parenting – St GEORGIA & Boo

the god in everything

this part is new for me.

balancing within the holy, in times of chaos and the anticipation of knowing that nothing is what it seems, and discernment is fundamental in any forward facing moment.

_{“the holy relationship is a phenomenal teaching accomplished, it represents the reversal of the unholy relationship. Be comforted in this; the only difficult phase is the beginning}.

_{For here the goal of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the exact opposite of what it was .}

^{A course in miracles}

I have asked for my relationships with everyone and within everything to be Blessed and Holy. I have asked and sometimes found myself pleading when it comes to the universal space of my youngest son. For the space of him has changed so dramatically that it is almost unrecognisable to who I have known him to be before this moment, to who he seems to be existing here as now. It’s a questioning space that we find ourselves in. Him and me. It seems we represent some opposites, some conflicting ideas and notions of things, actually of almost everything and a relationship at this point can at times seem unhealthy, and unholy in its essence.

It could seem that its not good for him or for me. It could seem that it shouldn’t be this way, this hard, this confronting in the details that can at times reach way outside the lines that we think are there, the ones that keep us both safe and comfortable and in a place of what we would consider to be acceptable and at times can raise hard questions, the kind that you could never have imagined having to ask yourself, its usually in the thick of something big and you wonder how this possibly could be for you? where is God in the thick of this seemingly unholy experience? but then you remember,

What he has, is for me. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be here.
So you hand it over, you give it to God.

^The ^{invitation is accepted immediately. At once, His goal replaces yours. This is accomplished very rapidly, but it makes the relationship seem disturbed, disjunctive, and even quite distressing. The reason is quite clear. For the relationship as it is, is out of line with its own goal, and clearly unsuited to the purpose that has been accepted for it.}

_{In its unholy condition, your goal was all that seemed to give it meaning.}

_{Now it seems to make no sense. for once the unholy relationship has accepted the goal of holiness, it can never again be what it was.}

^{a course in miracles}

My son has always been more than a story of just a boy. He’s a reflection of wider things. It wasn’t always obvious, the noticing was a slow unfolding, a deliberate and gradual recognition not for him but for me. It was my awareness, my willingness to expand that was necessary before the seeing could come, not ordinary seeing but seeing from the wider spaces from which he was reflecting and then, well, everything became like puzzle pieces falling into place over time.

Right now, the puzzle pieces aren’t fitting anywhere not that I can see clearly anyway.

It seems that whatever is happening out there is always happening within him. He’s a continuum of energy of sorts, with no gaps, like the Möbius strip.

And right now the world, what’s out there, is seeming like madness.

He’s a mirror for the madness.

It reminds me of something Sophie Strand, poet and ecological storyteller considers when she speaks of fungi, in particular the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which is a type of fungi that takes over carpenter ants, infects them, and coordinates their behaviours so dramatically that they effectively become the fungus wearing the costume of an ant so that by the end of the experience you don’t know if its an ant or a fungus. And it has me wondering who is doing the thinking for this boy, I call my son, that has changed so dramatically from where it once innately was.

Sophie goes on to say what’s got her thinking here, she questions what if things can think us.. “What’s thinking me?” What if this boy, my son who has always been a reflection of wider spaces has allowed himself to be borrowed, to be used as an instrument, willingly given permission to be used as Sophie would say as “a mouth piece”.

That is our predicament. I wonder what my son is the reflection of now, what has he allowed himself to be borrowed by?

Right now, the worlds reflection seems to be so concentrated and focused on the more shadowy side of things or maybe its just that there’s so much light that what has been in the dark, hidden in the shadows is now visible for all to see. It seems we are in a time where the innate energy of everything is being obscured and what we are being led towards is so much in the unknown. It seems that the Truth of things is not obvious anymore, maybe it never really was, nevertheless we are being called forth in a time where discernment is imperative.

my son, is a reflection, a body containing all of these things and discernment for him is no longer easy, his Truth is seeming obscured by the misconception and I wonder has he let himself be borrowed or used in someway that is not for his highest good.

