Great Spirit is Born in Us with Our Children
Anna Cole, PhD, Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor
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When I was pregnant with my first child, some years ago now, my PhD supervisor, a blonde hard-nosed bombshell with a social science background and legal training from my other life back in Australia as an academic researcher, came to visit. I was about eight and a half months pregnant and ripe and bursting, musing on baby names… and about to embark on a journey of birth and parenting that I could not even imagine.
My academic supervisor was a parent of two older children, and she said to me then, something that I’ve never forgotten. She simply said, “Once you have your baby, Anna, you won’t be able to watch the news the same way you did before”. And she was right.
After my daughter was born, my consciousness expanded as exponentially as my womb and birth canal had during her birth. I could no longer watch world news of conflict zones, killings and wars without knowing with terrible visceral certainty that everyone I saw in an army uniform, or starving in a refugee camp or being blown up by bombs, had been somebody’s baby.
Someone, if they’d been allowed to and were still alive themselves, had expanded their whole physicality and, along with it, their consciousness to birth, protect, feed and love this baby enough in whatever limited way for it to make it through to adulthood.
Parenting can be a portal into a consciousness that is vast and connecting. I think this is, in part, why parenting can feel so especially hard at times – we mothers, for example, have opened our wombs and our consciousness to – what the late, great Sinéad O’Connor called – the Universal Mother. And we know, we sense, we feel, that we are all connected. What happens in Gaza happens inside our hearts.
Then hard times come, triggering our old wounds, or they rip deep new wounds, trauma happens, or someone or society abuses us, and this can lead, as Sinéad knew all too well, to hurt the thing we love the most – our child – who is?filled with divinity. We can then?go on?to hurt, or abuse, or ignore, or belittle this divine being.
And within this painful truth of being human, I have witnessed a universal consciousness in parents, even some who have been shockingly hurt by violence in our world.
I remember in the recent aftermath of the Paris shootings at the Bataclan theatre some years ago, a man, Antoine Leiris, spoke in tribute to his wife, killed that night:
“…On Friday night you stole away the love of my life, my wife, the mother of my [17 month old] son, but you will not have my hatred… responding to this act with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that made you what you became…”
His words reminded me of a horrific loss in my family and the profound love, rather than hate, expressed by the parents after their three children and her Dad had been killed when a passenger jet was shot down over Ukrainian airspace by a Russian rocket.
In the aftermath, there were calls for retribution from the public and from several in high office. But within days, these children’s parents had issued a statement to ‘the soldiers in the Ukraine, politicians, media, and friends and family’:
‘…our pain is intense and relentless…we live in a hell beyond hell…no-one deserves what we are going through.? Not even the people who shot our whole family out of the sky…no hate in the world is as strong as the love we have for our children.
No hate in the world is as strong as the love we have for each other.
This is a revelation that gives us some comfort. We ask everyone to remember this when you are making any decisions that affect us and the other victims of this horror…“
World events have moved on since then, and those same Ukranian soldiers they appealed to for calm are embroiled in a nightmare, not of their making.
There are a few guideposts we can use as parents in the aftermath of the killings and suffering around the world and the other acts of violence that drag on our hopes for a safe and peaceful world. We can continue to walk closer to the Universal Mother.
Firstly, we as parents and human beings need to talk with each other so we can work through our feelings and reactions to shocking world events. We need to do this at times when our children are not present so they don’t have to carry the burden of the emotions we express.
We do need to offload our grief. We may need to show our outrage and fight the helplessness we feel with moments of complete anger. It’s a relief to be supported to show our deeply human responses – crying, trembling, and an open show of upset.
Accessing our gut feelings can help us recover our ability to use the power we do have. Once we’re freed from our reactions, there is much we can do in our families and communities to make the world right.
It is important for our children to see that we care about people and about justice in the world. But part of our job is to protect young children from constant exposure to news of harm and hurt—there is so much effort to connect and repair that finds no spotlight in the world news. Play Stevie Wonder’s song for Martin Luther King loudly in your car, sing along, and tune in to his divine consciousness.
And it seems to me that “together” is the watchword for dealing with news of violence or death. “What can we do together, as a family, to remember those who died and offer our caring?” is a healing question. We can ask our young children for their ideas and offer our own. Light a candle? Have a moment of silence?
We do well to listen to our children’s thoughts and choices – and to their feelings as well.
We can remind our children of what we do in our families to help each other when someone is feeling hurt. For instance, we resolve fights by listening carefully.
We make sure people don’t speak hurtfully about anyone else.
We ask someone to listen to our own feelings of upset whenever we can.
And we reach out to people we know have had trouble so that they don’t lose hope, or their sense that others care about them.
As my bereaved relatives said in the face of their horrific loss: “So far, every moment since we arrived home, we have been surrounded by family and friends. We desperately pray this continues because it is this expression of love that is keeping us alive”.
As parents, we know it takes a great amount of person-to-person love, work and commitment to keep even a small group of people working co-operatively together. Still, it’s these heartfelt skills that we develop – and that widened 360-degree view on life – born as our children are birthed – that are the same skills and consciousness needed to heal our human community.
