[ericajoy]

Hello 4s, Who here is a parent? I am a single mom to two preschoolers ages 3 and 5 and run into many challenges and opportunities for growth in motherhood. Curious, how do other fours experience parenthood? The theory I have run across is that 4s tend to be active child types who were parented by neutral parent types if I recall correctly, and so I am also curious about your childhood and how your own childhood has influenced how you parent.

I feel haunted by my own childhood now that I am a parent.

[devono]

yes, i was just going to post a similar topic.

what makes me good as a parent: i can be childlike, i love animals, nature, simple things, simple pleasures. i break rules for my children: i woke them at 2am to see a meteor shower, we eat pancakes in bed, we tell scary stories, we talk about death and sex and taxes. i am not scared of their emotions. i tell them every day how magnificent and beautiful and amazing i think they are. when i say, 'do you know how much i love you?' and their arms instinctively raise up over their heads and they say, 'THIS much'.


what makes me bad as a parent: sometimes my moods are like lightning storms- there's a forecast but you're never sure when you're gonna get hit. they walk on eggshells around my moodiness. sometimes my depression sends me to bed and i hate that my 10 year old daughter brings me tea to get me out of bed. i have one child who's becoming a people-pleasing 2 and one who's becoming a withdrawn 5. feeling like this is all my fault. i've ruined them.

[adverseaffects]

yes, i was just going to post a similar topic.

what makes me good as a parent: i can be childlike, i love animals, nature, simple things, simple pleasures. i break rules for my children: i woke them at 2am to see a meteor shower, we eat pancakes in bed, we tell scary stories, we talk about death and sex and taxes. i am not scared of their emotions. i tell them every day how magnificent and beautiful and amazing i think they are. when i say, 'do you know how much i love you?' and their arms instinctively raise up over their heads and they say, 'THIS much'.


what makes me bad as a parent: sometimes my moods are like lightning storms- there's a forecast but you're never sure when you're gonna get hit. they walk on eggshells around my moodiness. sometimes my depression sends me to bed and i hate that my 10 year old daughter brings me tea to get me out of bed. i have one child who's becoming a people-pleasing 2 and one who's becoming a withdrawn 5. feeling like this is all my fault. i've ruined them.

They would have become something no matter what. ;D
Children are not broken so easily. It's damn hard to ruin a child. Change them, influence them, but never in ways you expect or can control. Generally try to control one thing and the child reacts ina totally different way in reaction to that. Point being... all parents have certain strengths and defficienies and this will always effect in their child in some way. Every parent. But even if the parents was to change that one thing, it'd be sometihng else. you can't control how a child will grow, you can only be with them as they do.

[snowangel]

I parent a lot different than my parents did. My childhood was more of a battlefield because of domestic violence and my mom was not their emotionally for me and my siblings. She was not nurturing at all. My mom never told me she loved me, she never hugged me, she never got involved in anything that had to do with school, and I could never go to her for anything. I can't really explain it because I had a mom, but it didn't feel like I had a mom growing up. My mom abandoned the family when I was 16, and being a parent myself, I cannot image why any parent would want to leave their children like that.

I have mostly teens at home and a five year old. I am very protective of my children. I had to learn to balance being protective and letting them try things and fail. I also want my children to be independent, and they are, but I am also there when they need my support. I want them to be able to solve problems on their own and to be able to handle conflict when it happens. For example, one day my teens where arguing over who was going to watch something on tv. They tried to get me involved and make that decision for them. I told them that I would not do that. I said, no one watches tv until all of you can come to some kind of an agreement. So I told them that they had to put a schedule together of what times they wanted to watch tv, and they all had to agree to it. And I told them once they had that figured out, they could watch tv. It took them about 30 minutes to do a schedule and come to an agreement.

I am very supportive of my childrens dreams and I want them to live the life that they want. I want them to be who they want to be. And I want them to always know that they are loved, and no matter what they do, that love will always be there.

