Enough

A Personal Search for Worth

My morning ritual includes coffee and an online read of the New York Times.  The other morning during my scrolling, an article, about parenting 20 something children, in the opinion section caught my eye.  Seeing as my husband and I are parents to three 20 somethings it was no surprise that I tapped on the heading and began reading in earnest.

Well written and even more well intended, the article just did not live up to my hope of discovering some new and valuable insight into my own conflictual role as Mother.  Instead, it was another sweet article about the struggle to keep one’s mouth shut and opinions to yourself unless explicitly asked to throw your 2 cents in.

“Let them fall.  Let them fend for themselves the minute they graduate college,” advice the author shared that she had gotten from other moms. And again that familiar tug of stigma of, really? Is life really this simple for most people?

I wish my parenting was as simple as knowing when to just shut up.  Each person is so different and a one size fits all approach to parenting, no matter what the age just doesn’t cut it in my experience.

What I do know is being the mother to adult children has awakened me to just how responsible I have felt, for longer than I can remember.  Responsible for keeping them alive, for their happiness, for their ability to achieve, succeed…for everything.  It is a weight that holds me in place that makes it difficult to pull in breath.  It keeps me from the very truth of myself and what that means to live a life being uniquely who I am regardless of the projections of my children and what it is I perceive that they need me to be.

Advancing toward my senior years I float and flow on the understanding that my entire life is up for review.  How many experiences have held me captive to my past, to my feelings of worthlessness, to my sorrows, anger, regrets, and mistakes? I long to build a new foundation rooted in who I am separate from all that binds me.

Shaking off the world like a dog shaking off water, reveals the truth about my worth.  Worth is not outside ourselves.  Often we spend our lives on a treadmill of achievement seeking validation from the outside that we are worthy…enough…ok.  This search is exhausting and the more energy expended to find that feeling of worth the more elusive it becomes. Momentary feelings of worth come from praise for a job well done but vanish with the first invalidation that follows.  A fragile state of affairs to say the least. Society seems to have created an addiction to the constant need for approval, a dependency on the outside world to show you that you have earned the right to feel self-worth.  The reality is that to find worth we need only to be.  Worth is found in the stillness of just being…you. This requires the courage to look inside yourself, to dig inside and develop a consistent sense of worth regardless of what is or is not coming at you.

Yes, I am a mother, and I love my three adult children.  But my worth is not in being their mother.  Worth is not found in their lives, their successes, their choices.

Often I have found myself defending who I am to them, as if to say, look at me, understand who I am because I really am a great mom and I need you to acknowledge this.  Selfishly, yes, I have needed them to validate my worth as a mother. Certainly we need to have our boundaries respected as well as respecting our children’s boundaries, but how easy it is to step over those boundaries when we have a deep seeded need to find our worth through our children.

The above mentioned article may not have held any personal epiphanies but it did throw me face to face with the realization that believing I can only be as happy as my saddest child created intense feelings of responsibility. This relentless responsibility threatened to suffocate me as I attempted to control the success and happiness of each of these bright 20 somethings. This is a no win situation. I can no more control the happiness and success of those outside myself than I can lasso the moon for each of them.  They are all uniquely themselves, capable of living their own lives without input from me. The last thing I want them to believe is that I don’t believe in them, because I do. Truth be told it is me I didn’t believe in.  I used to say to them, when they pushed the envelope, that my job was not for them to like me, my job was to keep them safe until they could keep themselves safe.  Well that time has come and it is time to let go.  Regardless of where their journeys lead them, they get to live their lives and I get to live mine.  Allowing the love and gratitude I feel for them fill my lungs and settle in with a sense of my own worth separate from them, separate from everyone. With this I can breathe and begin to build a new foundation to support the structure of the rest of my life.  After all, it is difficult to build a structure on a crappy foundation.

The reviewing of the past and my relationships allows me to revisit old wounds, healing, releasing, sharing. The calm I search for is then present, waiting for me to envelope myself in the comfort feeling my worth as a mother, a human being from the inside out, standing in the stillness that is uniquely me and most of all, knowing that I am indeed enough.