Parenting without mistakes?
I had a dream where I met a journalist who was interviewing Dr. Benjamin Spock (an American pediatrician whose book on parenting was one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century). So in my dream I asked this journalist about her perception of this doctor as a person. I told her a true story about how his book was a parenting bible for many Soviet parents, even though it wasn’t available there in printed form (people photographed or retyped the pages, secretly printed them and glued them together into a booklet that passed through many, many hands).
… There were more details in the dream, but at the end I said the following:
“The meaning of life is not about not being confused, but it’s about what your choices were based on.”
This dream was an inner guidance response to the conversation I had with my older friend the day before. Specifically, my friend was reflecting on her past parenting patterns and acknowledging that her approach wasn’t always the best and that she didn’t have a good parenting model in her own life that she could copy to create a better parenting style.
First of all, it is actually quite rare for someone to have enough honesty and courage to admit their mistakes and shortcomings – it deserves deep respect. What’s more common are people of all ages (even in their 50s and older!) complaining about all the misdeeds their parents did to them when they were children, and how these very distant experiences continue to ruin their current lives. Of course, I’m not talking about the criminal cases of abuse, that’s another issue. What I’m referring to is the more common situation where a half-century-old “child” cannot release and forgive the memories of his/her very distant past and move on with his/her life. Does this situation help anyone? Definitely not: neither the now-adult children, nor their elderly parents.
I’m not going to talk about forgiveness here, because that’s an article in itself. But my question is this: Is it possible to make no mistakes in parenting? Is there at least one perfect parent who made no mistakes in raising their children? World-famous parenting guru Dr. Spock should be that guy, we should assume? (If you say your parent was perfect, good for you – you are able to forgive and see beyond the mistakes!) What I’m getting at here is that mistakes are part of every life path in this confusing reality. Today it may be Dr. Spock who is ” clearing the confusion” from your world of parenting, but tomorrow you find out that his own parenting style was very detrimental to his family. Now you are confused again, right? How do you know what’s good or bad when there’s no way to avoid mistakes?
The answer is simple if we look at it from the perspective suggested in my dream. First of all, we are supposed to make our choices in a state of unknowing (of the whole situation, the underlying conditions, and the future outcomes). This is an intentional design so that we learn to use Love as our compass (and forgiveness as a tool to stop the wheel of karma, to cut the karmic ties).
And secondly, isn’t it true that it’s easier to forgive the unfortunate choice if it was made out of love and in the belief that it would make things better, even though it was a confused view and that choice turned out to be a mistake?
In my dream I wanted to know the journalist’s feeling about Dr. Spock: was he a man with a heart? Because if he was, then his mistakes in parenting don’t carry the same weight as heartless decisions, and therefore they are easier to forgive. But if he wasn’t, then his whole “expertise” in parenting is just a fiction. How many well-known gurus and influencers turn out to be the opposite of what they teach and/or present? This is another topic to think about – why would anyone need a teacher other than their own heart?
So forgive yourself for the wrong choices you made based on the confused view of the situation, especially if you made those choices out of love (or what seemed to you at the time). For there is no one in this world who is an expert in anything and who does not make mistakes. And when we start to make our choices on the basis of unconditional love, then we won’t call anything a mistake, but an unexpected outcome, a stepping stone for learning and growing.
Margarita AoteaRa ©2023
The following quote from Q’uo speaks very clearly on this subject:
“It is a difficult thing to grasp in the world of the mind where things seem so clear-cut, but in actuality your illusion is set up with some precision to prevent any entity from being correct for very long at a time. The need of this illusion is fundamentally the need for confusion. Too much clarity within third density creates a pleasant and long third density. Each of you is experiencing the culmination of far more powerful ways of experiencing third density. These ways have been rough, and each trail has been mazed, and yet the progress that each of you has made is outstanding. In all of this confusion, each has found the end of a rainbow and is following that vision.
We encourage more than anything else this basic faith in self that sees beyond the mistakes of the moment and trusts in the excellence of that self that lies within like an undiscovered country. Were this instrument [channeler] never again to say to itself, “You’re just not good enough.” would she be good enough? Were the one known as Jim never to say again, “I just can’t remember like I used to,” would he remember as he used to? Perhaps, but the words that truly hurt the self are the words of judgment that create a contraction and a sorrow within the heart, and so we encourage you to cease bringing sorrow to your own heart, for it is in no way necessary. Each lesson that comes before you has its learning curve. Each learning curve has many moments of seeming failure. Indeed, the only way to learn is to fail repeatedly in such a way that learning occurs. The mechanisms of learning are assisted not by resisting the pain of learning but by speaking it, chanting it, expressing it, having a dance with it, so that there is a movement of energy and a lifting of the spirit that deals with whatever is being dealt with at the time.” (Q’uo, Sunday Meditation ©2002 by L/L Research (Louisville, KY) https://www.llresearch.org/channeling/2002/1006)
