I birthed 4 kids in 5 years while part of an evangelical cult in Missouri.
Not quite Amazon Prime's Happy Shiny People series, but I knew parents like that.
Some of us didn’t enter into parenthood the way others did.
As a girl, I knew I would be a mother because that’s just what little girls grew up to become.
Then at church I learned that God was most pleased if you had a lot of kids.
So when my husband said he always dreamed of having 6 kids, I said let’s start with four.
By the time my oldest was 12, I’d have left him and be living in my dad’s basement with those four kids.
I have a defining memory for each kid.
Snapshots that I’ve taken within my soul.
Key moments that changed the way I saw them.
For my oldest, it was the pastor telling me she was a strong-willed child when she was 8-months-old
For my #2 kid, it was watching him as a 3-year-old stack yellow Little Tyke chairs up the chain-link fence so he could climb over it showing no fear of falling, in his own little world, not asking for help or connection.
For my #3 kid, I was in the last row of chairs at church and looking out all the other kids in her Sunday School class sitting calmly and politely next to their parents, then looking down at her crawling over, under, and up the chair next to me.
For my last kid, it was yelling near him and seeing his big blue eyes well up with tears as he watched me abuse my power.
I’ve spent the last 8 years deconstructing my early life experiences, my politics, my participation in an evangelical cult and my parenthood.
Around year one, a friend mentioned Human Design.
As soon as I got home, I plugged in my birth time and details and hit ENTER.
I then spent the next 2 days hyper fixating on what it means to be a Human Design projector and what a 4/6 profile was.
I moved onto my kids next.
“What is a manifestor?”
“What is a ⅗ profile?”
“What is emotionally defined?”
“What is low determination?”
Finally by the end of the week, I sat back and said something like, “Holy crap–this is gonna change everything about how I relate to these kids.”
It did. 💓