Should My Daughter Be the Centre of My World, or a Witness to It?

Lily just turned 10 today. She is on a class trip. I called her this morning, and she said that it is way more fun to wake up on your birthday to a bunch of kids than to your parents’ faces. I take it.

I have experienced many transformations in my life: the move from Morocco to Germany, the transition from scientist to clinical researcher, the shift from corporate employee to founder. Yet the transformation from me to mom remains the most fascinating.

There are moments in life when you are forced to ask yourself, “Who am I?” Having a human being made within you is one of those moments. It makes you wonder, “Who the hell am I?” After all, pregnancy is one of those processes that forces you to acknowledge that you are not your body. You watch it do things your mind is incapable of planning or executing. You realize that the mind is not the driver. The making of a human being happens to you, within you, and you are just an observer.

For a scientist, with a delusional belief in the mind as the center of the “I” (je pense, donc je suis), pregnancy is the Cartesian antithesis.

Who am I if I am neither my body nor my mind?

I really don’t know.

I do think we are much larger than these two components. But how large, and in what way? I still have no answer.

Then a child is born, and society has a script.

There is a social protocol for how parents should be. It defines parental habits: what you feed your child, how you design their bedtime routine, how you socialize, how you organize play, and what a mother should be.

There is the “Great Mother” concept. Or else.

To be a great mother, you must lose yourself in your role.

Or fuck the role and remain yourself. Whatever the self is. To me, it is an intuition. A calling. You just know you should be a specific way. You should take a particular path.

Choosing to remain yourself is hard. It is hard because children are one shot. As a parent, you feel like, if I screw up the prototype, I screw them up for life. And that is a crazy responsibility.

It is also hard because there are not many alternatives out there. There is a uniformity in parenting. It starts with the food you feed them, the books you read to them, the agreed-upon time to bring them to bed, the amount of time you spend with them, the playgrounds you are supposed to visit, the portfolio of activities, museums, and sports clubs they undergo by age, and and and…

All of it requires you to adopt the role of parenting as an identity: “the parent.”

I refuse to make being a mom my identity. I was never meant to be that type of mom, I guess. It would have been a dishonest form of living. I wanted Lily to know me.

Me, her real mother.

As a result, Lily is a lot of weird things that I find beautiful.

The radical honesty. Her teachers would say she is blunt. Once, when her German teacher asked her what was so important that she had to talk about it during class, Lily replied: “I was talking about you, and I don’t think you should ask me what I was saying.” - I wish I was this honest.

The disregard for punishment. At school, they have these punishment rules where they give “bad behavior cards,” and “level 3” is supposed to be very bad. The first time she got one, she was very scared. Then she understood that this was just a concept invented by school, and that it has no real meaning. Since then, she has been the only child in school who remains unimpressed by it. Very much my approach to speed tickets.

She dislikes being supported through over-sympathy. The “oh, poor you, I feel very sorry for you” tone makes her feel pushed into a victim identity, and she can get mad at people for it.

I can’t tell you if she is disciplined or not. But she trains every day, no matter how cold or warm it is, shows up to every athletic competition, and wins. And she will never talk about it in terms of performance. To her, a training session or competition is only as great as the kids she met there. It is even hard to picture her as competitive, unless she loses, which is rare. But when she does, damn, she is mad.

She loves mathematics and sports. She does not understand the value of history and German classes because she thinks adults have an impressive ability to make the most exciting stories boring. In an ideal world, a child should not be exposed to boring adults. I agree with her, but we accept that one can’t do anything about it. For now.

She loves NLP emotional-management frameworks. She likes any concept that lets her frame or reframe her interpretation of the world. And the beauty of it is that, at times when I forget, she reminds me. When I say, “I am just mad now and want to forget about this incident!” she will counter: “By the way, you shouldn’t try to forget it. You need to make it smaller for it to lose its meaning.”

I love that she can hold conversations about where the drive to be helpful comes from. Is it to feel superior? To feel good about oneself? Or to make the other person feel better, or become better?

But giving your child instruments to understand and manage their emotions also means giving them instruments to escape them. Teaching them to live as they want to makes it difficult for them to be people-pleasing. It makes it difficult to form superficial friendships. It ensures that you introduce them to the social drama of life early.

