Parenthood

For My Daughter on Her 21st Birthday by Ellen Bass. When they laid you in the crook of my arms like a bouquet and I looked into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky, I thought, of course this is you, like a person who has never seen the sea can recognize it instantly. They pulled you from me like a cork and all the love flowed out. I adored you. With the squandering passion of spring that shoots green from every pore. You dug me out like a well. You lit the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me to the earth with the points of stars. I was sure that kind of love would be enough. I thought I was your mother. How could I have known that over and over you would crack the sky like lightning, illuminating all my fears? My weaknesses, my sins, massive the burden this flesh must learn to bear like mules of love.

Wow, what was that poem? Who wrote that?

It's For My Daughter on Her 21st Birthday by Alan Bass.

Oh, give me chills. I love that.

Yeah.

Oh, welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Alexa.

And I'm Brett.

And, and I'm Joe, and I'm overjoyed. Watching you two is great.

So if you haven't discerned this so far, today's episode is going to be on parenthood, and we don't yet know what we're going to talk about, but right now Alexa and I have been sitting in the question of when kids, how kids, what does it mean, uh, identity, freedom, how do we do it, how do we do it in a way that serves the kids best, takes care of ourselves.

Yeah, and just to add to it, I mean, I didn't ever consider that I might want kids until quite late in life. Likewise, like until I fell in love with Brett and imagined what it would be like to raise a person with you. Um, yeah.

Yeah. It's similar for me. I was not expecting to want that until, until I imagined it with you.

Mm-hmm.

So that seems like a sign. So to kick this off, one of the burning questions for me is like, what if we have kids? What if we don't? What are those two completely different life trajectories? And I'm curious for you how you experienced that process. Yeah, yeah.

For me, it was just really clear I didn't want to have kids. Tara really wanted to have kids. Like, when she hit like 30, she's like, I want kids, I want kids, I want kids. And I was like, no, no, no, no. And, um, and then there was a call. There was just like— it was just clear. It was clear, like, oh, this is the, the kid wants to come now. So for me, the odd experience, and it feels kind of woo-woo, but I can't deny what's true is that I literally just felt like, oh, it's time, this wants to happen. So it was more of a calling and less of an intellectual decision to, okay, now is the time to have kids. It literally felt like it felt like, okay, now, now is the time. And we, we had sex, like, we had been having unprotected sex for years. We were being as careful as you can being unprotected. But then we were like, okay, now it's time. I was like, now it's time. Tara's like, yeah, I feel it. It's time. And boom, like, one, one, she was pregnant.

Wow.

It was just like that. It was so, it was so clear. So that's how it was for me. It wasn't, there was no intellectual decision that was being made. It was just very clear no, and then it was a very clear yes. And I wasn't really contemplating whether I should or shouldn't. I definitely remember feeling like we're not financially stable enough to have kids. Yeah. But we sure as hell were not financially stable enough when we conceived Esme. Between the moment of conceiving Esme and her birth, I went from major debt just from living because I was meditating all the time to completely out of debt in that 9-month period and making the best salary I'd ever made. You know, that's a great question. There's a saying that says that babies come with loaves of bread under their arms. Like you look throughout America and most kids, they show up and like they're somehow or another figure out a way to be taken care of. And so, but I think what happens is my experience was something hormonally probably kicked in for me. Tara was like, I'm going to be the breadwinner. You're going to be the stay-at-home dad. I was like, yep. And then as soon as she got pregnant, all that shit changed. Like it was, I was just like, was like, okay, let's make money. And Tara, and by the time the baby was born, Tara's like, yeah, I'm not leaving this kid. Fuck making money, you go do that. You know, it was like the entire roles, what we thought was gonna happen didn't happen. Which was like, yeah, the biggest pain and also the biggest love of having children, especially in the early ages, is it felt like it was a deep tissue massage, right? Like the more you resisted, you were just fucked. So you don't resist, you just like it's going to tear parts of your identity away. It's going to tear parts of what you think is right away. Like everything just starts shifting. And if you— and I think that the spiritual journey of having— being a parent is allowing all that stuff to be let go and to have it ripped from you so that you can find out what your essence is. I don't see a lot of parents do that.. But if you do that, it's like an incredibly important journey to be on. And that happened like right from the beginning, right from the beginning. It was just like, you think this? Nope. You think you control this? Nope. You think you control, you think you control how you sleep? Nope. Like it was just like everything was just taken.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious to what extent that prior to your conception, even when you started to feel that call, to what extent did you feel like that call was dragging you kicking and screaming through the field, or to what extent you felt the call and you just dropped everything else. You're like, okay, I'm on this call now.

