Heartbreak and Humility: The Shedding of Innocence of the Inner Child

(also published in Holistic Parenting Magazine, spring 2017)
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I don’t remember the day when my innocence bubble broke. Was it as a baby, when my sister unintentionally dropped me off our spiral staircase and I broke my arm?  Was it that first time someone gave me sugar as a child, to comfort my emotions rather than just holding me? Was it that traumatic day when I was six years old and heard my parents argue in front of us for the first time and then my mother left, it was over, and our family life changed forever?

Or was it all those moments piled on top of each other, showing this one human girl child that the world is not always a friendly place, wiping away the rainbows from my eyes?

Over thousands of moments in our lives, layers of innocence shed away from our perception as we become aware of the not-so-kind ways of the world. For every person it looks different depending on if and when trauma is experienced, how loving our family is or isn’t, how much exposure we had to violence in our childhood, and many other factors.
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In his book The Optimal Life, Dr. Stephen Bizal writes, “Starting in the womb, at the time of conception, we are exposed to, vulnerable to, and influenced by the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical energy of the world around us.”

To Be Hardened or To Stay Soft

Hardened by the roughness of the world and life’s challenges, many people hold a perspective that this is genuinely the way it is, and there is no point in giving other perspectives much consideration.

“That’s just the way it is,” people often say. “Welcome to reality.”

Yet my own inner child refuses to accept that. And she’s a wise one; I support her. While I’ve not been immune to the busting of the innocence bubble or our cultural oppression of The Inner Child, I have never buried the little girl inside of me. She has danced freely, in one way or another, ever since the day I was born.  

When I really sit with the dynamic of the innocence bubble breaking — my own, my child’s or anyone else’s — it breaks my heart.

Grieving is appropriate. Mourning is essential. To not feel the sadness is to not fully see the beauty and innocence, the pure light shining in the heart of every human child.
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​What is Reality, Really?

While mainstream culture suggests we toughen kids up to face the “real” world, a contrasting perspective is offered by those on the gentler edges of living who know that Love is the only way to a society that is truly well and free. Isn’t it the case that toughened people create a toughened world, and those who’ve been treated with firm yet compassionate, kind and gentle love are the ones best suited to lead us toward a culture that respects and honors life?

In the words of writer Margaret Halsey, “The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is, above all else, a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.”

Without parents who insist on preserving innocence as much as we possibly can for our children, we’d be left with a world of tough parenting and tough children who spend more time healing old wounds as adults than creating from a free-spirited, spacious and fertile field seeded with the constancy of Love. A more caring society depends on parents who are willing to find a genuine balance of preserving innocence and teaching the skills required to face the unkind ways of the world.

Creating from Sweetness and Ferocity

Mama Bear can be a sweet, soft and tender bear. Licking her cubs, plucking berries from the bushes with her strong pearly teeth, peering with her dark loving eyes into the morning light. But Mama Bear ‘aint just sweet like honey. And human mothers are no different when we’re at our best. We can be gentle and kind while still having access to the fierce Mama Bear within us, as we guide our growing children.

Last week I dropped into an unexpected mourning period when I learned my 4-year-old daughter is being exposed to "rough" behavior and words at her incredibly darling Waldorf preschool. Yeah, surprise surprise, humans are humans and no school is immune. Kids are going to do and say things that they learn from older kids, or see somewhere on TV, and bring it back to their preschool, however cherubic the place might be. No shock — to the brain in my head.

But my heart? Shattered.

I wanted to crawl into a cave with my cub and take her away from all the roughness. It felt like all the choices her father and I have made to preserve her innocence were suddenly being threatened. Despite how much we respect and value the teacher-caretakers there, this is still our baby we’re talking about. Can’t we just wait a bit longer to let her start being exposed to this stuff? And indeed, as I have reflected intensely about all this, and cried, I have insisted on holding her close, feeling from her a shared desire to be near me. It’s almost like a question is lingering in her air... Where is my innocence going?