Is it great? I don’t know.

Where we disagree is that she sees the value of life in play and struggles to understand how Yendou is play. She would love for me to play more, and I would love for her to produce more - to understand that the meaning of life is to be useful to humanity. She gets it as a concept, but living it is a different story.

I need to remind myself: she is only 10. And what was I producing at 10!

She says being an only child sucks, and siblings are great because you have other kids to play with. I agree with her. Maybe she can apply that lesson to her own life, but for now she can’t see herself ever having children.

Why? Because this would mean I would become a grandma, and that would increase my probability of dying. After all, grandparents are always old and die one day.

I have no idea how she came to these conclusions. I am just the observer of her early life, as she is the observer of mine.

Where we are different is her fear of death. I do not know where it came from. But she hates looking at pictures of herself.

When she was four or five, she looked at pictures from her first years and started crying. I did not understand what was going on. Then she said, “It made me realize that I am growing, and one day I will die.”

Telling her that we all will one day did not help. Telling her that many researchers are working on longevity was the right thing to say.

I wish she would not see her past with tristesse. But wishes are just wishes.

There is a weird thing about your children. Because they were made within you, there is this assumption that you should be able to understand them fully. At least, I wish I could. Your brain was made inside me. How am I incapable of reading what is inside?

It is odd to realize that you do not know what is going on inside their heads. How am I supposed to support and parent well if I don’t have admin access?

It’s like running Yendou. Sure, I run product and shape UX and UI, but what am I supposed to do with the code library? Do I really have admin access?

I really don’t.

And that is great.

Think of it: we are full of bugs, and life’s journey toward individuation is nothing but a journey of building and debugging so the software can run smoothly. Knowing what is going on in our children’s heads would drive all of us parents mad. Parents would do anything to spare their children the pain and suffering of adulting, for smooth sailing toward the Übermensch.

But there is no smooth sailing toward individuation.

The struggle is the journey.

I am 38 years old. I live between millennials who have children and millennials who are single and wonder whether the family vision they once had is gone forever. I am a founder, surrounded by founders younger than myself, most of them childless, arguing about the low birth rate and having strong opinions on how this needs to be solved. Intellectually, of course. Because having children, really having them, would surely screw their dreams of becoming shareholder-valued beings.

Lily was born when I was a student. I did my PhD with her. I entered the adult life of work and responsibilities with her. I discovered running and partying with her. I founded Yendou with her. I raised money with her. I scaled the team with her. I lived my first adulthood with her.

Lily has always been here.

We were always in each other’s lives: witnesses to our never-ending becoming, until death terminates it.

I know we are on a passage. I know we will never spend as much time with each other as we have so far. And while we do have another eight to ten years to learn from each other and experience each other’s growth, there will come a moment when our journeys, although deeply shaped by each other, will connect less often.

And when that time comes, I want her to be fully herself.

So how does one become a great parent?

There are two ways. Make children your vocation, an achievement of life. Or invite them to be witnesses to yours. I lean Jungian: make humans and give them the gift of experiencing your becoming, your ascent, instead of the pressure to level up to your peak, or the fear of reliving your descent.

This way, at least, you give them a version of what taking the road untaken might look like.

Children need to learn how to live. Watching their parents live gives them cues for what a good life could be.

Is it wrong to wait until one is made, and then make children your next project? I have no idea. We all have to wait and see what Lily will become to figure out what happened. Yet, to be fully honest with you, I wish her much joy and some identity-shaping suffering.

Not making her my vocation. At least, I hope it teaches her that she is not the center of the world. Not even the center of her parents’ world.

That one can be deeply loved and deeply cared for, yet still be on earth by oneself, and that the journey is ours to walk.

Lily just turned 10 today. I have been mothering for ten years. and I must admit that she shaped my becoming, as much, if not even more than I shaped hers. it is beautiful and scary to be fully yourself, witnessed, observed, evaluated, judged, and loved by another human being.

I will leave you here, with one of my favorite quotes:

“If we truly love our children, the single best thing we can do for them is to individuate as much as possible ourselves, for this frees them to do the same.” — James Hollis

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