Cracked Open

Having kids exposes you, guts you, rips you open, and suddenly your heart is walking outside of your body. Having kids shifts your mind, rewires your neurons and your thoughts. Terrifying, beautiful, and messy all at the same damn time.

Healing is the way forward and the irony is most people don’t realize that healing is one of the ingredients to parenting. The irony is that most people don’t know what they’re supposed to heal from. No worries, that’s what the kids are here for – kindly showing us what we need to heal from ;).

Already being or currently in therapy makes you more self-aware of the need to heal in order to give your kids a healthy parent BUT self-awareness and action are on different sides of the coin and one of the two cannot exist without the other. Learning to sit with yourself is a skill, that with practice, can be acquired. A skill that comes in handy when your kids unintentionally shine a spotlight onto your pile of unsolved issues.

Becoming a parent also forces you to look at your own life and examine how you’ve been living and then attempt to unpack all of the things that could unintentionally harm your kids one day or not; it’s hard to know. It gives you a perspective into your own parents’ lives because you finally realize that they’re human too dealing with their own baggage and trauma while parenting. Whatever that looked like, it happened and you come face-to-face with that reality once you are granted the lifelong role of Parent.

There is nothing easy about raising kids, it’s all hard. I used to dodge my blind spots until my kids brought them front and center. It’s brutal and beautiful in the same breath.