So I ask, for help, for guidance, and I hand it over. This seemingly unholiness of our relationship in this moment, this undesirable space we have found ourselves, as a mother and her son.

Whatever is going on in the world and sometimes wider spaces than even that, somehow can make its way through this being I get to call my son. It doesn’t really matter the layers and details of his experiences or how they are so expansive in phonomen. It’s there for seeing, for ones with eyes to see that is.

I realised some time ago that I have an agreement with my son. His struggles are my struggles to own and bare. We cannot undo the entanglement of him and I, there is no choice no other way, not for him or for me and I will not let him fall.

It easy for me to feel helpless in helping him. His troubles are heavy, not pretty, complicated in design. There’s few who would truly be able to comprehend and hold the depths of his reality, when it doesn’t fit the grand narrative.

But support doesn’t always come from the places we expect they should. We rarely get what we are needing from such places. The help we are needing is larger than that. There’s only one place it can be called forth from, so I pray. I pray in such a way that my call is heard, every word, every late night whisper, every deeply rooted, sometimes agonising plea for guidance, for his protection, for help, I know is heard. I know because it’s in my bones. This is a story of faith and lives within lives within times over lapping times and spaces. All interchangeable all seemingly seperate yet perfectly connected.

He’s young, but only from small perspectives. His life is larger than anything I could ever know, I’ve always known that. I’ve always recognised his layers of other worlds other times and ones he has been. His spaces have always been occupied by more than the singularity of just himself.

Sophie Strand I think I’ll go to my favorite and it’s very simple and it’s not even really a myth, but I was very interested that when you actually go back, so a lot of what we take to be Christianity are Romanized rewrites of the rewrites of the rewrites of you know, it’s a game of telephone, through many different generations and languages and cultures. But if we actually go back to the Aramaic, to the ecology of Galilee, to the time period, the socio-political pressures, we can realize that Jesus’s parables are actually really anti-imperial and ecologically radical. And that they’re much more interesting than when they’re deracinated in this translation. And so one of my favorites is, you know, he says, “The kingdom is like a mustard seed.” And you know, when it grows, all the birds roost in its trees, it starts out as a little seed. And of course, having been mistranslated and uprooted from its time period and its location. It has lost all of its radical, wild meaning, its scintillating meaning, but the truth is that at that time period Jesus would have been talking to farmers who were losing their land and needed to be able to produce effective crops to pay the taxes to the Romans so they wouldn’t die. And in fact, the Romans were moving. The Roman operation was a commercialized agricultural state. So what it did is it would force people off of their lands and seize their land, so that it could turn the land into profit making monoculture actually, so that, you know, your complicated kitchen gardens would suddenly just become a green crop to feed the Romans. And so mustard greens at that time period, were actually an incredibly pernicious invasive weed that would destroy crops. So to say that to a group of farmers was a terrifying thing to say, that the most important thing, the Kingdom of God, it’s not to come. It’s not something that’s abstracted from the earth. It’s not in the future. It’s right here right now. And it’s the weed that you hate the most, that interrupts your ability to participate in the empire, in the commercialization process, and to feed your own family. And that has seemed to me to be like an absolutely radical koan, you know a japanese riddle that you sit with and try to understand because it’s very tricky to unravel what it actually means. And so for me, I’ve been looking at the parables that we have that come to us from Jesus and saying, like, how do they teach me to look at my own environment and look to the beings who I’m afraid of for information on how to actually digest the empire?

wander lines

A philosophy of tracing

This TRACING / from before the sign / I will never cease to see in it / what no gaze / would it be mine / will ever see • the human is there / perhaps / quite simply / with no one in the end / without voice • those / TRACINGS / are from my hand which borrowed the manner of handling / the style of this janmari who speaking is not • and everything that I can write from this / TRACING that all the writings of the / world have no chance of drying up. (Deligny, 2007: 813; quoted and translated in Alvarez de Toledo, 2013: 5)

I am exploring wander lines. trying to move away from neurotypical thought processes to a wider less structured thought way. I am trying to not think in straight lines, like my son and my eldest daughter, they don’t think in straight lines.

