Team mommy gets the Gold

The music in the background is usually the tranquility of my day, but today it seems to be the thing that brings all the chaos together in one large symphony of crying babies and running water from the dishes. I'm scrambling to finish up the last of the dishes knowing that if I stop now I will never get to finish it today. The girl is propped up on her knees, tugging at me and whining to please pick her up as the guy runs around in circles, only a diaper on, and screams at the top of his lungs in a pitch even the music playing in the background can't seem drown out. Coupled with the sound of the hard running water and the cars outside honking, buses starting and stopping, I look up above my sink and glance at my sign that reads, "SMILE, LAUGH, YOU ARE SO LUCKY, GET OVER YOURSELF, IS LIFE SO HARD, YOU POOR THING, HEALTHY BABIES, AMAZING HUSBAND, GORGEOUS LIFE." See Bob is a Jerk post for reference. And I think to myself, no not what a wonderful world even though it is, I think,

"Wow parenting is hard work."

I'm not sure where anyone got the idea that parenting would be easy, or marriage, or relationships or really anything in life. But for some reason, so many of us still hold on to the idea that if we just do something right, read the right book, get the exact parenting tactic down, life will be very simple and serene, something like from the pages of a parenting magazine where the mother is wearing a wrinkle free linen suit in the middle of the day, her makeup is just perfect and her children are sitting next to her in a peaceful recline in their polished shoes while the light of day shines on their spotless, freshly cleaned floors.

I was recently out somewhere and an adorable girl who I've known for only a short while asked me, "How's life?" I told her, "Amazing!" She asked me what I do and as I began to tell her that I am with my two babies all day her face began to transform from one of delight to one of complete despair. She looked at me with so much empathy and said to me in the sweetest voice,

"You must be so tired!"

Yes, it's hard work. But it's like an Olympic athlete. He trains his whole life, focuses his entire strengths on just one thing, the gold medal. While he is training do you think it's easy? Do you think for a second he thinks to himself "when will this get easier?" The secret is that in life, our greatest pleasures come from the things that require the most effort. The more effort we put in, the greater the experience of pleasure we will feel. Who has more fun, the spectator watching the game or the Olympic athlete who is working so hard his body aches and cries for him to stop but he pushes through with his eye on the target? It seems that the spectator is having the most fun, besides he's the one with the beer in hand, body relaxed, couldn't get easier than this! It's true, that spectator is experiencing a dose of pleasure but the athlete is tapping into a much higher level of pleasure unmeasurable to the entire audience's experience put together. And I'm sure he's tired.

The deeper reality is that the pain he feels is actually the best feeling pain in the world. It's the feeling of accomplishment, of growth and of meaning.

Parenting is hard. We're tired. And it feels fantastic.

It's like my household's chaos is the American Hockey team in overtime and I'm team Canada. I'm going for the Gold.

If your child is not perfect, you are a bad parent.

Apparently, if my child pushes another child it means I'm a bad parent.

But does it really?

At an indoor playground recently a little girl who couldn't have been older than 1 stepped right into the battlefield that is 'The Exhausted Noam (TM)' and got herself quite the push so he could make headway toward the slide. Where was I? I was sitting about 8 feet away feeding my baby Adina. I had my eye on Noam but I couldn't possibly get to him in time to stop him from the inevitable fate that was awaiting this poor innocent child.

The incident: Noam shoves the girl, girl falls to the floor and begins to cry, girl's mother appears in 2.6 seconds and grabs Noam's wrist frantically looking around for this "animals" mother. She didn't say that, I added it for extra drama but in all truth I know that's what she was thinking.

So many wrong things here, let me just begin with the mother's response.

Instead of girls mother rushing to her daughter to make sure she was okay, she ran to rebuke my son and to try eagerly to find his mother in order to reprimand her as well. Because, apparently, that is more important than checking to see if her daughter was well.

See this just sets off alarms in my head about parenting in general. Firstly this was the mother of a little baby girl who is probably more gentle than a kitten and doesn't even know what hitting is. But, sorry mother of girl, one day your child too will push, shove, hit or call someone names and the question is what will you do to deal with it? I mean besides the fact that if you are taking your child to an indoor playground you have to be realistic and plan that these things happen amongst kids, we must be realistic insomuch as life in general with kids is like an indoor playground with a bunch of little tired, overly stimulated animals running around.

In my opinion of parenting, which may be limited but in defense I believe is thought out and based on real sources, is that we are here to prepare our children with the challenges of the world and to give them the tools as to how to deal with those things as they come.

Are we going to run up to every kid's parents when something happens to our child and try to parent their children or change the parents parenting tactics? That is never going to work. You will not change others this way. You can only work on your own parenting and teach your children how to stand up to adversary in life, and then in turn through example we stand a chance at teaching others how to appropriately act.