It was surprisingly like, yep, this is the time. I can't deny it. It was surprisingly that. It was like, I would have expected kicking and screaming because I was like, no, no, no, for so long. And then when it hit yes, it was just so clear. And Tara was going through her journey too. And I definitely, like, in retrospect, I see how Tara and I met in a way that also, like, she was doing her change. She was very focused on work and she was changing. That was moving in her to the point where we could be more connected. And I think that was part of what made it like, oh, this is the time, this feels right. But it was without a doubt just felt like it was like, knock, knock, knock, knock, it's time, let me in. Like, that was the feeling.

Wow, I'm envious. I mean, I have a lot of compassion for you, but it was so clear that I don't— oh, I feel like there are calls in both directions for me.

Yeah, yeah, no, wasn't— my was a very clear no, and then a yep, okay, let's do this. Now the third kid was like, Tara was like a very clear yes, and I was a very clear no, and that was, that was a different thing. But both Oona and Esme, it was like a clear calling, like this is it, this is the time, we're doing this now. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been noticing shifting in myself. I mean, as we recently said on a recently published episode, probably by now, we were just at a grief ceremony for somebody in our community who recently lost a child. And yeah, one of the things that I might have expected, hearing the story of all the medical complications, hearing the story of all the judgment from outside, hearing the story of how rough it was and how difficult and much of a challenge it was for their relationship, my expectation might have been that it would have made me less likely to want kids. And also in witnessing it and witnessing the love, even despite various levels of potential hopelessness, just witnessing the love that was there actually, I feel like made me more likely to want kids, which is kind of freaky because that, that feels like a process that is not what I would have expected, or like what my intellect would do, or like, it doesn't seem like I'd be better off putting myself in a position where I'm in hospitals all the time, caring for someone who's very likely to die before they become old enough for me to know them as a personality. And yet that story, just all of it has done unexpectedly indescribable things in my system that make me feel more likely to lean into whatever that is. And I'm a little bit bewildered by that right now.

Yeah, just waiting if you have one. It's an indescribable— it's an indescribable You know, one of my kids is about to go to college now and, you know, I used to count her life in months and then I counted her life in years and now I count her life in months again. Like, yeah, I like the how much I'm going to feel a part of me ripped away when she leaves home. Hmm. It's a In parenthood, you are opening yourself up to unlimited heartbreak, whether you lose the kid or not lose the kid. If you actually allow yourself to feel the thing of there's just like— And like I've said, the breaking of the heart is like breaking it open. It just increases your capacity to love. I am 100% confident I could not do the work that I do in the world if it wasn't for having kids.

Wow.

Yeah.

All the emotional work came from raising children. All that emotional work came because seeing just kids and how they process emotions and how that's our nature and how all these intellectual ideas of emotions were off, all of that. Sitting in loving attention as my children threw temper tantrums in the middle of Whole Foods. That's what I do for a living today. That's what I do. So yeah, it's like, yeah, my whole capacity to love has changed deeply because of my children. And they constantly are constantly teaching me.

That is beautiful and really deeply compelling.