[ericajoy]

I wrote a bunch about this topic today, but never got to the present. Anyway, here is what I have so far:

Motherhood. I felt like a victim of motherhood. My marriage was in shambles. My husband worked late, went climbing or biking or somewhere else after work. I was spending hours everyday ignoring everyone and everything, staring at walls, watching the internal story of my life play out in full horror knowing I had married a man I didn't love because I had stopped believing in love. I wanted a break from poverty, fear of homelessness and the humiliating jobs that barely supported my wretched existence. When my wasband and I started dating, he was a rich kid from a local private university, and I was working a temp job at a state school hoping to get a full time job that would pay for night classes. My apartment was a pre-furnished walkup in a blighted neighborhood, the security door ripped off the hinges. He was dependable and handsome, and yet he was so emotionally unavailable and judgmental of me even then. We dated for 8 years, and while I knew he didn't love me, and I knew I didn't love him, I couldn't imagine going back to the desperation of life before him. And he didn't want to try his hand at finding someone else. On the day I married him, I cringed at the thought of kissing him. He demanded sex from me on our wedding night, and I scoffed at him, "how can you get off when you know I don't want to be here." That was our wedding night. We had sex once on our two week honeymoon. I spent as much time reading and avoiding him as possible. Though we were in the tropics it felt like winter. I got pregnant immediately and gave birth to my daughter the next April. During birthing classes, when they asked the soon-to-be fathers what they were most afraid of about being the support person for their wife in labor, my wasband told them he was afraid of being bored. He was being honest, too, because he spent much of my labor sleeping on the couch in the hospital room while I labored alone crying in between contractions. I gave up the natural birth and requested drugs.


With one child, I could do it on my own pretty well. I brought the baby everywhere with me. When number two came along 22 months later, I felt isolated and unsupported and unloved. Then I went on a business trip with my husband, leaving my 2 year old to spend the month split between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with her grandparents. That business trip was to Switzerland and Poland and my husband had to work long hours. I had a Swiss train pass and road to small villages and nearby cities. And spent days wondering around Zurich visiting museums and bookstores and reading in cafes all with my easy 4 month old son. In Poland I found a language exchange opportunity with a woman on break from school, and she brought me and my son all over Krakow teaching me Polish phrases and how to respond to the old women who would come up to my son grabbing his foot and asking "Il a ma lat?" or something like that. I don't remember anymore.


It was after that trip that I crashed. My husband told me it was because he spoiled me. Having experienced happiness and joy and freedom, I realized how absent those feeling were in my life. And I stared at the walls and ignored my little ones' cries and could barely eat and lost 40 lbs in a few months. And I would have anxiety attacks when I was in public. I felt like an alien, like nothing made sense. I was afraid of being taken away and locked up. I was afraid of going mad. I moved down to the basement and slept there, rarely coming up to the main part of the house after wasband came home from work. I wrote long letters to a few old friends seeking connection, asking for help, which I never sent. My therapist at the time suggested I take 3 hours every single day to myself and figure out what fills me up. I poured myself into a fantasy of love with an abusive, alcoholic ex who lived 2000+ miles away whom I tracked down on the internet. Life had lost all meaning. And at that time I started walking late at night, stargazing and being amazed by the potential of the universe, the magic and mystery that must exist for all of this exists, we exist. The crests and valleys were monumental.


Six months after we returned from the business trip to Europe, I moved out of our shared home into a shabby two bedroom bungalow across town. We had lived as a married couple for 3.5 years. As a parent at that time I was much more responsive than I had been, but I would get angry, especially when I was tired, an anger that reminded me of my mother's rage. Six months after I moved into my bungalow, that ex I had been chatting with online came out to live with us. He didn't last 3 months before I kicked him out. I mean, I certainly didn't leave my wasband only to be treated like a nonentity by a drunk freeloading videogame addict. I shaved my head at about this time. I started seeing a new therapist for depression and anxiety and to figure out why I would invite such an empty person into my home, living side-by-side with my children. I was horrified by my own judgement. And with her I started working on admitting the existence of abuse and neglect and rape and teen homelessness and substance abuse and facing suicide attempts and hospitalizations that were all my ancient history by this point. I thought I had found a way out of all of that, but what I realized by working with her is that all of that was still lodged in my body. And then my piano teacher asked me why I couldn't relax my hands, and I had not realized my hand were never relaxed. My therapist diagnosed me with PTSD and a bunch of other things as psychologists do and started insisting I see a psychiatrist so they could put me on drugs. I was very wary of being put on drugs for lots of reasons I'm not going to go into here. At about this time I moved again, into a cohousing community 3 blocks from my wasband's house where I could see the children's play area from the kitchen. I was starting to feel safe.


