I believe most parents will agree that regardless of how much knowledge and theory they gained before their parenting journey, the praxis, the practicality, the outworking of being a parent was largely developed during the parenting process. We learn by doing because effective parenting is a process and a practice. Of course, the gaining of the knowledge, the application of theory, preparation for the season ahead, all help too.
I still have a photo of myself with my two-month-old daughter on my lap, sitting on a couch, reading a book on parenting babies. I was 26 and quickly realising that my child was unlike the ‘clockwork and compliant’ little human the books described. The promises of the calm and content infant didn’t seem to matter to my child. The point I’m trying to make is, parenting is as unique as every person and it is a lengthy work that creates opportunities for little persons to know who ‘they’ are, while simultaneously creating opportunities for parents to move further into a kind of paradoxical knowing through self-forgetting.
True of any decade, there are parents who believe their very own parents, often their mother, sacrificed ‘too much’ of herself for her kids It is common to hear people say their mother did not take care of herself, was an embarrassment around friends, and really just poured too much of her life into her children. And perhaps they might say that about their fathers too. Ironically, there are parentless children and children of self-absorbed and dysfunctional parents, who would do everything they could to have a parent who is present, gives, sacrifices, puts themselves last, and does what is needed to provide a loving home for their children. This much we know, someone always pays for the posture of the self-fish parent or a self-absorbed parent – first the children, then the community, as this parent often stays stuck, all the way to the grave. Personally, I don’t think we can afford more eternally unsatisfied and over-entitled consumers.
And so I believe, even though it might not be popular in the midst of a self-care, self-help zeitgeist, that parenting is a decades-long invitation into an others-focused caregiving apprenticeship into self-forgetting, into selflessness, and into selective self-management. And please hear me, I am not advocating for self-abandonment, martyrdom, codependency or enmeshment here – these behaviours are as damaging as their counterparts.
And before I get warranted emails and comments from those who, for whatever reason, are without children, I would propose that we have planet full of humans, and more-than-human beings, who require some kind of sacrificial caregiving – whether that be the poor, sick, infants, disabled, animals, or habitat – and there are very few reasons most cannot empty ourselves in some way, if we want.
And so, I (and others) propose that the journey to effective eldering is a matured progression of sustained parenting/caregiving. This progression requires a wider and wiser kind of self-forgetting, self-emptying, and joyful dying to ones sense of importance and ego. Eldering is, if entered into and practiced consciously, an invitation into a soul-expanded awakening in, as Rumi put it, a “dying before we die”. Yes, I have gone from parenting, to death. And why not, we were created by two people and we are all headed to a grave. Uncomfortable with talking about death? You’re not alone.
As American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker suggested in the 1970s, the great “denial of death” is upon us in the West. It seems we have successfully sanitised and removed ourselves from seeing, hearing and smelling death. We rarely even like to speak of our own death with a sense of honesty. Most prefer to believe it isn’t real. Yet, as a palliative nurse recently reminded me, “Death is of the most real and guaranteed moments of your life.”.
[ Fun side-fact: Did you know that the ‘living room’ in your home was once called ‘the parlour’ or ‘receiving room’? As funeral parlours became a thing last century, and the dead were moved out of the home, if became a ‘living room’. Yes, we successfully outsourced another confronting reminder of death -along with animal slaughter, and the dying-aged. And for some reason most of us still like seeing it in entertainment on our screens. ]
I believe one of the reasons most people have such a deep and difficult time accepting and living with the life-giving knowledge that one day they will not be present to the world in the same way, is that they have not experienced the conscious sense of dying-to-themselves, including their ego which they so magnificently and expensively formed across the first half of their life.
To clarify, this overly common kind of death-denying pseudo-eldering I speak of in my upcoming book has, in psychological terms, created a vast kind of ‘arrested development’ in our culture today. In simple terms, we are talking about stunted emotional, psychological, and spiritual growth, on mass. I’d like to suggest that we are here, and headed for a kind of sad repeat in society today, because many are not willing to embrace the post-parenting, second-half, autumn-and-winter-seasons-of-life. Why? Because it leads towards our end, our unimportance, our demise, and a possible messy ending. Those who work in aged-care, hospice, or among the dying, (as I do), know what this looks like. We hear it, smell it, witness it daily – and no one is exempt from it.
Why does this all matter: the dying before we die, the sacrificial caregiving, the acceptance of our fragility as a species? Well, to many people, it won’t matter – they mistake having more for being more, they violently defend their own right to do as they see right, and tend to be in shock and disbelief when troubles and grief find them. To many, speaking of death is too heavy, too morbid, too much. Even many religious folk would rather subscribe to an individualistic salvation ideology that reads more like the legal ‘terms and conditions’ sheet of an eternal insurance policy than face the existential angst that drives many of them to defend their doctrine with utter meanness.
But among the masses, there are those who quietly and genuinely know that the practice of decentering all that demands the throne of our hearts – whether it be our health, wealth, success, fame, addiction, family, failings, religious devotion and anything else – is paramount to walking out the last decades of their life in beauty, joy, and truth. These decentric elders understand, with all their being that, “Seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life.” (Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise, 2015).
by David Tensen
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These are some reflections that are drafted into my upcoming book called “Decenter Everything”. If you’d like stay informed about its release and opportunity to be part of its formation, please visit this link to fill out a simple contact form.