Yeah, there's no regrets, right? Meaning, like, I have a story that's— the other day, Esme and I were Esme was coming to me asking for advice. I'm lucky I have teenagers who come and ask me for advice from time to time. And she was telling— I can't remember all the things about it, but she was telling me that she was having this issue with this boy. And I remember looking at her and saying, that's me. You learned that from me. When you were 3 years old, I did this. I was not able to be with you in this way. This way emotionally, and that created this fear in you of getting hurt. And I see that happening now, and I'm so sorry for teaching you that. And I remember that in that moment, I remember thinking, wow, I wish I would've fucked up a little bit more so I could have more moments like this. Because when you're like— when the kids are like 2 years old, you're like, oh my God, I'm fucking it up. And you are. Like, like, there's no perfect parent, so you're definitely fucking up your kids here and there. And, um, but I never thought that like we could actually have like such a deep moment of connection over me fucking up my kids, right? So it was this really, yeah, amazing thing that it's not just like one moment, it's kind of like the unfolding that is It's a large part of the power of having kids. Yeah.

What I'm struck with there is also the gift that, that was for her, because, oh yeah, so many of us have— we have whatever upbringing we have, and we come to love our parents as they are and wherever, wherever they're at. And also we often go and do the work on like, okay, these are the patterns that I adopted, and now I'm going to do the work on freeing myself of those patterns. And as I free myself of those patterns, I can love my parents as they are, but I don't necessarily expect them to, in their context, in their generation, having different access to these tools or like the culture around self-exploration, that they're gonna— that we're gonna have a healing moment in that way. But to the gift for her as a teenager to be able to have that experience with you where you're owning your peace shamelessly and with love is a really cool thing. Makes me feel a lot less concerned about whatever ways we might impart our patterns on our kids, because those are just opportunities for that experience.

Yeah, I also remember like going, oh, it's healed. Like, as soon as I said it and as soon as she accepted it, I'm like, that's that pattern is healed in her. And which is like something that I don't see very often. Like, oh, if there's actually that acknowledgement, like, you can— like, it actually heals really quickly, which is, which is a cool, which is a cool piece.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. It hasn't— that was 3 or 4 months ago. I haven't seen it come back up again, so. Yeah. That's the opportunity of having kids. They will, with a big knife, poke at everything unreconciled in you. I remember early on when we found Hand in Hand Parenting, it was the first time that I felt like I was doing it right. It was the first time that I felt like, oh, this is how I'm supposed to parent. And so one of the things that I discovered through parenting was like that listening to, oh, does this feel right? Because when I had such a clear understanding of like, ah, parenting was, eh, eh, eh, eh, and then when it went, oh, that feels right. There was this moment of, oh, this is how you do life. Like, eh, eh, eh is not— like, you keep on iterating until you go, oh, that feels right. And hand-in-hand parenting, that part of parenting was the first time that I had really felt that. It was another big lesson for me personally. And I can't say enough good stuff about hand-in-hand parenting or about Tara, who insisted that we use it. So I was a little reluctant at the beginning.

Yeah, I really enjoyed that at the beginning of our 18-month course. That was the first reading. It was like, I presumed it to be a business course, and the first book was Listen from Hand in Hand Parenting, and it was about how to be with kids. It's like, oh, I see, this is also how to be with CEOs.

Totally is. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, but I'm also curious at what ages did that, for, for Esme and Oona, did hand-in-hand parenting come up? And prior to that, what, what are some of the patterns that you were in? What were some of the ways that you were parenting that ultimately imprinted on them and that you've learned from?

Yeah, so Oona got hand-in-hand parenting pretty much from birth. Esme didn't get it till like 2 and a half years old. And so that's actually what I was apologizing for was stuff that had happened before that moment with her. I think that— so for me, I was very much in that I— like, the right way to parent is the way that I was parented, which is like, I think most people, most people 90% of what they're doing is what their parents did to them. And then 10% is something that they had a problem with their parents. And so they are overcorrecting. Like, I just see a lot of that happen in society. And so, so I was, you know, I mean, I, at the beginning of parenting, I was more quick to shame, I was more quick to abandon, more quick to punish, more quick to have her listen to my voice rather than her own voice, through compliments or through anything like that. And so, through the hand-in-hand process, and they don't talk about any of this stuff, it just happened. Through the hand-in-hand process, we don't shame our kids. They might feel shame sometimes, but we actively make it a practice not to shame them. We don't punish them. And you've met our kids. It's not like they're like full mayhem out in the world. They're, you know, doing great, cool shit in the world and they're—

They're amazing.

