Here, we have a wonderful essay about accessing hope while parenting in times of darkness and despair by author Danya Ruttenberg, whose book Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder and Radical Amazement of Parenting is one that we really want to check out. Enjoy!
~Rebecca Conroy, Editor of A Child Grows in Brooklyn
Sometimes, parenting involves a lot of what the philosopher Sara Ruddick refers to as cheerfulness. That is, engaging in the work of helping our kids to regard the world optimistically. That can look like, “It’s no big deal that you peed in your bed, we’ll clean you right up.” Or, “Mommy and Daddy fight sometimes but it’s OK” Or even, “Grandma’s not going to get better, but her love will always be with you.”
It’s not about denying the hard stuff, but, rather, keeping our kids from plunging into fear or shame or despair. Ruddick says, “for children, hope is as important as breathing, certainly more important than sleep.”
Finding hope is hard sometimes. I think we all—children and adults, probably especially adults—struggle with despair, with feeling like things are going to be OK. Really, honestly, sometimes they’re not OK.
And even when things are more or less fine, there are all manner of stresses and strains, not to mention the ways we doubt ourselves or just sometimes feel the exhaustion and existential dread that comes with the human condition sometimes. Our self-doubt. Our melancholy. How do we offer hope to our children when we’re not always sure we have it ourselves? As Rebbe Nachman of Breslov once said, “Finding true joy is the hardest of all spiritual tasks.”
It’s hard. But it’s also a critically important part of our work as parents, and as people; how do we offer hope to our children when we’re not always sure we have it ourselves?
Sometimes we need to make a conscious decision to find that point of resilience within ourselves—the part of us that knows that, maybe, even if Daddy and Papa’s fight, or even Mommy and Momma’s marriage, doesn’t go how we wanted it to, we’ll be OK in the end. Somehow. Some days we might have to go looking for that knowledge, but it’s in there. We will survive this—whatever “this” is right now. And once we know that we’ll survive, then we can show our kids how to as well.
Which isn’t to say that sometimes it’s not vital that we make space, in front of our children, to feel sad, or angry, or afraid. Part of how we teach our children that a person can face the darkness and come out on the other side is to do so in front of them. But part of resilience is showing them that we already know that the sadness or anger won’t destroy us. It’s not about pretending things are fine when they’re not. It’s about seeking the light, even when it’s hard.
When we help our children feel safe and optimistic (even when we ourselves might be feeling terrified or despairing), we make a choice to engage the light. It’s hard, indeed. But our kids desperately need us to do this work, for their sakes. We need to make a conscious decision to find that point of resilience within ourselves.
And sometimes, when things are really rough, we can parent our way into finding the hope. That is, sometimes we can fake it until we make it, can’t we? Because every time we do whatever we can to help our children feel safe and optimistic, we choose the light.
The more that we can live in a place of light, the more we fight despair even when it comes creeping into our rooms at night, the more we can offer this light to our children.
We’ve all had, unfortunately, opportunities in our lives to find out how resilient we are. Times when we’ve struggled as a parent, or in some other part of life: facing grief, or a painful breakup, or failure or hopelessness, or feeling like we just weren’t going to make it through the day or the week. But we did it. We made it.
When we remember our resilience, we can tap back into the awareness of how expansive our capacities are for healing really are. We can remember that we know how to choose love, and light. And when we tap into that feeling of resilience, we can rediscover hope for ourselves at the times when we might be feeling most despairing. This feeling of hope is what we have to offer our children. After all, “for children, hope is as important as breathing, certainly more important than sleep.”
When you love your children with expansiveness and resilience, it’s a form of hope. When we remember to feel it, we can better help our kids to feel it. This light, this hope, is as necessary as air.
Danya Ruttenberg is author of Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder and Radical Amazement of Parenting. She was named by Newsweek as one of ten “rabbis to watch” and by the Forward as one of the top 50 women rabbis in America.
