The Greatest Act of Surrender
What if the best way to survive parenting is to hand the job off?
What if the best way to survive parenting is to hand the job off?
The first time I realized that being a parent is risky business was in the early days of my pregnancy with my first daughter. It was a frigid February evening and my husband and I were living on top of a mountain at the end of a long, snow-covered road. I was rushing home in the darkness of winter to meet a client over Zoom.
As I pulled up to the house and stepped out of my car wearing impractical boots that did not have enough traction for slick snow (now relics of my pre-parenting days), my feet slid out from under me and I immediately smacked my not-yet-bulging belly on the cold ground.
With the wind knocked out of me, I picked myself up, got myself inside, fumbled for the light switch, and hopped on the call with my client (obsessively putting others first, also a relic of pre-parenting days). But as I consulted with my client, my brain started worrying more and more about the small being in my belly. We talked about spreadsheets and timelines as I ran body scans and mental scans of the limited information I knew about pregnancy looking for any data that could help assess the wellbeing of the baby.
Living With Fear
It was my first true induction into parenthood — learning how to function in the world while being acutely aware of the risk of loving a vulnerable being. While everything turned out okay, that night it became clear how every stage of my child’s life would open them up to new levels of risk, and at the same time, open my heart up to new ways of experiencing fear, pain and loss.
If we were lucky enough to make it through the first trimester, next we’d be deciding what genetic tests to run in trimester two, then mitigating the risks of giving birth in trimester three and doing so in a seriously flawed healthcare system. Once outside my womb, SIDS, flame retardants, and BPA waited on the other side. Then choking hazards, food allergies, and on and on until the risks would be bullying, car accidents, drinking, and, eventually, if we were fortunate to make it that far together, this baby would one day venture into the world on her own.
While there are many challenging parts of being a parent, the most difficult part is undoubtedly keeping a heart wide open in the face of so much potential pain. The weight often feels like too much to carry for a sensitive person like myself. But the more the weight forces me to examine my role as parent, the more I realize it’s possible my role is an illusion to begin with.
Control as an Illusion
When children come into our lives, the default way of thinking is that they are “ours,” and we immediately take on the 24/7, all-encompassing job of being their parents. But when we really think about it, what did we do to create our own children? Did we let the cells know it was time to divide? Did we form the heart and brain? Did we select the number of fingers and toes?
When I was pregnant with my second daughter, my husband and I watched the PBS show 9 Months That Made You, which was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. It described week by week in detail what happens inside the womb as a baby grows, and each episode was an eye-opening and stark reminder of how little control we have over the process.
For example, here’s what happens on day nineteen after conception: The cilia, small hair-like structures that are found on several hundred cells in the center of the embryo, mysteriously stand up at the exact same moment and start to rotate clockwise like an ensemble of in utero ballerinas. Because of their spinning, a current is created in the fluid of the embryo that then switches on the genes in the cell. From there the genes then determine where all the organs in the body will go.
How did those cilia know when it was time to rise? To start spinning? And in unison? Of course we have control over none of these, and they just happen without us actively willing or being aware of any of them.
But let’s look at it another way because it’s easy to chalk the human body up as a miracle in itself. How much control do we have over our or our children’s actual existence? Sure, they were conceived in an intimate moment, but clearly there are other influences that led to their lives on Earth.
Michael Singer breaks down the answer to this question in Living Untethered and describes how far the backstory goes for a single person:
The story begins all the way back with the dinosaurs. After a fierce storm in what is now South Central Florida, there was a big dinosaur lumbering around. When this dinosaur put its big footprint down into the wet soil, it caused a gigantic imprint in the mud. Over time, rainwater accumulated in this deep imprint, and the earth began to erode around it. Eventually, the water area grew so large it became what we now call Lake Okeechobee.
Millions of years later, the Mayaimi tribe settled by that lake because of the fresh water, fish, and other animals. Centuries passed, and Spanish settlers built a small town on the edge of the lake. Your great-great-great grandmother was a descendant of the Mayaimi, and your great-great-great grandfather was visiting the small Spanish settlement. One day while it was pouring rain around the lake, your great-great-great grandfather was drinking in the local saloon. He was so drunk when he stepped out of the saloon, he never noticed your great-great-great grandmother walking by sopping wet. Just as he stumbled down the stairs falling drunk to the ground, your great grandmother slipped in the mud and fell right on top of him. Well, they looked at each other, started laughing, and it was love at first sight. The rest is history.