Yeah. Self-sustained. And so like none of that shit was required, but I was definitely doing that kind of stuff at the beginning, you know, getting very frustrated and yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So resisting the deep tissue massage they were trying to give you.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And thinking that it like, There's a weird way in which like children can raise themselves. Like, that's the weird part, is like if you can be in loving witness of children and you can draw boundaries, like, which is often challenging, like the rest of it they can almost all do themselves. Is it— it's when you start like taking away their excitement, settle down, Johnny, when you start taking away their sadness, when you start taking away their temper tantrums, then you stop them from being able to actually navigate the world. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I see in parenting generally, is that people treat 2-year-olds and 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds and 12-year-olds and 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds like adults. And they're not. It's like you don't intellectualize with a 2-year-old. Their brain isn't online. Their prefrontal, they can't do imaginary thinking. What's actually happening, like you'll see this, you'll see these parents and they'll be like, okay, Johnny, well, you shouldn't do this and you should do this. And the kid's 2 years old, but the kid is just 100% responding to the emotional presence of their parent. They're not responding to the words. They're responding to like— and that was the amazing thing is to watch kids just respond to how you are emotionally is— it's amazing. Like you get wound up, they get wound up. You calm down, they calm down. I remember Una, like if I was not present, Una would come over to my lap, grab my face and like point it towards me and make me have eye contact with her. And maybe she would say, "I love you, Daddy." It was like she was like, "This, our field is not coherent right now. Our field is not relaxed right now." And so my job as a kid is to get us back into connection.

Wow.

And I see that with kids all the time. Like they're constantly looking, they're like, they feel safe when there's that connection between them and their parents. And if they don't have it, they freak out a little bit and then need to regulate through emotions.

Wow, that breaks my brain because my perception is always of like, parents are just trying to be well-regulated and the kids are like, "Aha, milk on the floor, cry." And the picture you just painted is much more of like that of an emotional support animal. Which like just is totally not my perception of kids, but I can see it. It's that they are relating on, in the early years, only an emotional or physical or embodied level. And yeah, that would be such a beautiful invitation that's constantly there to like a mirror. That if you're listening to it is a really beautiful guide and grounding to, to emotional presence. And if you're not listening to it, it'll be everything that I described in the previous frame.

Yeah, yeah. And they do it— what's, what's really weird is to know that they do it when they feel safe or they have no choice. So like, our kids would like hold it all together when they were like somewhere else. And then like when they get home, they'd be like, blah. And it's like, to me, be— to be able to interpret that, to learn to interpret that as, oh, they feel safe now. They feel safe enough where they can like get back into emotional regulation through releasing a whole bunch of emotions. And to see it as, oh, they're releasing emotions so they can get back to connection. Instead of they are releasing emotions because they're out of control or because they're bad or because they're naughty or because they, you know, can't control themselves. To see like, oh, they know exactly what they're doing. They're releasing a whole bunch of emotions so that they can get back into connection. And they would do it consistently. If you just sit in loving attention of their emotional experience, they will come back into connection. It's, you know, so they just know how to do it. And, and the, the bigger problem is that we don't. Or like, I didn't, you know, the bigger, the bigger problem was that like they would do that and I would get dysregulated by their emotion because I feel responsible, or because I would feel overwhelmed by my own version of that that I wasn't letting out. And that was like the big blessing of parenthood for me, was that like Every single emotion that I was not okay with, I saw that in my kids, and I learned how to be okay with it. I learned how to release it. I learned how to love it because of my children, because I could see my children, they welcomed every emotion.

Oh, I want everyone to hear this.

Yeah, one thing that's bringing up for me is common tropes that I've seen out on social media or common advice that people are like, enjoy your kids while they're in the stage where they love you because eventually they're gonna hate you, or shit, they're gonna eventually— they're gonna be 16, they'll despise you and they'll move out. And it's just like, oh, that, that's such a common reality.