If her child is acting up in class or isn't thriving in school later in life, will she try to change the child's teacher in hopes of having her child thrive better? I'm sure there are times when changing a teacher is appropriate but in most cases, we are probably better of teaching the child that there may even be teachers they don't jive with, but regardless, they are responsible for being good students and that's that. No exception.

I fear with this approach we are robbing our children of their independence and of their entire purpose in life at that. We are taking from them the basic fundamental principal of being an adult, which is to take responsibility for yourself and to learn to deal with life in an appropriate way.

In defense of my own parenting tactics, don't think for a second that I didn't have a serious (however serious can get with a 2 year old) talk with the guy about hitting. Don't think I didn't speak about it all the way up until he went to bed and told him how important it is to be kind and gentle. And regardless of this incident, don't think that I don't praise my son every time he is gentle with his sister. The reason I say this is because I fear that mothers or fathers reactions to a child hitting their child can result in a lot of judgment of the parents or the household. I am very quickly changing my mind as to the judgments I make about parents based on their children. I think at an older age you can probably make a better judgment as to the values being taught in someone's home based on their kid's character traits, but hardly when they're two years old.

The end of the story goes that the woman found the "animals' mother (me) and yelled at me, projecting her voice higher and higher to overcast my apologies as if not to hear it, and continued with, "Your son just.....etc etc......you should have intervened!" And then, no joke, she picked up her baby and stormed out of the playground with a thick cloud of angry smoke trailing behind. Okay the smoke is an exaggeration but you get the picture.

What are we teaching our children? Are we teaching them that they must be perfect and that if something "wrong" happens it's the end of the world? Or better yet, if something "wrong" happens, it is an excuse to completely lose it on someone? This is detrimental to our children if we teach them to think they can act like angels and not like humans who make mistakes. When a child hits my child now, I really do try to feel for the parent as they look at me with those guilty eyes. Right away I tell the parent, "It's okay these things happen now let's deal with it" because I know the pressure put on us parents to have these perfect children who don't hit, scream or have tantrums. We have to be realistic and arm ourselves for when these things happen because they are going to.

What will you teach your child to do when someone hits them?
How will you respond when your child is acting up in class and the teacher is "picking" (in his opinion) on him, and he's not doing well in that class?
How will we respond when our children get fired from a job?
What will we tell our children if, God forbid, we are faced with a tragedy such as death?

We can give them the tools to deal with it. Imagine the scenario: A boy comes home from school to tell his parents that a boy in class is picking on him. The parent sits down with the child and explains to him that all he needs to do is be true to himself. Don't feel insecure about yourself because this boy doesn't know you and is picking on you only because he is not happy with himself. The parent explains that the best thing to do is to ignore the bully because that is the ultimate defeat to someone who is trying to get a reaction. Later in life, the parent tells the child, you will see that this person will come out of his shell and try to rectify these bad behaviors and relationships he's made for himself, whereas you will still be you and not have sunk to any levels below yourself.

Or we could just teach them that when things are tough, don't deal with the issue yourself just go directly to the source. If a child hits you, go yell at his mother. If school is hard, yell at the principal. If your job isn't working out, curse out your boss. If life is tough, go yell at God for all the bad in your life.

You might even cry...

Once upon a time, there was a foolish boy who had a bag full of beautiful marbles. Now this boy was quite proud of his marbles. In fact, he thought so much of them that he would neither play with them himself nor would he let anyone else play with them. He only took them out of the bag in order to count and admire them; they were never used for their intended purpose. Yet that boy carried that coveted bag of marbles everywhere he went.

Well, there was also a wise boy who wished he could have such a fine bag of marbles. So this boy worked hard and earned money to purchase a nice bag to hold marbles. Even though he had not yet earned enough with which to purchase any marbles, he had faith and purchased the marble bag. He took special care of the bag and dreamed of the day it would contain marbles with which he could play and share with his friends.

Alas, the foolish boy with all of the marbles didn't take care of the marble bag itself, and one day the bag developed a hole in the bottom seam. Still, he paid no attention and, one by one, the marbles fell out of the bag.

It didn't take long, once the foolish boy's marble bag developed a hole, for the wise boy to begin to find those beautiful marbles, one at a time, lying unnoticed on the ground. And, one by one, he added them to his marble bag. The wise boy thus gained a fine bag full of marbles in no time at all. This boy played with the marbles and shared them with all of his friends. And he always took special care of the bag so he wouldn't lose any.

And what about the foolish boy? Because he was selfish and careless, he lost all of his marbles and was left holding the bag.

If you wrote down all the things in your life that you have, from life itself to the trinkets you own, to the feelings you feel, would you feel grateful for such tremendous gifts?