There are an infinite amount of chance experiences and encounters going back to the beginning of humanity (really, the beginning of the universe) that caused us and our particular children to be born. Then add in all the influences that shaped our ancestors and family members’ personality traits, coping mechanisms,, and idiosyncrasies that get passed from generation to generation and mix those with a partner’s family history. We have to begin to wonder how much our children’s experiences ultimately have anything to do with us at all. Life is always unfolding well outside of our own personal control, even when it comes to our own children.
The Ultimate Questions
Questions that inevitably come up when we start to entertain the idea that there is something greater than our individual perspectives at play is “What about war? Climate change? And all the other ways that humans cause harm to themselves, each other and the planet? And what about natural disasters that come out of seemingly nowhere? How can we let go of control and fear in the face of all those?”
These are questions that humans have been wrestling with for thousands of years, and while the specific challenges change over time, I don’t think the underlying question has. We’re always asking some form of “How can we trust life?”
The Taoist parable of the farmer that dates back to 139 BCE illustrates that while we may never understand why things unfold the way they do, the ultimate answer is to view the events of the world with a larger perspective.
Here’s a summary of the story:
There once was a farmer in ancient China who had a horse. All his neighbors said, “You’re so lucky to own a horse!” to which the farmer replied, “Maybe…”
A few days later the horse ran away, and the neighbors said, “How unlucky!” and the farmer replied, “Maybe…”
Not long after the horse returned with several wild horses, and the neighbors said, “Wow, how wonderful!” to which the farmer replied, “Maybe…”
Soon, the farmer’s son broke his leg while taming a wild horse, and the neighbors said, ”How awful!” and the farmer replied, “Maybe…”
Then a war broke out and the son was spared from the fighting due to his broken leg. All the neighbors said how blessed they were, and the farmer simply said, “Maybe.”
Of course the story could go on long after that. The point is simply this — we don’t know. While we think we know with our limited perspective, the story of humanity is much longer than any one of our single lives. We just don’t know what the larger forces at play are in both our lives and our children’s lives. Our role is essentially the equivalent of one grain of sand in the vast beach of existence.
It doesn’t mean we don’t try to improve things for our children and the world. We give it all we have and face the challenges at hand, but we can’t assume that we always know what is best for our children and the world in the long run.
Letting Go as Parents
What does this all mean for the way we parent our children? The best thing we can do for both our own well-being and that of our children is to stop believing that we are in control. Of course, we show up, give our children our absolute best, and we relax. Relaxing is the simplest but hardest part.
There’s a meditation that I heard about from a father who was deeply afraid he was going to lose his adult son to addiction that shows how powerful relaxing, surrendering, and letting go can be.
After doing everything he could to help his adult son overcome his addiction, the father realized he was powerless to save his child. So he visualized lovingly holding his son as a young baby in all his perfection and wholeness and handing him over to the hands of the universe. It was unspoken but clear that the mysterious, deeply loving force would be the one to take care of his son from here on out. The father did this for days and weeks every time he felt overwhelmed, powerless and angry until eventually he started to believe his son was exactly where he was supposed to be. After doing this meditation many times, he felt his son was in the care of a loving and compassionate force. Eventually, the son overcame his life-threatening addiction, and, in the process of surrendering, the father learned to trust the universe.
Opening Up Our Hearts
While letting go of control can’t guarantee the outcome we desire, it undoubtedly makes us less fearful and more openhearted to the experience of being a parent and being human. For a closed, fearful heart can’t possibly experience all the notes of life’s music. When we open our heart up to the potential risks and very real pain of parenting, we also open our hearts up to what, for many, is the most pure, unconditional human love of all.
Kahil Gibral’s poem “On Children,” written in 1923, begins with a simple and profound truth:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Then he concludes the poem with a beautiful metaphor where parents are bows, children are arrows, and life, the archer. He writes, “Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; / For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
When we relax and trust the unfolding of life, we become the flexible, stable bow — not too rigid, apt to break under tension. Relaxing and trusting life knows what is doing is the most terrifying thing we’ll ever do as parents and humans; but ultimately, it’s the only way to keep our hearts wide open to ourselves, our children, and, most importantly, life itself.
About me: Mom of two, wife, writer and podcast co-host who is fascinated by the intersection of parenting and spirituality — one seeker exploring the wild experience of being a parent and being human. For more reflections on parenting and spirituality, follow me on Medium and subscribe to my free newsletter: aparentspurpose.substack.com.
© Caitlin Frauton. All rights reserved.