That's— that is not my reality. Not only that, like, I notice that like all my kids' friends who know us want to be around us.

Like, oh yeah, I believe it.

Yeah. What I want to say is something I don't know if it's true, but like what comes to mind is like, hey, don't hate your kids and they won't hate you. Like, yeah, there's there's something about like when the kids hit teenage years, which Hand in Hand Parenting doesn't really go into, but when the kids hit teenage years, there's something that happens where their job is to push against the pool. Their job is to push off against the edge of the pool and you're the edge of the pool. And it's like their job. And if you give them the kind of the lane to swim in, that's all that's really necessary. And the lane is like, you treat people with respect, you contribute around, you contribute, you treat people with respect. And when you show that you can take responsibility, you can have the freedom. That's all that seems to really be necessary. If you haven't like completely emotionally fucked them up by telling them that they can't have certain emotions as kids, and then they've never learned to regulate themselves. But that's all that seems to be really necessary about it. But most of the time, the kids who are like hating their parents are— have been told their whole life that they— there's some part of them that's not okay. It's not okay for you to be sad. It's not okay for you to be angry. It's not okay for you to be scared, it's, you know, and so they, they've been told that they're not okay. And why the fuck should they want to be with or not hate somebody who's been telling them that they're not okay on some level for, for years? Yeah, not that any parent, not that any parent is logically saying you're not okay. I mean, some parents are criticizing all the time. But yeah, that's the weird part is that the parents actually love the kids. But they're sending the signal that they need to be adjusted, mostly because the parent is sending themselves the signal all the time that they need to be adjusted. And so to not do that to your children, to not do that to your children, requires you to love yourself. You don't want to fuck your kids up, love yourself.

Yeah. And that, that's sort of the trick for most people, huh? And it also seems like there's another way of putting it, something about not feeling ashamed of yourself.

Yeah.

Because I got to say, one of the ways that all of this is landing for me is like, oh yeah, this actually sounds amazing. I want to do this, but it seems easier if I could just be away from everybody else. During this time, right? Like, if, um, like, it seems no problem for me to be in loving awareness with my kid having a temper tantrum in my own bubble, but if I'm in an airport or something like that, I don't know how— I don't know how to handle that.

Yeah, yeah, those are the— those are the best moments too.

Those are the best moments.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, one of, one of my favorite stories was in the Whole Foods, as I mentioned, and Esme just kicking and screaming and I'm containing her so she doesn't knock shit off the shelf. So I'm not, I'm not holding her tightly, but I'm like kind of like being a blocker to this 3-year-old so she doesn't rip shit off the shelves. And this like I mean, I live in a kind of hippie community. And so this like little old hippie lady, she's like, are you okay, dear? And Esme just stops dead, looks at her and goes, I'm just having my emotions. And then she went back into like her temper tantrum. It's fucking awesome. Yeah, I say that they're the— but they're hard, no doubt. Like, okay, we're doing this right now in a Whole Foods or an airport. On an airplane, uh, like, and you're like worried that everybody's gonna be like— and they are, there's people, anybody, like, yeah, like have a kid cry on an airplane, then just look around, you can tell who was told they couldn't cry as kids. They're the aggravated ones in the airplane. And, um, and, and those are the places that erode away like that, like that caretaking that erode away the codependence. It's the thing that erodes you protecting your, uh, your reputation. Yeah, yeah. You are never going to parent and not have people tell you that you're a bad parent. Like, like, there's like People told Tara and I we were bad parents. And the people who told us that right now will say to us, "Wow, you got really lucky with your kids." Like we had nothing to do with it. It was just hilarious. Yeah.

In some way you had nothing to do with it. You just submitted to the deep tissue massage that they were offering lovingly.

Yes. That's not what they mean by it, but yes, that is true.

Right. Yeah.

