Arrived on the island of Parenting? Do you sometimes feel as if you’ve been shipwrecked, maroooned and are completely lost? I know this island can feel desolate and lonely.
Then there are times when you just connect and laugh and are so full of the delights and joy of being a mother or father, that you are so happy it’s like you’re on Treasure Island a paradise where most naturally there is a joyful loving relationship between you and your child.
For me landing on the Island of Parenting and no map or guide to help me was pretty difficult at times. As you may read in another blog post, my first baby was stillborn. That time I landed on the Island of Grief. When my daughter was born six years later, it was another traumatic event in a completely different kind of way… and it was challenging being on this new Island of Parenting. It demanded of me all my skills and asked me to develop many more. Like the character Tom Hanks played in the movie Cast Away, survival is only just possible and with time, over the months the ability to adapt and change and grow.
Now with two children and ten years later , we exploring the possibility of moving to an island called Erraid where funnily enough the author Robert Louis Stevenson had his character washed up on in his book Kidnapped. On Erraid I am sure to discover more about the Treasures of being a parent as we homeschool and explore a more rustic life. (Yes compost toilets and grow your own veggies -although my husband does grow a lot already )
When I wrote the Treasure Within – a parent’s handbook, as a way to chart the territory and landscape of parenting, I had no idea we would be moving to a real life island on the west coast of Scotland called Erraid! Even when the workbook decided to have an offshoot and I started developing an iphone app we still had not considered the idea of moving.
Yet the metaphor of the Island came to me living on the mainland as I was thinking about how I know my children are treasures and yet sometimes I fail miserably to see them that way. The search for the Treasure, the delving into the the landscape of emotions, forests of feelings, mountains of beliefs, and caves of concepts helps me turn around how I parent my children. A conscious searching and awareness of what my children bring up for me was something I wanted to explore and write about.
So now as we move to the west coast I look at the Handbook I’ve written and the app I’ve developed and see them as premonitions or guides.
It’s going to be an exciting chapter on our journey of being parents and I’ll keep you posted on how we do…. living on the Island for real…
PS Thanks to Rob Wilcox Photographer for kind permission to use his photo for this post.
