Michelle Gale (Interview Archive)
He said, "Good," and then came to the last question, the turnaround. "So can you flip it? Maybe your kids shouldn't wake you up?" And I answered, "No, my kids should wake me up." There are times they absolutely should, if they're scared in the night, if they're sick, if something frightens them, or if they just need their mama. Plenty of reasons exist for them to come get me, and that's a chance for me to find the answers inside myself.
The longer I sat with it and let myself get quiet, another turnaround surfaced: I should wake myself up. Wake myself out of these thoughts, the negative ones, the stressful ones that pull me away from feeling connected to my children. The thought was the thing causing me more pain than the actual interruption of sleep. That was the real situation. He was pretty happy about the whole thing, partly because it let him off the hook. But the bigger piece was that he got to walk through this inner process alongside me, and now it's something he can start doing for himself. We actually use Byron Katie's worksheet for kids and do the work with him too.
Erik: That's genuinely interesting to me. I don't think I've come across a child being coached to help their own parent move through an emotionally reactive moment, with the idea that the child has a real part to play in that. It's fascinating. Is that a central piece of conscious parenting training, giving the child the ability to offer a parent that kind of feedback?
Michelle: It's something I'll suggest, yes, when the parent feels comfortable and ready. But even if a parent isn't ready to have their child facilitate them or help in that way, there's still the idea underneath it, and the willingness to accept that our children help us grow simply by being who they are. Kids do what kids do. Their behaviors aren't bad. They're just being kids. They might do the exact same thing on Tuesday that they did on Monday, and one day it sets us off and the next day it doesn't. So what is that about? That's ours to look at, not theirs.
Parents benefit from settling into this and really taking it in: our children have a great deal to give us in our own learning, our development, our spiritual growth. We're partners in it. They came to us, the way I see it, for a reason. They're here with us. And just as we're here to help them become who they're meant to be, which asks a lot of us in terms of getting out of our own way and out of theirs, they're here to help us grow too.