Regardless of who you feel grateful to, you would feel pretty good. You might even start to cry.

Imagine what your life would look like (speaking to myself) if you walked around all day and thought "What is my responsibility?" Rather than thinking (speaking to myself) "What are my rights, what's owed to me?"

Can you imagine the profound impact it would have on your soul to always be thinking of what your responsibility is to your husband, your children, your friends, your community, your world?

You might think this is the way most people think, but a quick glimpse into the human psyche might prove differently.

What happens when you rent an apartment, pay money, money that you earned, worked hard for, and then everything from the front door to the fridge breaks within months? How would you feel?

Most of us would feel angry, hurt or used and we would probably be calling the lawyers before we called the landlord to see what can get fixed.

The Abba and I had the merit of living in the Holy Land, The Old City of Jerusalem to be exact, for a couple years. During this time we lived in one particular apartment known to many as "The Cave". The Cave was probably 100 years old, without exaggeration, and was beautiful as ever. But literally, everything in the Cave broke, front door, shower, faucets, floors, oven, fridge, light bulbs crashed from two story high ceilings onto the floor just missing my head! I'm oversimplifying the story by writing it in two measly sentences but I trust you get the idea.

The Abba decided this was going to be our opportunity for tremendous growth and enlightenment in our lives if were going to be sensitive to the messages we were receiving. I was apartment hunting.

We got to the point where when things broke, we laughed. The lessons we needed to learn were so clear! We needed to realize that none of these things belong to us, they are just gifts that can be taken away in a second. And each second they were being taken away! (This should not negate the idea of working hard for your belongings and feeling a sense of accomplishment for hard efforts, and most importantly taking pleasure in the things we have. To be discussed in a different blog!)

Recently the Abba took a trip to the Holy Land as I told you about, and after he came back we were sitting up talking, folding laundry, catching up, and he looked at me and said "You've changed". I gulped. "You are even happier now than you have ever been." I smiled.

But then I started to think, what is it that changed?

I thought and talked it out and came to the astounding realization that the only reason I am able to be more at peace now than ever before in my life is because I have somewhat, to a very minuscule degree, begun to internalize this idea of feeling "What is my responsibility to the world around me, rather than what are my rights?"

Imagine how your life would look if all day long you were only thinking, what is my responsibility to myself, to my husband, to my parents, to my children, to my community, to my world, to my creator?

Can you feel for a moment how your life would shift from the foolish boy with the marbles so scared to let go of his own, to the wise boy who gains infinity by giving to others?

No relationship can fail if each partner is thinking "what is my responsibility to this person" Every relationship can suffer if even one person is thinking "what are my rights in this relationship"

There lies a deep secret here in parenting, amongst many other things. If we focus only on what our responsibility is toward our child we will feel a deep sense of love and appreciation and if we feel that we are entitled to things in life or things are owed to us, we may find ourselves riding a roller coaster of disappointment.

I often cringe when I see ads that say, "You deserve the best." I mean let's face it lady (talking to myself) we were given this tremendous gift of life with all its beauty and pleasures and we did nothing to earn it! Nothing! We were born into it! And we 'deserve' it? Can you even imagine telling your child he deserved to be born? What does that even mean? We don't deserve anything in truth, we are just here enjoying and taking the incredible gifts that life has to offer. So we need to get outside of ourselves and stop thinking of what is coming our way and start thinking, "Wow, if I was given this tremendous gift of life FOR FREE, I wonder what my responsibility is toward this world?" What can I do for it?

Think about it. God knew what he was doing. He entrusted us with a gigantic beautiful awesome world, told us to find a spouse that is in itself a gigantic beautiful awesome task, and then to have children and that is a gigantic beautiful awesome thing and then to be part of society and change the world oh and on a side note perfect the world through morality and goodness.

That sounds like massive tasks that require a whole lot of responsibility! Alas, that is the design! God knew what He was doing. He designed the world in a way that only through taking responsibility for ourselves our husbands our children our society our world, would we be able to resemble Godliness, which in essence just means being a giver rather than a taker. Being the wise boy rather than the foolish boy.

Where do we start?

If you wrote down all the things in your life that you have, from life itself to the trinkets you own, to the feelings you feel, would you feel grateful for such tremendous gifts?

Regardless of who you feel grateful to, you would feel pretty good. You might even start to cry.

We can start by writing all those things down, feeling grateful. You will feel pretty good, you might even cry...talking to myself...

More money more problems?

I have been noticing a reoccurring theme this week in my life. The more we have the more we want.

This may shock my readers and I do suggest you sit down before reading this but, I do not own a television.

Are you there? Are you okay? Has the shock worn off?