I was leaving early on a Saturday morning to head to a farmers market. It’s always a big day, a big drive there and back. As i was heading our down our driveway i was stopped by fallen trees laying across my access. This was a big deal, they would have to be moved and i was annoyed that i was the one having to do it. From closer inspection it would require a chainsaw, not an easy task for this moment and for one person. I worked in slight annoyance, internally voicing my frustrations at the inconvenience, which could have been tended to yesterday. Why didn’t she say this needs to be cleared, she knew that it was mess, she knew because she walked over it to check the mail. Why didn’t she say you won’t be able get through tomorrow. I was having a self indulgent early morning rant to myself.

Nevertheless I was able to clear the path, remove the trees and branches and the nuisances that were ailing me and was on my way to the farmers market. All was well. On my drive I calmed. Breathed. And there it was. I understood the need for the early morning obstruction. The obstruction was not in the fallen trees on my path, it was in the obstruction of my thinking of how she thinks. Yes, she knew about the fallen trees, yes she mentioned them in an incidental way, but she wasn’t thinking in straight lines. She doesn’t think in straight lines.

I had been pondering on Deligny and his maps of wandering lines. I was wanting to understand this more, explore it from new spaces within my own thinking. I was wanting to see it in movement, thoughts in processes not travelling on straight lines. It seems someone was listening.

The straight line process would have been to notice the fallen trees and say we need to move them before tomorrow morning. It would have been to work together and have the driveway cleared for access again in the morning. But that’s straight line thinking, neurotypical line thinking. Its thinking- action-result kind of thinking. Its thinking that has been educated, indoctrinated, cultured into us like good manners. Its viewed as rational and necessary, as normal.

But it starting to feel false. As though by thinking in such ways we are denying something else. Perhaps something is becoming lost within us, within this process, something innate, ancestral, something that offers more to the experience we are having. We are not seperate from our experiences. My fallen trees were my lesson here. It would seem as though they were a cleverly planned obstacle placed within my path, within my thinking of things. They were my obstruction of thought and became an invitation to think of things from wandering lines.

Deligny clearly recognised this in his working beside non-verbal autistic children. What can be lost within the language of words. It reminds me of my son when he was small. He didn’t talk with words until he was four. We had to understand each other in other ways, by other means. We had to feel into these places. I had to remind myself that i can know him from here, just as a mother understands her newborn babe, words become so unnecessary from this space.

..that touches us without our knowing why, a touching that occurs not through the effects of language but beyond, where “something that cannot be seen” exists, something ineffable but nonetheless “immediately felt” (Deligny 1990).

My son thinks in wandering lines. He has his own maps of thought. They make little sense to the indoctrinated typical mind. They aren’t clear, they don’t stay in one place, they cross space-time- realities. Yet when i listen, really listen, his anarchy of thought makes way for contemplative thought, they invite possibility, maybe not always in this place, or in this time, or even this universe but what he chooses to use his voice for is stories of happenings and who am i to determine such things as real or not.

carly

challenging the ‘be a good girl’ notion

When she is told to be a ‘good girl’, it is assuming that she can also be ‘bad’. What exactly ‘Bad’ entails is completely in the eye of the beholder. We see ‘bad’ in all sorts of experiences in our daily lives. Children hear us relaying things we have read about, or seen or are listening to our interpretations of events that are all seemingly ‘bad’, and generally its pretty ‘bad’ if we are all talking about it. So why is it, that children are so often told to ‘be good’ by the people who care about them, implying that they must be capable of being ‘bad’, otherwise what is the point for mentioning it at all. It is patronising to children that we so easily hold them to such unwarranted judgments. It is pretending to be loving and kind in deliverance but really its just condescending superiority. Adults would never say this to each other, it wouldn’t be accepted by any means, and it’s not necessary for children either. Our interactions with children have become thoughtless, just repetitive habitual words, that we think have no real meaning or impact. Except they do. I don’t tell my children to ‘be good’, but they have heard this enough already in their interactions with others to know that this wins praise. Children are intelligent. My daughter will intentionally do things for the praise. She does ask ‘am i a good girl?’ after completing something, not often, but it happens, and it’s hard one to over come once the mindset has already been established. The truth is, there is no good or bad in children. They are just children learning to maneuver their way through their experiences and emotions. Most of the time my children are outwardly honest in their deliverance of their feelings and that can raise some awkwardness in the moment, usually because honesty is not what the recipient is expecting to hear. Their opinions haven’t been filtered or moulded to fit some false sociably acceptable standard. Their opinions are respected and they are learning that they are valued for them even in their indifference. How we can help others to understand this better, I’m still trying to work this out. My children are not obedient, because I don’t expect they should be.

