The Most Sacred Part of My Motherhood
Galina Singer, April 8, 2025
Several years ago, I would’ve felt ashamed that my daughter needed to learn self-love.
Today, teaching her how to reparent herself feels like the most sacred part of my motherhood.
This is what healing across generations looks like.
The irony of teaching my daughter how to reparent her inner child is not lost on me.
My youngest daughter is one of the participants in my Be Your #1: Self-love Intensive program.
One of the foundational skills I teach in this program is how to reparent ourselves, as an antidote to chronic self-abandonment, developed in childhood.
Several years ago I would have been mortified if anyone found out that my children needed to learn how to love themselves.
I know I’d have felt shame — that I somehow failed as a mother.
To confront the truth that my children are bruised from my mothering is probably the most difficult thing for any mother to face.
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Luckily for all of us, I have spent many years unlearning the traumatically judgmental environment in which I grew up and which I fully internalized.
While I was unlearning self-judgment, I was also learning to love and to reparent myself.
Thanks to these efforts, I can stand at this point in my life, no longer feeling ashamed for being human.
Teaching my daughter what it means to re-mother her inner child, as I step into my role of the elder, becomes especially meaningful — because it transcends generations.
I have never felt more meaning, more healing, more connection to the sacredness of my role as a mother.
In the last ten years — as I was reevaluating everything in my life — I have also confronted a profound sense of grief and pain, confusion and conflict in my role as a mother.
I have felt much regret that, despite doing the best I knew how, I was somehow failing my children.
Observing how my relationships with my daughters have been transforming thanks to my inner shifts, I understand that the mother who was failing my daughters was the woman who (for generations) tried to survive under patriarchy.
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She created adaptations to police other women to stay in line, to self-sacrifice, to self-hate, and to devote all resources to condition her offspring to become perfect addicts, consumerists, and conformists to societal systems and family expectations.
Failing as a mother who was supposed to get my children to behave and obey and follow a specific timeline became a blessing.
As I free myself from the one-size-fits-all box in which I stuffed myself as a woman and a mother, I now free my daughters.
I free them to take up whatever shape is most natural to them, to follow their own inner drumbeat, to follow what fills their heart with passion.
I am teaching my daughters this precious wisdom:
how to mother their own inner child through self-attunement and self-awareness.
Very well written! Thank you.
Your idea that we learn by being parents is so true. I had a great childhood, but being a father gave me a chance to avoid mistakes in my own upbringing.
At age three. I cried because I couldn’t read. I was a voracious read-to-me child.
My dad had only finished 3rd grade and my mom had stopped in the 6th. Nobody considered teaching a 3 year old to read.
When my daughter was only two, I hired a 1st grade teacher to tutor her. She taught my daughter (and my wife and me) The Letter People. My daughter was able to pick up a book and read for pleasure when she was still only two.
At age five, when she started Kindergarten, her reading level was 4th grade. I read to her every night, but she could read to her baby sister when I was sleeping.