But there's also, yeah, yeah. In, in here there's the, all the times that I've seen somebody in public with their kid and saying like, no one wants to hear you cry. I'm just imagining them saying, I don't want people to see you cry. I don't, I wouldn't let people see me cry. Like what are the different statements that they're actually making there? And that's where like one of the things I think people get hung up on so much saying this as a non-parent. Aware of that is that people will insist like, no, no, no, I love my kids so much. And that's true. And as we talked about in the episode, How Love Gets Confused, what that means can mean a lot of different things. And for a lot of people, loving their kids means controlling them.

Yeah.

Managing them in the way that they were controlled and managed.

And Or, or the opposite.

Or the opposite, right? Yeah.

Or being unboundaried with them. That's love. Love is to be unboundaried and let them do whatever they want. That's another version of the same thing. Yeah.

This is the second time you've brought up boundaries as being something that can be pretty challenging. I would love to hear more about that.

Yeah. So in general, I find that the boundaries are a little bit harder for the mom than they are for the dad. Generally, that's not always true, but that's what I noticed to be the case. That, like, deep maternal thing. Like, I think it's a more challenging thing. Kids don't— the way I would say it is that there's like a part of a kid that's like, I want to be independent, I want to do my own thing. And there's a part of the kid who's like, I want to feel safe. And I need boundaries to feel safe. And those two things create friction inside of the child. And if you don't give the boundaries, they feel unsafe. And so they start acting out more and more and more to try to get the boundaries. And so the boundaries can be really gentle and they're not— and not to be done at a distance. Like, it's like stay close and insist. So I wouldn't be like, okay, brush your teeth. I'd be like, we're brushing our teeth now. We're gonna go brush our teeth now. Right? So it's not like you need to go and do this. It's like, we're gonna— like, there's like a support and a gentleness in the boundaries. I think one of the places that boundaries don't get held in our society a lot with kids is like kids start yelling at their parents. And like, you wouldn't let your kid yell at anybody else. Like that. So what makes it okay that they're yelling at you? And so to be very clear, like, oh yeah, I see you're angry. Let's go get angry. Cool. Great. No problem. And we treat each other with respect. And so this is like, I'm not letting you do this. But the strange part is that if you're doing that, then you also have to treat them with that same respect. Like, like, for me, I remember this moment of imagining, like, oh, imagine if there was some, like, 1,000-pound, 10-foot man, or 20-foot man yelling at me at the top of their lungs. Like, what would that do to my system? Like a grizzly bear.

Respect my fortale.

Exactly.

I'd be freaked out.

And yet that's what this little 2-year-old's I'm dealing with if I'm getting angry like that. I am huge. I am loud. And then to like, you know, we learned this one thing about when the kids were really small that like I would always nibble on them. And it was all cute and everything, but then they would start nibbling on me, but it was biting. And I'd be like, they shouldn't be biting me, but I was biting them.. And so to, like, you want your kids to treat you with respect, like, treat them with respect. If you know, so it's, it's a very boundary thing, but it's also a very respectful thing. And that, that balance is a little hard to find at times, but that's the, that's one of the big tricks is to treat them the way that you want to be treated. Treat them the way you want them to treat others. They will mimic you way quicker than they will do what you tell them to do.

Oh yeah, definitely. I've seen that in kids for sure.

I'd love to get a, like, an example boundary of, like, if your kids are yelling at you, what are, what are different ways that that boundary could be drawn that's not forcing them to stop somehow in some control way or abusive way, but also drawing a clean, respectful boundary?

Yeah, it would be, "Hey, so that's not how we talk to each other, but if you're angry, let's go get angry. I really want you to be able to be pissed, and then let's come back to— or if you just can talk to me with respect, let's do that." It's so sweet.

And then how would you help your kid go get angry?

