Trust

By Naomi | Published: 09/12/2011

I’ve thought a lot about how we make decisions recently and how I’m not very good at being decisive. I’ve wondered how I can get better at it and I’ve decided the answer is simple. I just have to trust myself.

I’m not the best at trusting myself but it seems to be something most people struggle with. The most difficult things I’ve had to find my way with have involved my children. But now they are growing I’m also faced with trusting myself to make the right decisions about how we live our lives. I find it hard not to first think about what other people would do/think/say. In fact, I’ll pretty much trust anyone else’s opinion before my own when it comes to the big things in life.

When my first daughter was born I read all the books and bought all the things I thought I needed as a parent. I struggled as a new mum. I read books which made me feel utterly inadequate. I should, apparently, have known what my child’s cries meant. Hungry? Tired? Thirsty? Uncomfortable? I had no idea. The cries just sounded like crying to me. I tried and tried to put her to sleep in her own bed. What I really wanted was to have her in my bed but the books told me that was wrong and I didn’t trust myself to disagree. It was hard work and stressful as I tried to live up to the perfection I was reading about.

Our second child was different. I threw the books away and trusted myself. She was carried in a sling for 4 months, slept in our bed, was cuddled whenever she cried and fed whenever I thought she might be hungry. We did baby-led weaning and skipped all the crazy food mashing. It was still hard but I felt I had allowed myself to be myself and that in itself was incredibly liberating.

Other liberating decisions have all involved looking inward and asking ourselves first what we think. What everyone else thinks really must not be allowed to matter as much. The decision to home school was made that way. And now, the decisions we’re making about how we live have to be made that way. Trusting yourself is not easy. What is easy is listening to everyone else. But at the end of the day, the decisions you make about your life have to be your own. Otherwise you haven’t really lived your own life. And who wants to live someone else’s life?

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  • Brit in Japan

    Interesting post. I'm a British man married to a Japanese lady and have been living in Japan for a long time—we have a young daughter, and attitudes to raising children are of course rather different from the UK. The kids sleeping with the parents until they are about 6 is the norm, and to force them to sleep in a different room at such a young age is considered cruel. So it is interesting—for me—to sometimes question my own cultural beliefs, and to see how deep they run. Among the western men married to Japanese women, maybe half insist that their kids sleep separately from birth, and the other half (myself included) do things the way they are done here in Japan, although our daughter decided she wanted to sleep on her own when she turned 4. At the end of the day, you  have to trust your own judgement, even when surrounded by numerous dissenting opinions. Incidentally, “Naomi” is a very Japanese name…

  • theminimallist

    Hi. It's so interesting how things are done in different cultures. I think we westerners are quite unusual on a global scale in putting our children in separate beds and especially in separate rooms. I did in fact give up more often than not and have my first daughter in bed with us but the struggle to do otherwise was what was stressful and the feeling I was doing the wrong thing by giving in. It's interesting that western men married to Japanese women often insist on following their culture and not the one they are living in! 

    I've only ever met about three others Naomis here my whole life!

    Thanks for reading.