This post isn’t so much about a huge, public, “mea culpa,” as it is about waking up. Which is what I really think we’re all here to do. I just wondered how many of us who are mothers have had this experience, and how willing we are to loosen our grip on our egos just a little bit to just step back and look at this possibility.

We keep our children from their fathers because it makes us feel like we matter.

How much in that sentence has to do with our children? Not much, I’m guessing. Certainly not much in my own experience. Which is one reason I do this work. Because I’ve made the mistakes myself and I hope I’ve learned a little bit from them.

I’ve been taking my own advice and reading what I recommend. That is, Dr. Kyle Pruett’s book, titled, “Fatherneed.”

I started with the chapter on Mothers and Fatherneed.

It hit me like a Mack truck. That was me!

Dr. Pruett talks about how we women serve as gatekeepers to our children’s experience with their fathers. How we can, by a gesture, the way we hold our bodies, the tone in our voices, push Dad away and say (as he quotes in his book), “This is my world, and I’m not sharing it.”

I looked back into the mists of the past at the father in my children’s lives and I got a very unpleasant shock. That’s what I did.

This isn’t to say that men don’t do the same thing in some families. Or that they don’t sometimes refuse to invest themselves in the way that matters most to their children. Or that some just never even take up the mantle at all. Or that they abuse their size and mass and cause terrible harm to the smaller beings in their lives (too often, the women and children under their roofs). All those things are true, in some cases.

But if we women, we mothers, are honest, really, truly painfully honest with ourselves, most of us just have to admit, “Yep, that’s me.” I’m the one who locks out dad because this thing called nurturing is the one thing I still have that’s mine. And I’m not sharing. As Dr. Pruett also says, there’s not a shred of interest in the child in that statement, “This is MY world.”

Like so many other things, the great equalizer between men and women, between races, between socio-economic status, is ego. Just plain old ego. It’s all about me. And maturing, or waking up, or whatever else you want to call it, is a process that lets go of all the assumptions about what we mean to the most precious people in the lives of most of us . . . our kids. Our children need to see us accomplish this relinquishment, no matter what our age or gender. They need to see us let go of that clinging to “ME.” Because that lesson is the only one that will make this world a better place.

How many of us, as mothers, have clung to our motherhood because we were angry, or disappointed, or alienated, and said, “This is all I have, and I’m not giving it up!” How many of us have marched at the head of the parade of some cause or other that lets us hang onto that essentially selfish, entitled assumption that says, “He can’t possibly do it right.” (Translated, that means, “The way I do it.”)

I don’t know about other women, other mothers, but I’m truly humbled by seeing how readily I’ve assumed I was all my children need. Seems to me, if we’re ever going to turn around the increasingly divisive, angry world we live in, we need to just stop for a minute. Listen to the voice that has always driven us. Just stop and look at why we really do what we do.

The more all of us, both mothers and fathers, are willing to see the ego in our gatekeeping, the more likely we are to let it go, or at least loosen our grip on it, and the happier, richer, more whole our children will be.