Today I'm reflecting on the concepts of restoring and re-storying ourselves, inspired by some big transitions I'm navigating as the parent of a child soon to be leaving home for college.
He will become a new person and I will, too. But what happens before then--and now?
This is about grief and love, and choosing to rewrite certain stories about ourselves as a way to honor our unique timing and processes.
Weekly stories by email from Bonnie’s HERE
Connect with Bonnie: Instagram, Email (hello@bonnieweeks.com), Website
Listen to Bonnie's other podcast Sexy Sunday HERE
The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner
Today I'm reflecting on the concepts of restoring and re-storying ourselves, inspired by some big transitions I'm navigating as the parent of a child soon to be leaving home for college.
He will become a new person and I will, too. But what happens before then--and now?
This is about grief and love, and choosing to rewrite certain stories about ourselves as a way to honor our unique timing and processes.
Weekly stories by email from Bonnie’s HERE
Connect with Bonnie: Instagram, Email (hello@bonnieweeks.com), Website
Listen to Bonnie's other podcast Sexy Sunday HERE
The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner
Bonnie (00:00.986)
Welcome back to the podcast y'all. I am feeling a little bit spicy and by that I mean that I really have something that I want to tell a different story about. I want to re-story something and I think about this word re-story often because I think about the word restore and if you're going to restore something that means
make it new, you are going to give it a fresh life. Right, if I were to restore an old house, I unearth the parts of it that might need fixing and I make it functional and beautiful and usable and bring it back to life. And when I think about the word restore and how that connects with the idea of re-story.
to re-story yourself. That is beautiful to me. To think about the ways that we might tell stories about ourselves or to ourselves, thinking that it is that one thing and that's the story of how it goes. But what happens if you re-story yourself and you look at the story that you have been telling from a new angle?
and get curious about why the story is what it is.
That said, I've been thinking a lot about how my oldest kid in eight months from now is going to move away from home. And he's going to college. And I have cried so many times about this. And this is an interesting season as I am recording this because it is winter time. It's a, it's.
Bonnie (02:07.922)
the inward time, it's a grieving and a shedding time, it's a water time, it's all of these things. There's a darkness in it, there's, that is the seeds for which we will grow from. And so I really have been processing a bit of the grief that it is to...
Bonnie (02:31.662)
to have raised this child, to have pushed him out of my body and to have held him, to have not been able to walk for three weeks after I gave birth to him and his giant head and how I would help him, like I helped him learn how to ride his bike. And I think about yelling down the street like.
don't pick your nose while you're riding your bike. Words I never thought I'd say. Or how I tell him also on his bike, you have to look forward when you ride your bike. And he just thought it's fascinating to look at like what the wheel looks like on the back of the bike when it's turning and what the visual of that is. Because when you ride a bike, you can't look at the back.
You could only see the front tire. And he wanted to see what the back tire was doing. It's a lot rather dangerous when you're the driver of the bike.
Bonnie (03:37.578)
Here's the kid who ran off the bus. I ran down the street and I'm standing on the front porch, like excited to see him coming home from school and two houses down. His shoe flies off in the middle of the street and he keeps running like nothing happened. And he gets to the front porch and I'm like, hi. He's like, hi. And I was like, what about your shoe? And he looks at me like, oh yeah. And then he goes back.
Like he didn't stop in the middle and just grab a shoe while it flew off right then. He ran all the way to me and then he was like, oh yeah, that's right, that shoe's bad. Yeah, whatever, it's fine. And how that's not how my brain works. I'd be like, oh, my shoe, go get it.
He's the kid who made me a mom.
Bonnie (04:29.38)
and
Bonnie (04:35.532)
and
Bonnie (04:40.006)
I have been saying it recently and I feel like I might have said it in a podcast recently, but I just don't think that it's something that we can prepare ourselves for as parents and even to be told it's different than experiencing it. I didn't know how much loss and grief I would feel as a parent. And uh...
