First half:
Lucy Griffin-Stiff

Me: “Darling, can I help you tidy up your hair for school?”

Elsie: “No thanks, it’s fine”.

Me: "Are you sure. It looks a bit wonky?"

E: "No. It's fine like this"

Our kids have a great way of setting off our unconscious triggers, things that we’ve parked and forgotten about from our childhood that resurface without us even being conscious of it.

For me today it was Elsie’s hair! She’s seven now and wants to independently do her own hair before school.

On the one hand this is great! It free’s me up from doing it and being depended on to be there every morning, without fail, to do her hair.

On the other side, she doesn’t really feel the need for it to meet my definition of tidy.

This is actually my problem, not hers.

Good-for-her that her hair-do is good enough! YAY.

But it took me a lot of patience and letting go to tell myself – do you know what, does it really matter? Is it a big problem? No.

I grew up in a house where it mattered. It was a fear story. Your hair had to be neat and tidy to my mother’s standards, your appearance smart, or else! At least that’s how it felt to me and this belief entered my subconscious to the point that I’m uncomfortable when I send Elsie out the house looking how she chooses.

It’s such a lesson to learn in the middle of life, that these old stories we hold on to don’t have to be true for everyone, or forever.

And also that we don’t want to pass on these fear stories and our "first half" conditioning down the generations – or we’ll keep the epidemic of “I am not enough” in one guise or another on repeat forever!

I’ve done a lot of work over the years on releasing my "first half" conditioning, making peace with the past, letting go of baggage, creating a life I love – but each day through our kids there’s still a little lesson to learn in how ingrained these can be!

Do you find this in moments with your family?