I was starting to feel safe, and with that safety came the courage to really look at what had been happening in my life. For so long I was so angry that I had married the man that I had, so angry that I had the children so much more than 50% of the time because I still didn't have time for myself and I couldn't go to school or get a job and I was so jealous of my wasband for having so much time to pursue his own interests. I was usually angry at myself for getting myself into such a situation at all, of becoming a mother at all. And frequently, I would turn that anger on my wasband and my children, too.

And then I realized that I was doing the best I could at that time. We all are in every moment. I married for safety because I hadn't known safety and it was an amazing gift. To me, just having some of my physical needs met felt so much better than not even if it didn't come with love or acceptance. And I ignored all of my needs beyond safety because when I acknowledging them I felt needy which in my mind was a very bad thing. I mean, if I am needy, if I have needs, who would put up with me. (disintegration into two?)


I haven't even really touched on my childhood or teen years or even really my parenting. I haven't even talked about my notions of time travel for healing childhood wounds. :) I will write more...

[wittyfool]

@devono - loved your post but I don't think you have ruined them. May be you have difficulties accepting them. I won't force you to do that. I know you love them but that is slipping away from your experience. I am no parent. I should be honest here. I have HUGE expectations from myself when I will become a parent in a few years. When I read the initial part of your post, I was like THIS... THIS is how parents SHOULD BE. And I was filled with a stupid pride that I am a type Four too who is reading a type Four mother.

Yes, your children are your creation. But they are their own creation as well. A cruel cruel thing will teach you to love them again. She has already tormented you a lot and as you become super capable of handling her, she devices new and new ways to challenge you. If life was not this challenging, will it be as much fun?

[wittyfool]

@ericajoy Keep writing. Please keep writing.

[ericajoy]

@ericajoy Keep writing. Please keep writing.

Thank you for your encouragement and Thank you for reading it in the first place :)

[ericajoy]

I wish I were better at being nonreactive, but in fact, I can be nonreactive for a while, happy and blissful, and then things start to catch up with me and I explode. Every little thing starts to get to me, and I am irritable, spinning out into a full blown rage very quickly. Then I am able to regain peace until things start getting on my nerves and reach my boiling point again. This rarely (possibly never) happens around anyone other than those closest to me for which I feel guilty. When I had 2 babies at home and was getting little sleep, going through a divorce and under tremendous amounts of stress, I would go through the cycle daily or even multiple times a day. I can get to the point of getting angry at receiving mail, or the dishes and laundry building up, or my own body because they eventually require my attention. And sometimes I feel so inadequate and so put upon, being responsible for even these simple rhythms. I don't feel practical at all. Doing these small tasks takes a lot of energy for me, and sustaining it for any length of times is exhausting. In fact, I often find myself in the middle of a book or surfing the web awakening to realize I never finished cleaning up the kitchen.

And this morning, being awoken before 6am by my 3 year old son who would not go to sleep until after 10 last night followed by him waking up my 5 year old daughter and then pouring a tin of cinnamon all over the kitchen infuriated me, and I snapped. Small things. And such small people. My children, I can resent them for requiring my attention, my action, too. And then I feel guilty for being so self-absorbed, reading about the enneagram or what have you. I am feeling particularly down today, reactive today, unable to find ground today. And when I feel that way, I isolate and read novels and surf the web and feel unable to cope with any minor thing that might disturb my bubble.

Yesterday I did an activity in school. (I'm in massage school.) We chose partners and traced the outline of each other on large sheets of paper. Then we spent maybe 20 minutes solo drawing things of ourselves: our scars and trauma, our tension and holding, our flexibility and openness, our strength and weakness, our pleasure and pain, etc. And this project was very upsetting to me. I took it very seriously. I enjoyed looking at other people's, but I couldn't stand up, I felt so unstable. Some were very lovely, flowy. Others were more rigid like armor. Each felt like something to me. And when I came back to my own, I felt empty. Like I could hardly stand to look at it. Even while I was working on it, I felt like I had so little to communicate about myself. And spent much time filling in the background with pixels. This whole experience left me feeling shaken to the core. Why do I feel so empty? Why can't I find my ground and my peace?