I won't get into they why's just now but besides the obvious reasons, commercials, addiction etc. there are a plethora of very valid reasons the Abba (The Daddy) and I chose not to have one in our home.

We do, however, have family who owns televisions. Last week the Abba went away to the Holy Land to get some milk and honey. While he was away we stayed at my families house and without getting into too much detail, I'll just say by the end of the week I was signing Noam up for TAA, Television Addicts Anonymous.

It's interesting, at home he can go an entire day of reading, playing games, and hanging out with the Imma (The Mommy) and be just fine. But, when he's around a television, the more he watches the more he asks for. For some reason he cannot control himself and just watch 20 minutes. That 20 minutes makes him want another and another.

We're totally spoiled.

We all know it. We shouldn't feel guilty about it, we should take pleasure from it. Real, deep pleasure!

Do you ever find yourself complaining about your internet being down or your cell phone not working? Well come on, if you really think about what's happening in space to make your computer work on wifi and your cell phone have reception, you'd be laughing at yourself!

The more we have, the more we cannot comprehend what life was like without it and the more we want. It's a rat race really. One of my dearest friend and mentors in life recently cried to me about how her remote control car door was broken and she didn't know how she would go on! She quickly realized on her own that her fears of the manual car door future were quite silly in retrospect.

I'm not saying we shouldn't strive for more, for better. But we have to realize that if we appreciate the things we have, we can find true happiness. If we constantly look for the next thing, we'll never really live in the now. You cannot actually know if you will have the future, and the past is gone so in reality the only thing you DO HAVE is the now. So if we choose to live in the future, we're actually not living in reality!

Wow, that's scary.

We want to live in reality, and we do like nice things, and money, and we do want more and we do aspire for greater and better and that's all great. But in the process we have to figure out how to aspire and grow and climb while living and being in the RIGHT NOW.

Judaism says this is the secret to happiness.

TRULY APPRECIATE THE THINGS YOU HAVE.

So obvious, yet so hard.

It's not even a case of more money more problems then, it's really a case of more money more desire for more and less focus on appreciation for what we have now.

More money, more more more more more more more more more.....

Positive Parenting or Ego Parenting?

I've started reading Positive Parenting by Rabbi Abraham Twerski.
The first section of the book:

1. What is the goal
2. Where to begin
3. Who is this little person

I'm blogging about number 1, WHAT IS THE GOAL.

In a nutshell the Rabbi writes about how each of us is driven by our ego, and naturally so. When we speak about 'having' a baby we use the word 'have' which implies that this child is mine. To clarify, because yes indeed this child is mine, I'm the one who changes him and stays up with him at night when he can't sleep after all, I'll illustrate the point just by using the simple translation in Hebrew.

In Hebrew when we say I have a baby we say, "Yesh Li Tinok". The words, 'Yesh Li' actually do not translate to I have, rather, they translate literally to mean "there is unto me". This is a fantastically different understanding of what we 'have' in the physical world than what the English translation teaches us. In reality we don't 'have' any of it, one day it will all be gone. Rather we should think of it as, 'there is unto me', meaning that right now God has given me these gifts to use and they are entrusted 'to me' right now to use to the fullest.

So too our children!

They are entrusted on to us. We have only the time allotted to us in this world to give them what they need to develop their potential in this world.

And so back to the Ego.

There are two ways to look at parenting your 'little person'.
1. To raise the best child you can
2. To raise the best 'Noam' possible (insert your child's name here)

Some parents will look into a school, for example, and wonder what the best reputation they will get or what others will think, others will wonder what school will be best suited for THEIR child. Of course these are not easy decisions, nor am I trying to oversimplify something very big here.

We need to stop trying to fulfill our ego and start fulfilling the needs of the child.

Rabbi Twerski gives a wonderful tool to assess how much ego you're using in your parenting. He says, when the child does something that is not what you want him to be doing, assess how much 'hurt' you feel about it.

To the degree that you are hurt, is the degree that you are ego parenting.

In other words, if the child's misbehavior upsets you to the point where you are mad, upset, fuming, yelling, huffing and puffing, anything outside of being calm, then you are feeling that this is a blow to you. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it to you and you can't stand it. If we switch our lens we will realize that when the child is misbehaving, the role of the parent is to find out what that child needs and to help bring him to that point. It really shouldn't upset us because after all, these are little children who don't know better, and if you claim they do, then they're just trying to push buttons to see what their boundaries are, and who's there to give them those boundaries if not you?

So the goal in our new lenses, is to see the situation for what it is, recognize what the child needs, and help him get to where he's trying to go. We don't really need to 'work' on being calm when we have that in place, because naturally we will just remove ourselves from the equation and just deal with the child in a positive and guided manner!

For me this is news and I wanted to share.

Now onto the section 'where to begin'.