Little Teachers

I became a mother thinking I would teach my children about the world. Instead, they became my greatest teachers.

Like many parents, I imagined I would guide them, protect them, and show them around the world. I did not expect that they would also become mirrors, reflecting parts of myself I had never truly seen.

The first lesson was not a gentle one.

One afternoon my daughter looked at me with eyes full of fury and screamed words that felt like knives. In that moment something terrifying happened inside me. My body tensed. My thoughts turned dark. A powerful impulse rose in my hands — the urge to hit, to shout, to overpower the small person standing in front of me.

The intensity of that moment shocked me. I loved this child more than anything, yet something violent had appeared inside me.

It was not the first time. The first time I noticed this, she was still a baby.

I was holding her while she cried endlessly when suddenly a violent force shot through my arms — the urge to shake her with all my strength. I didn’t act on it, but afterward a cloud of shame followed me for hours.

Over time I began to recognize this surge of energy. It seemed to appear from nowhere. When it did, I searched for ways to release it — not very elegant ones, but effective enough. I would run to the attic and hit the walls. I would rush into my bedroom and scream into a pillow. Sometimes I locked myself in the bathroom just to cry. Still, the shame kept growing.

One day during a camping trip I became so overwhelmed that I left my daughter in the car and walked away just to breathe. I felt desperate. How could it be possible to love someone so deeply and yet feel such dark impulses toward them?

The more I tried to suppress it, the heavier it became. I started to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with me.

Later I learned that many parents experience moments like this but rarely speak about them.

One day, exhausted by this cycle, I did something different. Instead of escaping the chaos, I stayed. I sat down in the living room and began to meditate while my children played around me.

Of course, children are children. The moment I sat still they began to fight, shout, and test every boundary. Sometimes I still ran to scream into the cushions. Sometimes tears rolled down my cheeks. At one point my children even began to imitate me — they thought meditation meant screaming into pillows.

But what I hadn’t expected was that the real noise didn’t come from them. It came from inside me.

The moment I stopped moving, something in my body didn’t know what to do. It had spent years—decades, really—responding, fixing, anticipating, bracing. Every cry, every demand, every small chaos had trained it into constant motion. And now, in the stillness, there was no outlet. No reaction to perform. No next step to take.

It felt almost wrong.

My chest would tighten, as if something was trying to rise but didn’t know how. My shoulders ached with a dull, familiar tension that suddenly had nowhere to go. My jaw would clench, then release, then clench again—as if the body itself was asking, Are we doing something? Should we be doing something? Why are we not doing something?

There was a strange restlessness, but it wasn’t just mental. It was physical, cellular. Like a current that had always been flowing outward—into action, into reaction—was suddenly being asked to turn back on itself. And it didn’t know the way.

Memories flickered, not as clear stories but as sensations. Old frustrations. Old fears. Small, unfinished moments that had never been fully felt because there had always been something more urgent to respond to. They didn’t arrive politely. They pressed. They pulsed. They lived in the body as heat, as tightness, as an almost unbearable urge to get up and do something—anything—to make it stop.

And when I didn’t move, when I let the current continue without interrupting it, there was a kind of quiet panic. Not dramatic, not loud—but deep. A sense that if I didn’t react, something might overflow. I stayed in stillness despite the discomfort. 

But slowly, something else began to happen. The ache didn’t disappear, but it started to change texture. What first felt like pressure began to feel more like movement. What felt chaotic revealed a rhythm. The body, which had always been trained to respond, was learning—awkwardly, imperfectly—to feel without immediately acting. And that was unfamiliar territory.

Not peaceful. Not yet. But honest.

As if, for the first time, the current wasn’t being redirected or suppressed—but simply allowed to complete its path

Then one afternoon, while I was sitting quietly in the living room, something unexpected happened. A deep peace filled my chest and gently expanded through the room. My children crawled toward me and curled against my body. Within minutes they had both fallen asleep.

At that moment, I could not believe what was happening. For several minutes, I looked at them in disbelieve, trying to make sense of this hart melting scene.

Days later Lara screamed at me again. But something inside me had changed. The surge of emotion still rose, but it no longer carried me away. It was the same energy, but now there was space around it. Istead of reacting, I looked into her eyes. And for the first time, I could see her suffering — and my own — without judgment. I could stay with it without drowning in it.

From that place of clarity I said softly, “Remember that you are loved. It seems you forgot.”

Was I saying it to her, or to the hidden parts of myself?

I still don’t know.

But something opened that day — a quiet freedom. A sense that this journey of motherhood was not only about raising children, but about discovering parts of myself I had never truly seen.

And so I continue exploring the world, accompanied by my greatest teachers — the small mirrors who keep revealing where I am still learning to meet life with more honesty, more patience, and a little more love.