Bonnie (05:05.418)
how that when your kids change, how they're like these small little wiggly things that can do new things for themselves, all the way to this point where it is gonna be moving away and going to college. And.
the amount of different versions of himself that I've already seen. I know so often talked about how in relationship and partnership, like if you were to be with somebody for 20 years, but you have known so many different versions of them, but it's not said very often about children. And I have known so many versions of him.
Bonnie (05:50.574)
And now as the mother and thinking about the story of the earth at this time, thinking about the mother nature, thinking about this earth and what is the brain, what is the wisdom of the mother earth. And then this very season it is winter and winter is a release. It is
A force end of...
Bonnie (06:26.206)
of deep, dark growth, and it is a letting go. And where it is built into the nature of things, that there are cycles and that there is this growth and there is a release and in fall, and here there's like a full spectrum of seasons that happens and so that in the dropping of leaves and in the change of how much light there is, there is a wisdom in these things.
And so for me, reflecting on me being a mother and a parent and the wisdom it is to also release things in order for them to grow anew. And how beautiful that is, and how I did not think of that before, and how we do that in cycles and watching my children change from one person to the next as they try on different things throughout life. And the minute do you think you might know your kid?
They're like testing you in a different sort of way or pushing back in a different sort of way. And there can be a lot of frustration from parents I feel like about their kids trying to find the new boundary. And I don't know, I feel it's pretty natural because they're a new person. Like as parents, like I became a parent when I was 22, very young and now I'm 40.
And I am such a different person than I was when I was 22, but I was still an adult. And so like, I'm in this range of 22 to 40 as a parent. And of course my kid has changed as much as I have changed. And I think the generosity and like recognizing that as parents feels really important.
So I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about grief and how when you really love something, how you hold hand in hand this love and this grief together.
Bonnie (08:41.494)
and they cannot be separated. And how my children are this. It is the invitation for me to hold both love and grief has given me a lot of perspective to look at my own parents and me as their child. And just that experience as a parent and...
Bonnie (09:10.118)
as my oldest is about to go to college. This is where I'm feeling spicy. I need a good kind of spicy. Well, I don't know if there's a bad spicy. A spicy where like, where your mouth gets burned off because you're eating hot sauce. I guess maybe that's spicy. It's not one I prefer. But as I am processing this experience and
going to become a new person. Like I'm gonna become a new person as my child leaves. As much as I became a new person when he came into my life, I was a new person and now I will be a new person again. In eight months, he will leave and I will cry. And I also be stoked for him. And it gets to be both. It gets to be both.
And so I am reflecting on eight months of time, which is very little time, and the amount of things that he does not know. And also I'm always blown away at the things that he does know when we visit.
Bonnie (10:25.674)
And so with that in mind, it is making me think about how many times I have seen memes in the social media world or people talking about, I wasn't taught this in school and I wasn't taught how to do this and emotional intelligence or ways to give voice to yourself or what you want or how to like navigate the world. And there was so many.
memes about this and so many words that people feel frustrated and are telling this story that they weren't taught this, that it wasn't part of their growing up.
Bonnie (11:09.63)
And I'd like to... Restore that.
Bonnie (11:16.19)
as I watch my oldest kid about to leave home and I think about all the things he does know and all the things he does not know.
One, it makes me like, oh my gosh, we got a cram. Like, what do I need to teach him? Like, we gotta do some more, whatever, I don't know.
Like there's a part of me that's that and the other part of me that's like, I cannot do any more than what we're doing.
And so my invitation here is to re-story the idea that maybe everything that you're learning right now should have been taught to you when you were younger.
What if this is the right time for you to be taught that? What if you didn't have the capacity in your emotional, mental, spiritual, physical body, all of the body that you had in the brain and the heart, what if you didn't have the capacity when you were younger to even learn what you're learning now?