Stepping Up to the High Bar
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No, I don’t think everyone should be with their kids all the time so we can keep them from a mean world. That’s creating from fear, and it won’t create a world of Love. But I do think we should question ourselves when we put on a “that’s just the way it is” hat. It’s not the way it is. It’s the way we allow it to be. There is a firmer stance for kindness that we can all take. Looking within ourselves and looking at our parenting, we can do a little less tolerating and a little more standing strong for the sake of love being “the way it is.” Shouldn’t we aim for this, anyway?

Living up to the high bar children present to us, is galaxies away from easy. It is some of the Great Work in being human, whether you’re a parent or not. And none of us will ever be perfect at it. 

Sweetness is the world many of us dream of, when we think of what our children are worth. A colorful, considerate, compassionate world. This is the “world” we want to create in our own homes, and speaking for our household, we’re about 80% there. That leaves room for improvement, and in my deep true core I will not let my daughter down.
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Here Comes the Mirror

So I’ll call us out and I’ll call us all out. What are we modeling with our own behaviors that might be rubbing off onto our children? Do we use our voices in a fearful way to get them to comply? Do we always respect our own needs — for rest, for joy, for acknowledgment, for physical touch — or do we let ourselves be undernourished? How often do we reach out to show kindness to strangers who could use a loving gesture, or how often do we pretend it’s none of our business? How often do we notice something unkind under our own roof and yet choose not to name it? Are we too busy in The Land of the Computer Phone to seize the chance to speak our stand for Love?

Ultimately, the more prepared a person is to face the world in all its moods, the better off they’ll be. Each child needs the tools, inside and out, to live in whatever world they experience.

Tools, Teaching and Learning

We want our children to know how to handle conflict. We want our children to choose friends who respect and value them. We want our children to feel confident in their own skin. We want our children to seek approval from within themselves rather than from other people. We want our babies, when they leave our nests, to have learned to celebrate who they are, complete with whatever makes them different or flawed in the eyes of a very confused, spiritually hollow, over-consumptive and commercialized society.

How better to learn, ourselves, than to teach?

Our children are evolved beyond us, yet they still need our guidance about how to be in the world. They know how to feel, but they don’t necessarily know how to tell someone else — a dear friend or a bigger kid at school — how they feel. It is our job, far more than it is a teacher’s job, to show them how to honor and express their feelings. To take care of themselves, emotionally as well as physically. I’ve told my daughter before that sometimes people are not kind, but she’s not experienced this much first hand. Now that she is seeing it for herself among people she knows, it’s a whole new world. A break-mama’s-heart world.

But broken hearts can emerge with beautiful, fiery power. And I can step up to that burning plate and tell my daughter that I am sad the world isn’t always kind. And I am sorry I am not always kind — sometimes I’m grumpy and impatient — but that I always love her, and I am learning too, and I want to do better. And that we can help each other.

The Big Huge Glaring T Word

Mountainous within all this is a word that captures the single greatest thing we can do for our children: Trust.

As we teach and learn communication tools, as we look in the mirror to step up and model more of what we want our children to learn, we must also do the enormous spiritual work of trusting our children. This is very, very simple and very, very difficult — for most of us anyway.

Most of us are busy feeling superior over our children, or putting them on a pedestal and letting them “rule the world” with no boundaries, or some combination of those extremes.

​What does it mean to actually trust your child? Does it mean letting them lead the way all day long every day? Does it mean slacking in our parenting role? Does it mean letting them rule the roost, or allowing them to do things that don’t feel right to you as a parent? No, it doesn’t mean any of these. Trust is the big huge giant in the human experience — or one of them, anyway. It is one of the greatest spiritual lessons we face and although it isn’t easy for anyone, we all are all naturally capable of learning how to trust.

(Stay tuned for a follow-up piece on Trusting our Children.)