How Raising Humans has Grown Me
Around about the time I started growing my first child, I was studying how we adults continue to grow throughout our lifespan.
When most soon-to-be-parents’ bedside tables are stacked with books about child development, my shelves were overflowing with books about adult development – how we grown-ups can continue to grow up…if we so choose.
At the time, the prevalent conversations about development through adulthood were focused on the increased capacities we gain, the vast array of perspectives we are able to take, the maturity and wisdom that become part and parcel of who we are as we ascend the “stairway to heaven” of development toward some experience of greater consciousness.
I could certainly see where my own development through childhood to adulthood had followed this trajectory. I had grown bigger throughout my life, and not just in the physical sense. I could see things inside of me and out in a different way that offered more nuance, more gradations than the black-and-white, absolute thinking that had permeated my childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood. I had grown to be more self- and other-aware and had more options for how I could show up to the world in a more mature and intentional way.
Except for all of the times when I didn’t have these capacities; when I was shrunken, smaller, constricted in the ways I saw the world and myself in it, more immature in my behavior and thoughts and feelings…when I was in the grip of fallback.
I had a niggling awareness of me in these moments of fallback—locked down, childish, stuck—before I became a mother. And I could still keep it hidden…sometimes. I would close the door to my office under the auspices of working on a project; not pick up the phone when it rang or respond to emails right away; and grab a glass of wine and a tissue box and head to bed early when I didn’t feel equipped to show up to the outside world.
But after becoming a mother, my experiences of fallback seemed to be broadcast in technicolor. I couldn’t help but see the inconsistencies in who I imagined (and wished to believe) myself to be. My complexity and my simplicity were revealed. My contradictions. My light and dark. Once I had my son, there was no door that could be closed, no sequestered day that could be taken, no escape from all that demanded me showing up in whatever way I was capable, as well as all the ways I was without my capabilities.
Solitude allows us to check out from the ways we may interact with the world that would reveal our incapacities to do so. In the absence of solitude, an absence which is the steady state of parenthood, I – in all my contradictions, insecurities, grasps for control and order, longings for a me that could be in service to just me – was on full display.
And the most painful seeing of me in my fullness was through the eyes of my child…who continued to love me. That was the worst of it…and the best…both at the same time. I was awful and I was worthy of love. My children were the first to consistently accept and love me for all of me. (In truth, I hadn’t given others the chance. I learned early on through my own growing up what parts of me were welcome and which needed to be tucked away out of sight.)
Raising good humans is the hardest job I’ve ever had. It is also the single biggest source of my desire to grow, to do better, to understand and unlock the tethers that hold me so that they will not shackle my children…and theirs.
And perhaps that’s why I do the work that I do.
I’ve spent more than a decade studying the phenomenon of fallback, the experience of feeling out of sync with who we’ve known ourselves to be, with who we want to be seen as, as we show up in a smaller, more constricted, less capable, less complex manner than we were able to just a moment before. And I developed the courage, persistence, practice, and capacity to turn toward all of it, to notice and to wonder. My research and practice have contributed to a shift in the way we understand what the process of adult development really is, how we shepherd it, and how we grow on purpose.
Far from being an ever-ascending staircase on the path toward enlightenment, development through adulthood occurs as much through our stumbles back and down as through our skips forward. Through my role as a coach and facilitator working at the intersections of human and leadership development, I support people in coming to embrace the fullness of themselves in their moves both forward and back. In the process, we discover that the tethers that have been holding us back paradoxically offer the wisdom that can set us free.
As I have been raising my children, I have also been raising me. As I face into their ever-changing development, I have faced into the limits of mine, and revisited stages that feel much more appropriate to their ages than my own. And I’ve come to discover that there are really good things in those parts of me that I’ve attempted to lock away…really good things that I’m actually not able to grow beyond without first integrating. And it’s not easy.
It's a practice
We play the record on repeat to our children. “You need to practice.” Practice your handwriting, your multiplication facts, your karate forms, your Spanish, your goal shooting, your piano, (in my house these days) your careful inspection of the dishes you claim to have washed.
The thing is, we are all forevermore in the practice of something. I tell my kids this all the time. I, too, am in the practice. I am not always going to get it right. But I’m going to try my best and I promise to return with renewed hope and commitment to the practice of being human every day.
As Alis and I have thought about what has allowed our role of raising good humans to be a catalyst for growing ourselves, several factors emerged.
1. Disorienting dilemmas – confronting something within or outside of ourselves that fundamentally challenged our beliefs and assumptions about who we are and what we say we’re about.
2. Having a sustained practice. Development is no once and done undertaking. It entails a lifetime commitment and is ripe with fits and starts.
3. Witness – being seen in our fullness without judgment by others who are also on this messy, imperfect, beautiful journey of becoming.
4. Diversity – of those who witness. It has been my experience that it takes a village to raise a Valerie…and the diversity of that village allows me to see things I could not see otherwise. I have learned so much about raising humans from those who are not (raising humans), from those who are much further along in the journey, and from those with different experiences altogether. I am richer for these paths that meander in different directions and at different paces than my own.
5. Similarity – of those who witness, of those right there on the same road, at the same time, as me. I am not alone. You are not alone, either.
6. Distance and spaciousness…you know, those things that are nearly impossible to come by as a parent? Yet, when we have been able to claim that space and embrace the practices that allow us to step away from the role of parent, caregiver, educator for long enough to take perspective on it, we are able to remember who we are…still…and connect to who we are in the process of becoming.
7. Truth-telling (naming) – to myself, to others, to my children…about being in the practice, not having it figured out, about the values and the fears that underly how I am showing up.
8. Reflection from others and the courage to here it. My husband once told me I was being a bully to him and the children. My sister once told me that I am my own worst bully. Both were hard for me to hear. Both were true. And both were said with love and compassion.
9. Connection to time and timeliness – keeping an eye on the long game, in service to what is needed in this moment.
10. Intention – becoming clear about who I want to be in relationship to myself, to my children.
We have erected these scaffolds that have served us in service to a community of growing humans. We hope you will join us in that space.
An invitation to practice alongside us
If you have arrived here, reading this, you too may share the belief that growing yourself is worth the effort. You might have already spent years honing the instrument that is YOU. You might have done it systematically or simply by trial and error. You might already be a parent or just contemplating having children one day. You might have raised children and are now stepping into the role of grandparent with new eyes and a curiosity to see what else there is to learn. You might be caring for children who are not your blood, but who hold your heart and whom you are longing to see flourish. You might be an educator - creating space for the growth of not just one or a few, but many children whom you are helping build the foundation for their future lives.
Whoever you may be and wherever you might be on your life’s journey, we welcome you! Through our Growing Humans offering, we will share all that we have learned through our years of research and practice, through our accompaniment of other humans along the journey, through our own experience of growing ourselves on purpose as we grow the children who have been entrusted to us.
Our intention is to cultivate a community of curious and self-reflective adults who believe they are as much in the process of growing up as they are in the process of growing others.
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