Can you see that a lot of the reluctance you have is because you don't know what the right thing to do is, and you don't want to do the wrong thing?
We are captives of the idea of right and wrong. I am attached to and identified with wanting to be a right loving mother. And I believe that I know what a right loving mother is. But on the other hand, I know in these moments, I'm not a right loving mother. And I don't know what to do about not being a right loving mother. So I'm in conflict about what it means to be a right loving mother.
Can someone who is in conflict over not being a right loving mother ever be in relationship with the intelligence that is rightness and lovingness itself? It's impossible. So I have to be willing to go into these moments with my child (with anybody, honestly) with the one intention of wanting to be as present as I can to whatever it is that's participating in that moment in my name. Because I know what's not right, and I can taste violence. I can taste ugliness. Do I want to talk to my child from an ugly spirit?
But if I'm afraid of an ugly spirit, and then I treat my child and give them all this latitude that they should never have, am I doing the right thing by my child? So it seems like it's a rock and a hard place, doesn't it? But it's not if I'm willing to learn.
"Teach your children well. Your parents' hell did slowly go by..." How do I teach my children? I must learn myself. I must! I have to be with that person, with this place, with this situation. I have to be there. And the sole, the s-o-u-l intention has to be for me not to come in with an idea:
My kid is resisting, he's lying, he's cheating, he's stealing, he's doing drugs, taking money out of my purse - whatever it may be - I know my child is doing that. So here I am, and I know I need to make a correction. I have to. But how does a loving mother make a correction? And so now I'm saddled with this understanding - what I think is my understanding - of what a loving person is, instead of just letting what the moment is bring up in me what it brings up, act what I'm acting out, and then see what happens. How does that taste? What does that feel like?
There is no recipe for life. Don't you see you want a recipe? You want to drive by the McDonald's of happy relationship time and choose one of the "happy meals" so that you can drive through, have your curds and whey, and then go on with your life. There's no such thing!
It runs so deep. And yet, it's so evident. I can't stand uncertainty. I can't stand it! Why? Because something in me wants to know what's right and what's wrong so that then I can identify with it and have the feeling of myself as right or wrong, and then spend my life insisting that everyone and everything follow the guidance that my rightness and wrongness outlines for me.
Why can't I be a human being? Open, sensitive, experiencing - directly -the content of my own consciousness as it's brought up in my relationships with people. Why can't I be a human being? A human being doesn't go into any moment knowing how the moment should be. A human being doesn't go into moments thinking about who they should be or who they should not be. That's not a human being! That's a tape recorder. It's a broken machine that's a violent machine. It's an ugly machine, because it never participates in the life that it's being given so that it can continue to develop itself.
And if the mother develops herself, then by God, her children will have a chance to develop properly as well because she's acting out the very thing that she needs them to see. But if she meets them with resistance or righteousness, the child reacts and resists the righteousness or that resistance, and then does what? We just have the fomentation of this constant state of everybody trying to be according to what some condition or society tells us life should be like.