Bonnie (12:27.594)
where now you say, it would have been so valuable had I known how to use my voice in this way. That would have been great, you're right. But were you just worried actually about the shoes you were wearing going to school or who you were gonna eat lunch with or like the kid things, like what was, what's the...
project that you're working on at home and the Legos you're going to build or like, are those the things like the things that you're trying to figure out as an adult? They're like, man, I wish I would have known how to do this. Like you didn't need to know all of the things that you're learning right now when you were a kid. And could some of them been helpful? Yes, absolutely. Could we learn how to say no?
and to have that be encouraged. Yeah, so I'm not saying that there's like a blanket statement of like everything you were taught as a kid, you couldn't have learned anymore. I'm not saying that because there is a big giant disparity, just a big range of like what some kids are given over others. And maybe if you're listening, you have had an experience where you felt very alone as a kid and you felt very unsupported and maybe you didn't.
have a parent crying over your leaving home. Because that exists. And that's real. And that's really difficult.
And could you have benefited from a little bit more kindness and softness and security in a lot of different ways? Absolutely.
Bonnie (14:13.438)
My point isn't that you wouldn't have benefited from that. My point is that I think we can sometimes play the victim of blaming that it's somebody else's fault that we didn't learn something.
And again, it's not all things, but maybe, maybe we were taught something, but we didn't have the capacity in who we were at that time developmentally and in our nervous system and in what we had the capacity to even understand like language, to have words for the things. We didn't have the capacity as a kid.
to learn these things. And so it makes sense that as adults we're like, oh my gosh, I am learning and unlearning and how do I make sense of this? And it would have been awesome if I would have been taught this before. You're right. And now, right now, you actually finally have the capacity to learn it, to integrate it and to expand into it. Not before now.
Bonnie (15:31.142)
not before now. And so I guess I offer this as a softness, a softness for those earlier versions of ourselves that didn't know things, but that knew only what those versions of ourselves knew. And they brought us to this version of ourselves. And we could not, we could not be this person we are today without that person.
We couldn't sit in our seat right now and be like, oh my gosh, my life has changed because now I understand this about myself and about relationships and about the world. Wow, I'm just learning this. And what if instead we re-story and say, I get to learn how to say no. I get to learn how to celebrate other people saying no. I get to learn how to create a boundary for myself that makes me feel expansive.
I get to learn how to lean into things that make me full of joy. I get to learn how to manage my money. And maybe I wasn't taught how to manage my money, but now I get to learn that. And the list can go on. The list can go on and on and on.
And I say all this because I'm having the experience of watching my kid and saying, oh, he doesn't know how to do the things. And we're having conversations and all this stuff, you know, that like comes up and still.
He does not know all the things and he is not yet in circumstances that require him to know all things. He is going to be a freshman student. Does he need to know how to be a homeowner and a parent of children? No, he doesn't. That's not where he is. Does he need to know how to run a team of people? No. Does he know like...
Bonnie (17:37.218)
I'm like, oh, I don't think, you know, as a parent, I'm like, oh, I don't think he has to know all the things. I get to show up, there's a piece of it that's like, oh, I can let go of feeling like I have to be the one that gives him everything. We're a community with each other. We all help each other. And also, you know, there's a lot of people with different beliefs around how to parent. Like,
a billion beliefs out there. As many people as there are that are parents, there's that many beliefs around parenting, truly. We all think differently about that. Very much like if I'm a yoga teacher, other yoga teachers, they're going to do it totally different than me, every single one of us, because we're different people. So my thought is that even with like, with all the variants of the ways that people parent, some people really think that children should be quiet and not heard and...
