deepest gratitude again to Walk With Mom for articulating these ideas and crediting The StoicMom Project! And for impressing upon me the need to ensure I’m communicating as clearly as possible. I want to be careful that moms don’t think I’m encouraging them to absolve themselves of responsibility to show up a certain way for their children. So what do I hope moms take away from the SMP when it comes to responsibility about how we’re experiencing life and being the mom our kids need us to be? I’d word it something more like this (and offer it as a Guiding Principle, an ideal to work toward rather than something to beat our selves up with when we fall short):

-I relieve my child of responsibility for my happiness and experience of Life. By taking charge of my own, I can model a more empowered way of being in the world, increasing the likelihood that my child will one day discover and embrace this same power.