Parenthood as Models, not Martyrs - My Lessons from Untamed

“Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time”, states the line from Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed (page 128) that, no joke, changed my life. A few (equally insightful) paragraphs later she followed up with the question: “What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?” 

I hope to expand on that concept - mothers as models, not martyrs - here, but I want to be clear that I take no credit for the idea or inspiration. Also, go read the book. I’ll wait. 

Ok, caught up? Great! Let’s proceed with that thought in mind. 

The minute I became a mother to a premature 33-week-gestation baby, and he was whisked away to the NICU while I was calmly stitched up, my preconceived notions of parenting flew out the door with him. The bustling chaos of the labor room was gone - the nurses, my husband, and the baby all rushed out taking it with them. Left behind was the doctor, quietly doing post-baby tasks to my body, my mother, and me. I had had no medicine, and in the post-delivery natural euphoric haze I wondered - what the hell just happened? I caught my mother's equally bewildered gaze and realized everything had changed. I was a different person. 

Embodying Balanced Parenthood as a Model 

Now, 8 years later, I am an even more changed person than then, and I’m just starting to build out some core guidelines that I would like to adhere to as the journey of parenthood strengthens and changes with experience. The biggest misconception for me was that I, as his mother, had to sacrifice everything for him. I’m learning, and Glennon’s words solidified this for me, that maybe that doesn’t have to be the way. And maybe, both mothers AND fathers can be living examples of models for their children, doing things that may be difficult and change the trajectory of a child’s immediate surroundings, but ultimately show them, the children, that balanced parents make better examples of people to emulate. 

For that is what children - all children - do. They watch, and learn, from the people closest to them, and embody the traits that they see, both good and bad. They observe everything - spoken and unspoken. Which, even writing that, feels like it adds another layer of pressure that the modern parent, especially mother, does not need! 

So, perhaps, instead of trying to pretend to be perfect so that our child will emulate that ideal of perfectness, we aim to expose our imperfections (which they see anyway) in a way that is open and honest. What if we, as parents, strove to build our lives in a way that is open and honest? What if we, as parents, strove to build our lives in a way that feels authentic rather than what is “normal” or “expected”? And that from this mentality, the children learn to be imperfect and still withstand? They learn, and to borrow another phrase from Glennon “We can do hard things”, they survive, even thrive?

Striving for Imperfection

Now, what can this look like? I think the beauty of it is that it can be anything that feels true to you, and if you are co-parenting - in a relationship together or with other people - with the other person/people. This is also where it’s hard. For me, my intention is to break free of inherited family patterns of anxiety and avoidance. I want to teach skills of coping with moments of panic rather than being told to “deal with it”. I can say that without judgment of where I heard it first because it has come out of my mouth in the direction of my own child in reflex and frustration, I understand how it could come out of my own parents as well. Also, I have to face my fear in thinking in those moments, how can I change his anxiety when I feel I can’t even change mine? But, maybe that’s the point. I am learning tools in adulthood that require retraining my inner child. So when I catch myself channeling my parents, I try to stop and apologize to the actual child in front of me and practice deep breathing together. 

I acknowledge that this awareness of wanting to change is a learned skill, and all humans are on different stages of emotional intelligence and its journey - some not even on the path at all. This is where the co- part of parenting can get even more complicated. Again, it depends on the dynamic, but for me, this is where I had to come out from underneath the idea of martyrdom, of the need to sacrifice for my child, and learn to speak to him, my son, based on my compass for life, regardless of the thoughts of the other trusted people in my world. 

What I could do though was to invite them, my partner specifically, to think of how they would model parenthood if they thought outside of their learned experiences in childhood and instead from the lens of living a life that they wished to SHOW their children, instead of just TELL them. And then I had to hold space when my partner did just that. Even - especially - when it conflicted with my idea of how to model life. Those points of parental divisions then became, out of necessity, adult discussion points away from the ears of that child. 

Changing the Game in Practice

Basically, I’ve found that modeling as a way of parenting has a way of upending every relationship in your life for a while - maybe forever - but it feels like the benefits of authentic parenthood are worth all the challenging things. 

For, I hope my son grows up to know that his father, his uncle, and his grandfather cry. That he can be the embodiment of sensitive men that they struggle to expose to the world without judgment. I hope he trusts that his grandmothers are the strongest people I know, and they have the ability to manage and execute with their eyes closed. And that all of these traits - masculine and feminine - strong and sensitive - live within him, live within all of us. I believe that the freedom and confidence to be whoever he may be is the best lesson I can hope to provide, even if it’s hard for me to model in actuality now and always. 

Back in that labor room, I saw that my mother was watching me with all the emotions. I knew she believed in me, but I saw that she was worried that I didn’t believe in myself, even after the amazing thing I had just done. At that moment I knew I would be ok, no matter what happened, because I had watched her be ok, over and over, even when things were most decidedly not. It was the one thing she couldn’t hide or pretend otherwise. And I knew, though I didn’t know how yet, but I knew showing up and getting through it in actions was the most important of the many lessons I wanted to show my son.