There's some people that really think that I don't want to be friends with my kid. I want to be their parent. I got to tell them what to do. And I think there is so much play in there in between there. I am so not in the binary of, and by binary mean that it's one thing or the other thing, or it's just that thing. That's not how it works. And when I think about this moment of my kid going to lead for school and he doesn't know all the things and he doesn't
need to know all the things right now, because think about for you, when you have had an experience and then you're like, oh, interesting. I didn't even know how to think about that. I didn't know that was a thing I needed to think about until now. Like that's gonna continue to happen for my kid and it's gonna continue to happen for you and me also that we will have an experience and we will learn from it. And that's what we do. And maybe we get to the point where like, man,
Like everybody before me in my life failed me because they didn't teach me how to do this thing. I call bullshit actually because.
Bonnie (19:43.582)
I don't know that we were ready. Right now, we're ready. Right now, we get to own the hell out of it. And what if we restore it rather as a victim from everyone in our future not telling us or supporting us or helping us, and maybe they didn't. Maybe they didn't, and we really could have appreciated it. But maybe we restore it and say, now? Now, world.
I am owning this. Now this is who I am. Now this is what I am learning. Now this is what I have to share. Now this is me alive as me and I'm ready.
because I'm learning and because I'm asking questions and because I'm being brave. And maybe as I reflect on my role as a parent, and maybe if you're a parent, is maybe I'm not the binary of like, my kids are gonna do everything that I told them to do and I'm not on the end of like, they're just gonna be free for all, like do whatever or like maybe my job as a parent, if I really think about it, is my kids definitely don't know everything.
Do I know everything? Let's like put that in there. No. Do I know maybe more than they do? Yeah, in some ways. Because again, I've been alive for 40 years and they have not. So maybe there's some things there. I've had a couple of experiences they have not. So maybe my role is to really build a relationship with them. And how do we build a relationship of authentic trust and honesty and respect?
so that as our kids age, and when they come up against situations that they need support in, they know who they can turn to. Not the person who beat them into like something small and quiet, but somebody who could be themselves and who is interested in continuing to learn. And maybe my job as a parent is to be that type of person that is easy to call up and say, how do I...
Bonnie (21:52.834)
do this, or this is what I'm thinking about, or what are the words for this? And to be that person and to be with them as their capacity to understand and to want to process and to want to hold new versions of themselves comes to light. I want to be that parent.
My kid, I don't need to teach him every single fucking thing that I know. That's not necessary and actually not helpful. He has his own things to learn. I'm going to be there. I'm building this relationship where we can talk about all the things and making it a shame free environment where we get to learn together.
Bonnie (22:48.55)
And I kind of wish that for all of us. That's how I show up when I mentor people. That's how I show up in flow school. That's how I show up with friends and lovers. Is that there is room for all of us. And all of us are at the perfect place to expand into whatever understanding is right here ready, ready for us to pull in.
We're ready right now. We didn't have to be ready before. We're just ready right now. And whatever it is that's right here that we pay attention to, this is the practice of paying attention. This is the yoga where we pause long enough to look, long enough to look at ourselves, long enough to look at the world around us and to see and to see ourselves and to see yourself as no small thing and to look at yourself in the mirror and to see yourself, to see yourself physically and to see yourself.
internally to sit with that. It's no small thing. And this is the yoga. This is the experience where we build the home in ourselves. And it didn't have to be anything before right now.
Bonnie (24:08.47)
So maybe this can be the time that you restore yourself and you stop blaming it on anybody else. Even if there were shitty people in your life and who really did not show up or took advantage. Even in those circumstances, this is when you get to own it. This is when you get to own the hell out of your voice.
This is when you get to be bigger and bolder. And just you. And you don't have to be more than that.
Bonnie (24:52.698)
I have gone on quite the journey of being a parent.
I have been a lot of different versions of myself.
And I do love this version of me as a parent.
Bonnie (25:08.682)
and the joy.
Bonnie (25:13.954)
that I have and knowing my kids and the way that they have helped me know me and the way that meeting of me and them is able to spark these kinds of ideas that I can share with you.
Bonnie (25:35.71)
It feels like a big, giant circle.
Bonnie (25:43.918)
I'm so grateful.
Restore yourself friends. You are more than one thing and you get to own your life. Mwah.