What do we trade when we prioritise obedience over our children’s needs, mistakes or messy emotions? -Raised Good, parenting by nature

This doesn’t mean that they are ‘bad’. They simply have choices, and most of the time they make the ‘right’ ones for themselves. They are learning that certain choices they make wont bring them their desired outcomes, eventually they’ll make a different choice. It requires more patients and more compassion and understanding. It requires that we be present in the moment with our children. Admittedly, it’s is definitely easier to take control over their lives and autonomy. It is definitely easier to play the role of the boss and dictate their days to them. Telling them when to eat, sleep, bathe, work, play, talk, listen or who to be nice to, etc…Its definitely easier to tell them what to do rather than ask them if it is what they are wanting.

My children are more often than not outspoken, meaning they don’t think to hold their thoughts back on any situation, especially ones they themselves are directly impacted by. They are defiantly clear about what it is they are wanting and what it is they do not. They are unafraid to use their voices, and they don’t easily abide towards domination, manipulation or any other techniques that degrades or undermines their usually valued opinions. They wont simply hand out respect if it’s not warranted. And this can be somewhat unsettling, if you’re not expecting it, especially when it is coming from a five-year old. Are they ‘Bad’ children, No. Should they do what they are told to do, simply because someone tells them to? I don’t think so. Understandably, this is a tough notion to consider. But i would prefer that my children risk politeness for honesty and remain true to their feelings, than to deny themselves that right, in fear of being socially unaccepted by the opinions of others. There are many ways we could be interacting with children that doesn’t entail making them feel inferior or imply that they are incapable of making good and safe decisions for themselves.

“The reality that adults have more power than children, however, does not mean that it is appropriate or necessary for us to exercise control over them. Rather, it means that we have an obligation to consciously choose how to use our power. We can choose to use our greater power to control children and coerce them to do what we want. We can choose to do nothing with our power. But we can also choose to use our power to support, assist, and facilitate the growth and learning of children in ways that affirm their personal power, dignity, and humanity.” -Teresa Graham Brett

We could be making ourselves clearer to children about what we are desiring, explain ourselves better without the authoritarian overtones. We could be offering them a range of possible outcomes to consider, before making decisions for them. And we could allow ourselves to think about it a little more deeply and question our own concerns with needing a certain outcomes. Possibly, we should be asking ourselves more often, does it really matter? We could stop opting for the quick, go to, fix ‘do what i am asking of you and do it now.’ We could opt out of needing to power struggle with children.

My children are strong and independent, this strategy never works on them and i would never wish it to. They are learning that people aren’t always sincere with their words and in their actions. It must be incredibly confusing for children, when their well-being is so conditioned to only having particular outcomes and behaviours, deemed to be acceptable. It still bewilders me, that children are so often condemned for their natural feelings and emotions, it is asking children to deny feeling parts of themselves, simply because they may be causing undesirable attention.

We know that the way we are moving is not the norm, we know that its unconventional. The easier path would be to compel ourselves, despite our instinctual knowing and follow the less confrontational path. We could accept the ‘normalised’ and ‘expected’ way to raise children, without ever questioning it, even if it doesn’t feel right. But thankfully, that’s not our journey. I’m strongly in favour for questioning what has gone before us and i’m thankful that i’m raising children that will without a doubt question everything that comes before them, before taking it on as their truth at face value.

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