When I first became a parent, I think I saw parenting as lots of things. So I think I saw it as something I had to get right. I think I saw it as some way that I could compensate for the things that maybe I felt were lacking in my own childhood. I looked around and I saw that the people thought that parenting was a really hard job to get done.
I saw that people thought that it was something where you were supposed to mold people into well-behaved, certain orientated people. Parenting is actually a profound invitation to really deepen our spirituality. I think I learned the hard way in a way. I thought I could just pour my love into my daughter.
She was my first one child. I thought, right, I'm just going to give her everything I didn't get. I'm going to give everything I know from my spiritual kind of deepings. I'm going to just like pour my love into her.
And that kind of lasted for a little while. And then at some point, of course, I know this now, but at the time I was a little bit confused. At some point, I really burned out because I was just giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. And giving everything away.
I didn't take time for myself. I wasn't in the receiving mode. And so I thought I could just give endlessly. And on one level, at the beginning, quite honestly, that is just what you have to do.
Like the truth is when you have a tiny little beat in your arms, you're learning the ropes, you're figuring out how to create a family. It's deeply, deeply selfless work. But at some point, and I believe we can do this right from the start, actually, at some point, we need to learn how to take care of ourselves. Conscious parenting sometimes, I think, wrongly as something very fleet-free flowing and everyone does whatever they like.
That's not true at all. Children need really clear boundaries.