Fear as love

How can I trust my people when I cannot trust myself?

Welcome to Being in Motherhood. I hope this writing finds you when you need it. Thank you for being here. If you are new here, I invite you to read this first and if you want to learn more about me, Emma, read this. Here, I explore mothering, healing, breaking cycles, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood.

My partner got into a fight this morning. Fight is a strong word, so is argument. It is more so that we revisit an aspect of our relationship that brings up tension and discomfort for both of us. It is something we have danced with over and over again, and it is still tender in our relationship.

We were going back and forth sharing fears, hurts, and thoughts on the subject I thought we had beaten to death. But something emerged, he reflected back to me how my fear is mine, how I am often afraid, and how the issue at hand makes me uncomfortable, not him.

New perspectives arose and I realized how often I feel fear and disguised it as love.

I grew up in a house where there was a lot of unaddressed fear. My mother was predictably unpredictable, meaning you could count on her to lose it, yell, or shame you, but it was never certain when. I walked on egg shells and I tried to control the chaos.

So far in my life, I thought I was trying to help my mother. I thought my desperate attempts at cleaning the house, picking up after myself, studying hard to get the best grades, and overachieving in any way I could would change things for her.

And I thought if I could control these things, she would be able to care for me.

Control was about me getting something in return, beyond the feeling of being in control. I am realizing my endless striving and controlling was me trying to find peace for myself. I hoped I would being able to calm the chaos and she could shift into mother mode. I strived so much because I was uncomfortable with the vast discomfort of feeling my big feelings.

While I know being abused and neglected hurts, I am starting to wonder if while I was afraid of those things, if I was more afraid of the feelings that arose after. I was afraid to sit with myself and how those things made me feel. So, I strived to change things to avoid those feelings more than anything.

I am still learning how to sit with discomfort. I am still learning how to let go of control with myself and my people.

I am also sitting with how much I try to control my son. How I call it love but…

you cannot love someone and control them at the same time.

I am noticing my rigidity. I am noticing how I think I know what is best for him.

What would a day in my life be like if I stopped trying to control my people?

How much energy would I save if I focused on my feelings and my experiences instead of what I think is best?

Take my desire for my son to ride his bike every morning.

It is about control and reciprocity. In all honesty, it is selfish. I want him to ride his bike or move his body because I want him to sleep, so I can work. AND I want to work in peace without having to deal with the uncomfortable feelings of him not napping and having to rearrange my plans.

But I disguise it as wanting what’s best for my son, I know what’s best for my son, so we MUST go on a bike ride each morning. But, he has survived and he has napped without this daily task I place on him.

I want to trust my people and I am wondering what I am teaching him about listening to himself. I am wondering if he sees me as rigid.

So, this morning I didn’t try to make him do this. We played outside, we kicked the soccer ball, we walked a bit, and then he, ON HIS OWN he decided to ride his bike.

I talk often about wanting to give him more autonomy and I am tired of trying to take it away from him. I am giving up on daily bike rides and letting him be.

I also want to trust myself. I want to trust myself to know I am going to navigate whatever comes up whether he naps or not. I can handle my emotions now. I am not the young girl who could not.

Elena Brower asked this question in her piece this week, “am I creating an entire life based on an old question?”

I thought it was interesting at first and then today it hit me. I am creating an entire life based on an old question.

I keep asking, am I safe?

I keep asking my son, my husband.

But safety is an inside job. Safety is riding the currents of emotions. Safety is making space in my being to hold my feelings. Safety is not coming at life from a place of control. Safety is trusting my people and myself to navigate whatever arise.

I am a big lover of cycles and seasons, I trust the seasons to change, I trust my energy to shift with them. I am learning to trust myself more to ask for what I need, process my feelings, and hold space for myself.

When I was outside with my son this morning, I thought why can’t I trust him to do the same? Maybe he has wanted to ride his bike less because he too feels the energy of winter.

Maybe the innate wisdom he carries already knows what he needs, even at almost two.

Maybe it is more important for me to teach and show him how to listen to himself and his needs than try and control him for my peace of mind.

When I let go of control, things flow, things grow. This publication has been one of the things I am so proud of because it has come from me trusting myself, my intuition and it has allowed things to grow in their own way.

I want that for all areas of my life; myself, my son, my partner. I do not want fear to be my baseline. I know I am shifting it but this experience with my partner showed me how much I am still needing and wanting to shift.

I can only take care of myself. Meaning, I can only handle what every is right in front of me, I know longer want to make preemptive decisions of control in hope that will get me something in return. I want love and trust to flow freely in this house and in my being.

I do not want to make choices from a place of fear or control. I do not know what is best for my son. I am here to guide him, sometimes I have to prevent him from doing something dangerous because he cannot control his impulses. But I do not understand what he feels in his body, he does and even at this age, he knows how to listen.

I do not want to let my fear and need for control to get in the way of that. I want him to be able to trust himself right now, I do not want him to have to repair his relationship to his intuition later in life. I want to give him a different start than I had.

So, can I sit with my fear instead of react from it?

Because that is what control is. We are trying to shift our fear by trying to make something tangible out of it. But, it never works out. Things usually wind up going a different way.

I long to sit with myself and sit with my fear more. While tending the to the little girl inside me who often feels the worst is yet to come. The part of me that fears the unknown, the unpredictable, the chaos. I do not long to love it, but to make friends with it. Because fear and change are not going away.

I remind her she is safe, she is not in that home anymore, and she can stop asking this question around safety because I am here to take care of her.

She does not have to strive anymore, she can just be.

I can just be.

I can trust myself to be.

I can handle whatever arises.

Love,

Emma

Thank you for reading!

Share with me in the comments or reply to this email what moved through you as you read…what is your relationship to control? how willing are you to trust yourself, your people? how do you welcome love into your relationships?

If you know someone who is on the journey of motherhood and healing, please share this with them. It means everything to me when you share my work with someone you love and who could benefit from reading it.

Recent writings you might have missed…

• A fear you’ll find me out - and burn me at the stake

• Unspoken Words: Volume 3 - sharing mothers experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.

• The endless grief of motherhood - exploring grief, shame, and being pulled apart by desires.

• A call to action for all mothers - an invitation to stop justifying our love for our child(ren) after we tell the truth about motherhood.