I might even get angry with them. We may go pound on a bed together. Yeah. Yeah, we've definitely gotten angry together and or sad together. Yeah. The otherness of it is like something that really hit me about that morning ceremony, like this new idea that's been coming to me is that like people want to be like, people want to be, know that people are with them in it. They don't want to be given advice or told what to do or judged or anything like that. People want to, oh, you're here in this with me. And it's a basic principle, but that's very true with kids too. Kids want to know that you're in it with them. And if they feel that, if they feel like you're in it with them, they have a lot of respect for you. But if they feel like you're doing it to them, giving them advice, I see that a lot with teenagers. I see a lot of teenagers shut down to their parents because the parent isn't in it with them. The parent is telling them what to do. The parent is giving them advice. The parent is worried about their choices. The parent is trying to control what they're doing through influence or whatever, instead of just like, oh yeah, that sucks that all your friends who've just like gone to a party without you. Like, you know, again, I was on this hike recently where I just watched these two young college students talking and then like the adults just talking to them like, I know something. And instead of like listening to the wisdom of these two young kids. And yeah, it's just something— it's something in that too. There's like a Like, when you were a college— no college student wanted to be spoken to like that by, you know, no teenager. Like, when you were a teenager, you didn't want a whole bunch of advice from your parents unless you asked, right? You know, especially if that advice came with like, I told you so's, or, you know, you'd have you done that yet, or anything like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love how much this is some, you know, different reflection of, um, how I see you with people in so many different scenarios, situations, and how I think how your coaching is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm in view with my kids a lot.

Yeah. And one of the things that that does is it creates the space for them to be also your teacher. Yeah, them to be issuing a deep tissue massage on your rough edges.

You're nuts. Yeah, we were this morning, Tara's like, do you remember that time when Esme said to somebody, she said, hey, just let me have my feelings? It was like 6 months ago. Do you remember that? I'm like, yeah, it was me. She said it to me. We were around the dinner table. I was trying to fix something. Yeah, definitely. Then that's the beauty of having kids. And there is this weird piece about also realizing they can't have theoretical thought until they're usually like, whatever it is. I think it's like 15, 16 years old, but parents talk to them like that, or they're like, Their intellect isn't really even online until they're like 8. They still believe in like Santa Claus and that— but we're talking to them rationally and they're just like full feeling machines. They're like in a dream state. So it's just, it's an interesting thing because you have to like— part of parenting well is that you have to like live from their point of view. You can't live from your own point of view on them. And that's like a— that's a deep lesson in itself too.

Yeah, and circling that back around to one of my original fears and resistances around kids is like, but I'll have to grow up, or something, something along those lines. And there's actually this other, other frame of that, like, I'll have one or more Baby Yodas opening me up into, into my emotional and that dream state-like reality, to the extent that I can meet them there. Yeah, that's beautiful.

That definitely— yeah, yeah. And don't make any mistake about it, like, you will be exhausted and you will be pushed to your limits and you will not have time for yourself, and you will lose yourself, and you will— all that stuff happens too. That's part of the pro— that's part of the deep tissue massage. Yeah, you'll be judged.

I'm also afraid of what it will do to our relationship.

I was 25, 26 years old before I met Tara. I went out drinking. Typically, the way I would like pick up women at the time, very dysfunctional. I would just like sit down early in a bar and I would drink until somebody hit on me. And so I sat down and there was a couple and they were an older couple for me at the time. So I think they were probably like 35 and they just had this really great marriage. And they were drinking and partying, which was interesting. But they were just so— and I found out that they had kids, and I was like, give me your advice. Like, tell me what— like, how do you have such a great marriage? It's clear you guys love each other and you have a great marriage and you're intimate and you're partying, which, you know, 27, you're like, cool, partying as a married couple, I can do that, you know. And, um, and they're Their response has stuck with me for my whole life, which is the most important thing in a marriage is to take care of yourself and then take care of the marriage and then take care of the kids. Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for taking care of the kids or taking care of the marriage, but the priority is always take care of yourself first, take care of the marriage second, take care of the kids third, because you can't be in a good marriage if you haven't taken care of yourself, and you can't be a good parent if you haven't taken care of the marriage. And that advice sticks with me.

I love it. And it's such an inversion of what most people say.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me oddly of a Southwest Airlines thing where they say, "Employees first, customers second, shareholders third." Because if the employees are happy, the customers are happy. If the customers are happy, the shareholders are happy.

Yeah, love it.

