Parenting 101: Cristine's Guide to Soul-Care

When we first started this journey of parenting kids from hard places, I was in a constant state of educating myself.  I would watch all the Karyn Purvis videos I could find.  She was so gentle but so firm and such a fan of the kids in her care, I wanted my parenting to look like her.  

Karyn Purvis is amazing and I learned so much from her, but when I tried to do what she did it was falling flat.  I learned all her phrases and I now say them as if they were mine. 

"Let's try that again with respect."

But something wasn't clicking for me.  I felt impoverished and frustrated.  

I was scheduled to speak for a women's retreat and our theme was "Flourish", a theme I helped pick out.  In the back of my head, a voice kept telling me I couldn't speak on flourishing when I wasn't flourishing.  The more the voice spoke, the more I started to fall apart.  But I kept studying, because no matter how desperately I was falling apart I was determined to speak.

One day as I studied Psalm 92, I saw it clear as day.  I saw the fault in my thinking, at least one my faults. 

I grabbed onto the words "flourish like", it didn't say the righteous will flourish if they do all the right things.  It just said that they flourish.  They flourish because God makes them to flourish.  This is not their own thing, this is the work of God.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about how we start thinking we can create things like community and spiritual experiences, when what we are called to is to enter into what God is already doing.  I am called to walk into the flourishing that God is already doing in my life.

The question then became, why do we flourish like a palm tree?  Palm Trees were considered the most useful trees of the ancient world, they provided materials, to build homes, make rope, feed cattle, and their fruit feed humans.  They can bend and sway in a storm without coming down.  I am supposed to be flourishing like this tree, bending and swaying in the storm without falling apart.  It is also the storm that causes them to flourish, it is the storm that strengthens their trunk.  It is my storm that is causing me to flourish.  It is parenting kids from hard places that is causing me to flourish.

To care for kids from hard places and flourish we must engage in soul-care.

When Beth Guckenberger is speaking about caring for kids from hard places, she says things like, "There is not enough Diet Coke in the world for me to like you past noon."  

Can I get an AMEN??? For me there is not enough coffee in the world to make it to bedtime without tripping a trigger.

We need SOUL-CARE to get us from morning to bedtime.

I have watched mamas and daddys and siblings and teachers do this journey and come out the other side joyful and I have watched some come out of it devastatingly bitter. Let's not be the bitter ones, let's be the joyful ones.  

Cristine's Guide to SOUL-CARE:

1. You are a SOUL and you must commune with the one who made your soul.  

You must pray and meditate and read the Bible and create sacred space in your heart.... if you want to change your mind-set, if you want to be joyful, if you do not want to grow bitter.  I know its hard. I know everyone wants a piece of you. I know there are a thousand reasons why you don't do this, but can I suggest that you don't do it because it is vulnerable and painful.  It is painful to lay out the hurt and frustration.  It is painful to let go of your dreams and expectations.  It is painful to say to God, "Whatever you will my story to be, I am okay with that."

2. You must create a SACRED SPACE.  

A place to rest, a place to think, a place to feel, a place to be safe.  Kids from hard places are notorious for crossing all our boundaries, manipulating us and taking away our safe spaces.  What if you had a space that for a designated period of time was just yours to be safe and vulnerable, a place to think and feel and ponder?  This summer that space for me was on the porch before anyone else opened their eyes.  Now it is in front of our little, space heater that looks like a fireplace.  I pretend it is a fireplace, I pretend I'm in the mountains and I make that space sacred.  

3. You must offer yourself GRACE.

You have to have grace with yourself when it comes to soul-care.  I do NOT make it every morning, some mornings I have early meetings and sometimes I have late nights and early mornings are not a good idea.  The goal is not perfection, the goal is soul-care and inflicting shame on myself is the opposite of soul-care.  

You also MUST have grace with yourself as you deal with your kids.  There are hard moments and most of the time there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution.  I had one of these moments this morning.  As I was reflecting on this interaction, I realized that my response was probably not the best solution.  It was a solution and it wasn't a bad one, but there were definitely better ways to handle it.  I chose grace and then I chose practice. I replayed the scenario and I practiced doing it better.  I practiced having more empathy (which we'll talk about down the road in another post) and redirecting and choosing my words more carefully.  And I practiced GRACE.

