My daughter asked me last night, while I was snuggling her into bed, whether I ever got tired of spending time with her. Amazingly, I had just been thinking at that moment about what I would do if I had more time to hone in on where I need to go next with my life—for me and for our family. What would I do if i could dedicate myself less to managing things for other people, animals, buildings, employers? What if I could pause what the world needed of me for a day or a week or a month and just figure my own shit out to its logical conclusion?

It was a brutally honest moment for me to live. How to explain to her that I love her more than anything in my life and that, at once, I am struggling so fiercely at this moment to place myself in the context of my own existence? How to explain to her that working on my own shit is one of the the best things I can do to be a good mother to her, which means I sometimes have to absent myself from physical time and space with her in order to shift a paradigm for myself?

Does this make me one of those “narcissistic” parents I’ve heard maligned so regularly? One of those parents who is so consumed with her own life and self that she cannot be present for her children, who is so impenetrable and steely in her self-absorption as to be incapable of reflecting back to others and therefore who deprives her developing children of a consonance with a caregiving parent?

I don’t feel like this describes me. I mean, I’m a reliable person, a good friend, a determined although certainly flawed individual who walks her talk and strives to live ethically, peacefully and mindfully. But even assuming all this were true, does this make me a good mother to my daughter?

I admit that I am daily challenged by what it means to be fully responsible for the care and well-being of another human, especially one who can’t drive or wield a sharp knife safely yet. I point out the things I need her to do around the house much more readily and vocally than the accomplishments she has achieved during the day. I am constantly “reminding” her about rules I’ve explained and the reasoning behind them when she seems to forget them. Am I nipping at her heels like a good sheepdog does to keep the flock safe and sound, or, instead, am I ripping at her heart, sinew by sinew, in the way that Zeus’s eagle emissary was eternally commissioned to do, to punish Prometheus for enlightening humanity by giving it fire?

On a regular basis, I feel as if my responsibility as a parent is too great for me to bear. How can I possibly be entrusted with the exclusive care of this precious and brilliant human being when I am so mottled with my own psychological dross that I can barely get my ass out of bed some mornings and rely on psychotropic medications to get me through my days? How can I possibly show her what is good and beautiful about the world when I am so clouded by my own doubts and fears and feel pretty certain that the world cannot be sustained at this rate of human abuse? How can I model for her care and kindness and heart-driven action when I am so consumed by my own assurances of self-worthlessness and uselessness?

And I’m not laying this all out here as some grand exposure of my own pity party in a veiled attempt to create a guest list of cheerer-uppers. I can assure you that my deepest fears and anxieties do not make for attractive party-favor fodder. I’m not just prattling off here to get attention or have people come back to me and give me a thousand reasons why what I’m saying isn’t true. Because even my best friends and confidants don’t know the deepest darkest places inside of me, the places that have never seen the light of day and that haunt my dreams so fiercely that they threaten my waking hours.

I have been given this miraculous gift to shepherd a new human through the early stages of her time in this body, on this planet, in this time, and it is a walloping task, the magnitude of which shrinks me with humility each time I consider its heft. I knew from the moment she came into the sphere of my physical being that this was a job for no mere mortal.

I was reminded when she came out of my body and I was tasked with giving her a name, for chrissakes. I was convinced of the hubris in the assumption that I could ascribe to this perfect being a placard of convention that she would bear across her chest for all of her days (or at least until she had the gumption and legal right to change it, if she so chose) that would define her to others in a single word upon which every following impression of her would hinge.

And I am daily, hourly, momently haunted by the voice that sneeringly gibes, “Who are YOU to tell her what to do?!? YOU who can’t master your OWN emotions, who can’t stop making the same mistakes after years of failed attempts, who chooses unwisely, who wastes time and is always late and models more often than not using the Berenstain Bears, this-is-what-NOT-to-do method?!?”

What I have is all I can give her, and what I want for her is more than I have. I want for her a freedom from the limits that I impose upon her simply because they were imposed upon me, limits that began with a fallacious basis of institutionalized assumptions and constructs handed down un-mindfully, generation after generation, that create cages and barriers rather than base camps and launches. I want for her a better mother than I can ever be. And I know this about myself because I have  a child within me who has been pleading with me for what feels like a lifetime to take care of her, and I haven’t even been able to do that. So what kind of outer mother can I possibly pretend to be when I have been such a failure as an inner one?

The only silver lining I can imagine from this vantage point is that somehow, from some alternate universe where time moves from back to front, this spectacular being—this Roën, whom I named—has been delivered to my life as my child to be MY teacher, to reverse the downward whirlpool spiral of energy and to send it back skyward toward the stratosphere and beyond.  Perhaps she chose this path from wherever she was, before she came here. And perhaps, in some strange parallel universe, I deserve her.