Yeah. But yeah, it has always struck me, that inversion, and it's very true and it's very hard to execute. It's very hard, especially in the first 2 or 3 years to prioritize yourself. It's really, really hard. But I remember when our— I don't know, I think the second one was like 18 months old was really hard because we had been sleep deprived for years at this point. And we were like questioning the marriage and Tara and I were like, I don't know, we can't fix anything. And, and some friend was just like, you need a weekend. You have not had a weekend together in like 5 years. You just need a weekend. So we figured out how to like get a weekend, which we were not good at. And it was like, at the end of the weekend, all of our problems were gone. Like, we slept like 18 hours, like 3 days in a row and we just connected and it was like, wow, really? It was just about like connecting and getting sleep. That was, it was just like that practical.

Yeah. There's the part of me that's like, if you hadn't done it for 5 years, but you were able to do it, why not be able to do it once a quarter if you actually prioritized it and planned for it? But then I hear everybody with kids be like, oh, it's been 3 years since we did any travel without our kids. And also people don't want to, I imagine. There's like, I don't want to leave my kids. The moment I leave, I miss them. So there's some question in there. There's, there's some part of my brain that always wants to be like, oh, there's a way to hack this.

And, and there is. There are people who are really good at hacking it that like, I, like, I'll tell my clients like, get somebody if you can afford it, get somebody 20 hours a week to help just in any way that you can, like, that makes a huge difference. And, or have a grandmother, you know, or somebody who's always wanted a baby, however you can get help. I think it's like really, really important. I think the other, some other like really cool little hacks are take turns. Like, I've noticed like, you know, there's, there's been people that we know who have kids, they get overwhelmed and then they They get divorced and somehow or another they used to both be working full-time and now they're both working half-time. And if they would have been working half-time when they were married, they might not have gotten divorced. Right. So there's this thing that happens where you're just so tired and all you're focused on is like, is the other person doing as much as me? Like, it's like that.

Oh yeah.

And then everybody has to be working all the time instead of like take the day off. I got today, tomorrow I'm gonna take off. Like, that is a far healthier— to give each other both a day off, you know, tricks like this. Like, there's just tricks like that where you can fully get your— yeah, but yeah, it doesn't matter. You can do all that stuff and you're still going to be overwhelmed by your kids at times.

Yeah.

There's one other thing that I just noticed is that one of the coolest things that made being a parent such a strong spiritual practice for me is to notice that every time I was triggered, I was projecting onto my kid. If I wanted to go, "You're selfish," it meant I was being selfish. If I wanted to go, "Why don't you just listen?" it meant I wasn't listening. If I was saying, "You need to calm down," it meant I needed to calm down. To see that every single time I was triggered, I was making that child into my trigger. I wasn't just like projecting it onto them, I was making it them. Like, you need to calm down tells a kid that they're not calm. You're naughty tells a kid they're naughty, right? So you're defining them, and, and so you're— it's like literally the mechanism to make them into you. Holy cow, to hand over your patterns. And if you really see that, it's such a cool thing because it's like every time you get triggered, you're like, that's me, that's me, that's me.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh-huh. I see how raising kids, um, was such gold for your journey. It's like, yeah, what an amazingly tight feedback loop, immediate Immediate. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't wait for our kids to listen to this.

Call us out on how far we have fallen. And you can be like, "Yeah, and I'm sorry. That's not how I wanted to be with you." And then you'll cry together. That feels like a good end.

Yeah, yeah, really beautiful. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, Joe. Thank you for coming out again, Alexa.

Yeah, good to have you here. More Alexa, please.

It's so good to be with you.

Yeah.

Okay, and thank you everybody for listening. And I'm gonna say that with more feeling. And thank you everybody for listening. Thank you for laughing over me, Joe. One more time.

I'm gonna leave that in. Good.

One more time with feeling. Thank you. Thank you everybody.

Ah, okay.

I'm really grateful that people listen to this, and I'd love to hear how it impacted you. And if there's somebody that you think would enjoy it, please send it their way, or don't, or shoot us a question, or leave us a review.

Love you all.

Take care.

Bye.