4. You must have FRIENDS.

Friendships are a big part of soul-care.  As souls, we were made to be in communion with other souls. I love deep conversations over coffee, long walks, learning new things and moments of hilarity.  All of these things bring life to my soul.  The best friendships not only encourage me, but challenge me.  It's in these friendships that I have gained the courage to face another hard day and found new wisdom for the hard places.  You must find a friend you can laugh with, because laughter is good medicine.  It is as important as finding a friend you can cry with.

5. You must take care of your BODY

There is not enough coffee for me to like my kids at the end of the day.  There is also not enough coffee to provide the energy my body needs. I'm a little like a plant, I need sunshine and exercise and lots of water. I have to have people around me that also value this, and I follow people on social media that remind me to drink more water and go to the gym and not to eat doughnuts on hard days (it's a thing).

6. You must do something you ENJOY

I set aside time everyday to read.  Reading creates a space for me to slow down, engage with an idea and maybe relax a little bit.  Quite honestly, it is a sacred space for me.  It is where my ideas are stretched and my world is broadened.  It is where I started to learn what it would be like to walk in my kid's shoes by understanding our cultural differences and how their background has changed the way their brain responds to the world.  

There is no way to shift your mindset from "I'm going to fix this child" to "I CANNOT FIX THEM" without soul-care.  Take some time to take care of your soul and next time we are going to jump into how to grow in empathy for your child.  

Resources:

1. Karyn Purvis is the BOMB.  I still watch her, hoping someday to be as gentle as she is.  She challenges my parenting and quite honestly, she nourishes my soul.

2. I mentioned a quote from Beth Guckenberger, check her out! She will challenge you to care for your soul :)

3. This podcast helps me rethink my perspectives and make the mind set changes I need to make. Honestly Adoption Podcast

4. If you want to hear more on flourishing, this is a video of my Mother's Day Message at SONrise, Flourish: Made to Be Flourishing

Parenting 101: I Cannot Fix Them

Although I would like to pretend it’s not true, there are hard things in this world...people, hard circumstances and sometimes our kids are hard. The thing is, there are kids that have a harder time in the world because the world is hard. Some kids are harder than others because they come from a hard place. Karyn Purvis defines children from hard places as “children that have experienced some type of abuse, neglect or trauma during their lives (including prenatal exposure to substances or high levels of stress, difficult labor or birth before or medical trauma).”

If you have a kid from a hard place in your care, you know the struggle. Kids from hard places trigger us. They push on our tender places. They reveal something in us, something we don’t like.

I wonder if we struggle to respond well to hard kids because of our PRIDE. It might look something like this -
I would never act like that.
No kid of mine is going to act like that.
This makes me look REALLY bad.

OR when dealing with kids we don’t parent like a teacher or other caregiver...
my kid wouldn’t act like that.
What is wrong with their parents?
What is wrong with me that I can’t handle this?

I wish I could look you in the eye right now and speak these words to you -
It is hard, there is an ugliness that wells up inside us that we wish would go away. We, the strong safe adults, feel anger when we are hurt physically or emotionally. We, the strong safe adult feel frustration deep within when we are trying as hard as we can and nothing we try works. We, the strong safe adults, are not perfect and sometimes we have control issues and that butts up against the kiddos control issues.

When we look in the mirror, we find our own small child inside us, hurt and alone choosing its own coping mechanisms like escape, control, anger, laziness, overly helpful, blaming, so much blaming, shaming, overwork, or being super needy. I spent the majority of the first couple years of loving kids from hard places trying to fix them. Trying so hard that I was shaming myself when every technique in the book didn’t work.. I did not have the longview in mind because the short term was so overwhelming.

There has been a slow steady shift in my mind-set to, I CANNOT FIX THEM! 

I can provide interactions and environment that provide the structure that healing can happen in. I can work on me and shift my perspective. 

But I CANNOT FIX THEM! 

I was surprised when one of our last interventions did not work. I really thought it was going to be the key to my life becoming easier. The problem was that my son was not interested in participating. He had no desire, he shutdown and get this,

I COULD NOT MAKE HIM.

He reminded me daily that he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. My pride was bruised, my desire to control was driving the truck and we were not liking each other.

Over the summer as I started to think about this differently. I realized, I can be in control of only me and my responses (I know we teach this to first graders but seriously, if you have a kid from a hard place you know they reveal the first grader in you). I can be in control of creating an environment for healing. I can be in control of the boundaries surrounding me. I can be in control of taking care of my own heart. I can be in control of my own expectations.  I am learning to let go of what I cannot control.

Over the next few posts I am going to dive a little deeper and show you how I have worked to make this shift in my own life.  I invite you to make this slow and steady shift from controlling our kids to guiding them.