I am currently feeling a lot of stress because my daughter is starting Kindergarten and my son is starting Preschool, and I'm trying to negotiate daycare for my school hours starting next month, and I don't know what my school schedule will look like in the fall, and my alimony is running out in December (the same month I graduate from massage school, so I have to hit the ground running) and I don't know how I'm going to pay my mortgage in January. And I don't trust myself to support myself let alone two children and all of this is exhausting. I have decided that I want to work with mothers and families particularly because I have found motherhood and family life so challenging and prenatal/postpartum started a process that brought trauma to the surface for me that I had been ignoring for my entire life. (I'm 34.) And yet I don't trust myself to be able to work with this population. I've had so much trouble feeling connected to other mothers and families... or anyone for any length of time or with any depth. And the internships to work with that population are expensive requiring background checks and medical tests because they are in the hospitals. (Can I work in a hospital!?) And on top of that, I'll need to take extra coursework. So then I am balancing my need to follow my dream of working with this particular population while questioning how realistic this dream is and the desire for meaningful work with the fear of not having money come January to pay my bills and keep me in a home that is comfortable and secure for me and my children. And this whole thing brings up my history of teen homelessness and insecurity. And also my lack of real support/family connection and my aloneness and isolation, fear of asking for help or of receiving from others because of fear of feeling obligated to other people because of traumatic past (I did that for you, now what are you going to do for me scenarios leading to sexual assault), believing that I have anything of value for which I can receive money. Sometimes I can assert myself and feel like right action is obvious and feel in touch with myself, and yet, the closer I get to this challenge when I need to be on my game, the more scared, more stressed, and the more incompetent I feel, like I want to spend the rest of my days in a fetal position.

Rarely, do I feel so overwhelmed these days, but when I do, I totally spin out like this. I judge myself harshly for this.

That was earlier today. That was how I felt then. I spent most of my day distracting myself online while overeating and some time socializing with friends and neighbors in our common green. I don't feel so hopeless now, and yet I still feel scared of the uncertainty and my ability to ride the wave and stay true to myself (whoever that is) while making my way in the world. I feel like days like today challenge my ability to be a good mom to my kids.

[wittyfool]

better at being nonreactive

What does this mean? Transformation into a calm and deeply perceptive mind? I also wish that you had it. If you get it somewhere give a small portion of it to me too. I am in a dire need too. If you already had it then you would not be writing this at all. You would be a different person altogether. With a different life. Only a type-Four can so cruelly reject oneself. Your reactive tendencies are your own. Ignored and suppressed and twisted they harm you, your relationships, your life and lives of your two children. But they are also deeply ingrained in your personality and habits. When reactive energy fills your body and mind how do you deal with them? Do you try to suppress it as long as you can and then reach a point when you NEED to take it out on something/somebody? There is so much of energy within you that you are fighting against. This will definitely destabilize you. If channelized properly this reactive energy can be a wonderful asset.

If you experience anxiety more than you think is usual then probably you have a Six fix. In this case the following should help:

Remember that there is nothing unusual about being anxious since everyone is anxious and much more often than you might think. Learn to be more present to your anxiety, to explore it, and to come to terms with it. Work creatively with your tensions without turning to excessive amounts of alcohol (or other drugs) to allay them. In fact, if you are present and breathing fully, anxiety can be energizing, a kind of tonic that can help make you more productive and aware of what you are doing.

Tell me if you relate with this. More advice for type Six issues are at

Personal Growth for Enneagram Type Sixes

What I really admire about you is that you are deeply involved with your life, grappling with the challenges both temporary and long term. Struggling to love your two children and wanting to love and care for them deeply. Doubting yourself and yet making things happen. To me you are like one of those characters in a serious movie whom you really really want to make it through their struggles, like Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness. What you need is a deeper level acceptance of yourself and your life. I know it is difficult. I know that. I am struggling with it too. Major decisions that have shaped my life happened only by chance. At least it looks like that. How can something so small when it happened twist the entire course of future? It's a really baffling thing. I realize it is futile to think about it but somehow, in an unknown way, it means a lot to me. As if the essence of my identity, value in my life, who I am, is locked there in the past.