We have lost our way

We have lost our way.

We are not wandering in a dark wood, arms outstretched, pleading in the mist for a tiny ray of light to shine on a path.

Rather, we are wandering in a massive city of towering buildings and flashing lights and blinking billboards.  

We are not lost in a vast emptiness.

We are lost in a bustling city.  We are standing in the middle of Times Square, holding three different maps and our GPS in the air trying to get reception.  We are in a sea of street signs pointing left, right, up and down and everything in between.  Ours eyes are blinded from the flash of street lights promising to bring order to the chaos.  We are bumped and jostled by a million other people who walk with purpose and yet some of them, some of them, must be lost also.

Never has there been more information available to us, more "how-to" guides, more DIY guides, more encouragement and methods and masters and teachers and books and theories.  How can we possibly lose our way with a million ways we could go?

We have lost our way.

In centuries gone by, they did not have the luxury (paralyzer?) of so much information.  They had to raise their children with only two tools: the experience of friends and family in their community, and their mother heart.

Oh, how we distrust our mother hearts today!  We are women, with the specific physical anatomy to bear children, but we also have the specific emotional makeup to raise them.  Sharing experiences and information has always been an important method of learning and growth, but the plethora available to us today has caused us to distrust or ignore the very essence of motherhood within us, that little voice that says you know your children better than anyone else.

We have lost our way.

How different would our lives be if we lived in a world without blogs, home shows, parenting/decorating/fashion magazines?  I might not have a cute house with handmade decorations from upcycled toilet paper rolls.  I might not have colour coordinated birthday party decor.  I might not have a thousand pounds of guilt about turning on the TV so I could make dinner, and another thousand pounds of guilt because of the packaged dinner I made.  I might not get caught up in the convincing writing of experts without carefully considering the other side.  I might not sign my children up for little league and music lessons and talent-honing classes to create "well-rounded children."

We have lost our way.

We have lost what it is we want our children to become; not professional sports players or Carnegie Hall performers or Oscar-winning actors.  We are filling our time with pursuits that are marketed to my children because they are of a certain age or live in a certain area.  We have lost our way in connecting with each individual child to see how they should spend their time so that they can become who they are destined to be.

We are lost under the mounting pressure of being the perfect parent, when the definition of perfection is all wrong!

We are lost!  But our compass is within.  It is that mother heart.  It has always been there, but now we must turn inward and patiently wait while the arrow finds true north and points us in the direction that the ever-faithful arrow always finds.