Being a Mindful Parent With a Side of Trauma

A tiny being was born into my life right when my days were filled with the oppressive business of death. In the hospital room, holding him against my chest, I fell madly in love and promptly started hyperventilating. Who thought it was a good idea to make me responsible for such a fragile creature when I was barely capable of managing my own life? My son was born as my father lay dying of terminal cancer. There were tears in my eyes when I placed my son into my father’s arms for the first time and tears in his when he accepted he would not live to see his grandson grow up. Death has a remarkable power to strip you of artifice, of your false self. In the weeks leading to his death, my father and I dismantled our egos and hid nothing from each other, not the good and definitely not the bad. With my tiny son snuggled in his arms, my father asked me to be a better parent than he had been. That promise was the beginning of this blog. “Mindful Mommying” starts with the premise that just as every life path is distinctive so is every parenting journey. This is especially relevant for those of us who come into parenting having survived childhood trauma (emotional, sexual, physical), familial cycles of abuse or religious indoctrination. Regardless of intentions, when trying to free ourselves from the pain of the past, it can be easy to slip into unconsciousness, to blindly repeat ingrained patterns or create new, unhealthy ones. As Shefali Tsabary points out, “It is no surprise we fail to tune into our children’s essence. How can we listen to them, when so many of us barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life?” While I am a firm proponent of seeking professional support for healing and parenting, there is not enough therapy in the world that would have prepared me to be the mother to this child. My therapist was not there two days after his birth when, thanks to pandemic precautions, a random nurse took my child away only to bring him back with blood on his navy blue and white striped sleeper. My therapist was not on call when I had to hand my child over to a complete stranger and find enough courage to believe he would not be harmed while I did my job. When LA was born, I knew I had no choice but to become a mindful parent so that when my wounds surface—as they have and will—I don’t give them the power to control another child’s life. Mindfulness tells me that my challenges may be unique to my circumstances, but they are only as powerful as the narrative I give them. When I am not a victim, but an aware survivor, I face the job of parenting from a pro-active position that denies what Tara Brach calls the “trance of fear” that traps us in reactivity.

Mindful mommying is about being a mother who happens to deal with trauma, but who refuses to allow that to singularly define her experience of parenting.

“To mother” is the technical verb form. If you are anything like me, you wince at the word “mother,” associating it with criticism, with never being enough, with impossible standards you cannot ever meet. You do not wish to be a mother to your child. “To mommy” is the verb I chose instead, because words are power. To mommy is to have a chubby hand patting my face in the early mornings hours; it smells like milk and laundry soap. It sounds like the Darth Vader noises my son makes as he experiments with pushing his breath through his voice box. It feels like showing up in my life every single day, regardless of how I feel or what has been triggered, because I am determined to be his mommy, not his mother. Beverly Engel encapsulates the difficulty of being a mommy when one was raised by a mother when she says, “For some reason […] I imagined that I’d escaped our family curse. I should have known that it’s not that easy.” Before I became a mother, I would try to mentally prepare for what not to do with a child. I would sit on park benches watching children with their parents.  Pinching an arm. No. Yelling in anger. No. Roughly pulling a child to her feet. No. There is no real way to prepare for when triggers push me into a space where my first impulse is exactly what I know not to do. At those moments, generally at 3am when I have had two hours of sleep, l feel the beginnings of a disassociation coming on. My self starts pulling at its moorings, detaching ever so slightly, lifting into the air and heading for the ceiling. What happens next is all in my hands, and I know from repeated visualization and practice that I must do the exact opposite of what comes naturally. I must remain present, ground myself and breathe. I must remind myself that I am an adult, that I am capable of caring for myself, that any threat I feel is in the past. When I know that I am anchored in reality, I can care for my child as his mommy. In this struggle, I know I am not alone. RAINN statistics tell us that in the US alone, roughly 1 out of every 9 girls and 1 out of every 20 boys are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. The numbers do not count children in violent homes, children who are emotionally or verbally abused and so forth. They do not account for duration or familiarity level. The numbers only tell us it happens, that it is incredibly common. Scores of important research studies done on the effects of trauma in childhood and quite a few clinical treatise try to approach the damage of child abuse in order to suggest strategies to combat this epidemic or to heal its survivors. I’m happy that these all exist. When it comes to parenting as the survivor of childhood abuse, however, the pool of resources starts to dry up. Since my day job is as a researcher, I’m no stranger to finding source material on a variety of topics. Imagine my surprise at how little exists on this topic outside of academic databases. Try to read these studies sometime, and you’ll see why this is not a positive outcome. Here’s a snippet of a conclusion from a study in 2012 published in a reputable scientific journal. The researchers conclude that, “in the current psychiatric nosology, multiple comorbid diagnoses are necessary—but not necessarily accurate—to describe many victimized children, potentially leading to both undertreatment and overtreatment.” Allow me to translate in case you don’t have time to look up what nosology means: We conclude that child victims often have multiple issues at the same time which means they are at risk for getting not enough treatment or, conversely, too much. There is presumably a great deal of useful information to be gathered from these studies, but first you have to clear the hurdle of discipline specific language. You also have to accept that most of these studies are hedging their bets a bit. Whatever they find, they could be wrong sometimes, because humans are complicated. They are definitely not about to give you a roadmap to being a parent. If you prefer to avoid the scientific lingo, you can go to the easier reads. I found a smattering of insights across the web, some blogs, a few e-books, anthologies of survivor stories. These are good for what they are, but hardly seem adequate to the enormity of the task the statistics on child abuse suggests we are facing. I have yet to come up with a good answer as to why this disparity exists, because it seems like an important market if one accounts for the population statistics. Consider Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead book from 2018. In it, she teaches people how to be better leaders using insights from her research on vulnerability and courage. Dare to Lead was at the top of the NYT Bestseller list and sold over 2 million copies. Now, don’t get me wrong. That is a great book, even if you’re not a leader, and I love Brené Brown. Her work has been fundamental to my growth as a person. But the numbers say there are more people parenting with the burden of trauma than there are individuals who want to learn to lead. Except we have no book on the NYT Bestseller list. Where do we go from here? I have absolutely no idea, but this site is the beginning of my process of finding out the answer to that question. My parenting bar is high, perhaps too high, but I am determined to do better by my son. I owe it to my father. I owe it to my son, and I owe it to myself.