Tag Archives: stages of human development

Raising Teens: Becoming the Lighthouse

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I am just back from a vacation of a lifetime with my youngest. It was our first ‘just the two of us’ trip. It was to honour her passage into high school, and so l gave her a girls’ weekend at a favourite city with all the perks of a city that never sleeps – shopping, good food, and lots of selfies.

This summer has been all about marking this developmental transition of adolescence. My big kid was home alone overnight for the first time, we had our first parents-only camping trip, and both kids got a big trip with just one parent. This is us honouring what is ending and also becoming. And, i don’t mean what is happening for our kids. We too as parents are in a transition season: The end of school-age parenthood needs to be honoured in ceremony. It may not be a major life transition but it is still a rite of passage.

I’m glad i’m not alone in wanting to honour these initiations with some type of pomp and circumstance. I’ve been watching the show Sterling Point with my youngest. It has been such a good bonding opportunity as we watch certain episodes, stories, and themes. We have a cottage near the location so it’s an added bonus to watch the show from this vantage point. One storyline that i loved was how the group celebrated Maple starting her menstrual cycle. They made her a flower crown, howled like wolves, and shared advice. I had a ceremony for my daughter when she started her menarche. At the time, she was not as into it as i am, so seeing this portrayed in the show was really exciting for me. It normalized ceremony as an important part of growing up. If you want to see my hot take on the show as a therapist and mom to teens, take a look at my recent instagram post.

In the coming weeks, both my kids will be in high school. This is a pivotal rite of passage for me as well as my youngest kiddo. It dawned on me only a few weeks after school ended that I need to honour the rite of passage for myself. It was our last year at the same tiny alternative school both my kids started at when they were a mere four years old. She celebrated the end of an era for herself. She had a party after-party, and got all dolled up. As much as we honour commencement and ceremonies for our kids when they’re moving through different pivotal stages of school, we also need to have a way to mark this for ourselves. And so this is something I’m noticing I need to do as my youngest starts high school.

And so, I am working on crafting a ceremony for myself to honour the arrival of high school. I need to mark this transition for myself, and i suspect other mothers will gladly participate to honour this threshold for themselves too. Plus, i am always looking for a good reason to host a ceremony.

It is time we brought back more ceremony into our lives, and less superficial celebration.

A rite of passage is not just celebrating the transition. It is needs to include some work and letting go. It needs to honour what is ending and also offer a bit of elbow grease. Marking it in this way offers the somatic experience of The Return, the coming back but anew felt sense. In Arnold van Gennep’s Book, Rites of Passage, he shared that this step is key and often overlooked. Having time to to integrate an experience is as important as embarking on it. We may not go on pilgrimages as a society anymore (though i definitely advocate for one) but we can practice a modernized version of a quest. It might look like a camping week, a portaging adventure, a summer work experience, or a trip.

Maybe not the most fancy of activities, but one thing we did was request some household projects to be done by our kids. As part of my teenagers experience for the summer, we had them do a few tasks and chores around the house. Some of things that they’ve never done before. And so when my eldest was sanding down the deck, I noticed they were sitting on our rickety outdoor dinner table. I asked them to not sit on it because it was precarious. They grunted and complained and rolled their eyes at me, but stood up. An hour later, they came up to me with the invisible tail between their legs and admitted that they sat on the table again and it cracked.

The moral of the story isn’t that they did the thing I told her not to. It’s that they felt safe to come and tell me they did the thing and knew I’d be upset and possibly even say I told you so and they still came to me because they couldn’t fix it alone. They trusted that even if I was angry at them that the love was always going to remain.
This is what I want to happen if they were ever to do anything out in the world that made them feel scared or in danger: To call me no matter what.

As the saying goes: Small kids, small problems; Big kids, bigger problems.

Raising a teenage daughter today is a modern-day version of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, but the lure is social media and not Hades. Or maybe social media is the new Hades, in a more modern trickster suit. I’m fighting to keep my daughter close but I am competing with a greater force and that is her phone. I’m not fighting my kid about her phone, I’m fighting the attention the phone takes from me. Our smartphones were supposed to be a place we sometimes visit, not a place that we live in all the time. This is my work-in-progress project. As my teen enters the high school jungle, i know that i need to hold onto her a bit more. My grip may not be as tight but it needs to remain nonetheless.

I’m needing to do that consciously and not reactively, so that I don’t fall into anxiety and instead have a clear path that helps me stay clear and secure. I need to also do this in a way that doesn’t lose myself in motherhood as I enter my new Virgin territory.

Many of us are raising children and being parents as an over-correction because we were raised by parents that were emotionally immature or unavailable and so we want to be the most present, attuned, available, and understanding parents to our own children now.

I remember having fights with my own mom about my friends, how long i was on the phone at night, and our competing needs. Now i see it as normal teenage woes. Back then, I grew up being told by my mom “wait until you have a teenage daughter. That will be your karma.”

Maybe it’s not revenge that my kid is giving me a hard time. Rather it’s destiny as a developmental stage. Teens are meant to protest as a way to build individuation. I know this now. I also now see that my mom may have been going through perimenopause at the time i was a teen, and i really wish this was spoken about then. I get back to this point soon.

A part of healing these parts was to first unlearn that anger is scary or destabilizing so that my children can embody it more fully.

I have internalized a wound of unprocessed anger due to ongoing unmet needs, and it is what is fighting with my child at this developmental stage. What i couldn’t say to my mom back then is hard to hear my kid say to me. It’s not karma that i have a sassy kid. It’s a pattern that has taken generations to get to me, and i can now heal what wasn’t repaired. My own Inner Sassy Teen Part is very headset on being able to say what she needed back then. My Mother Parts need her to remember that my kid has her own needs now.

Our teens also lose the mother that they had as a younger child themselves. Gone are the play-based days, the years of wonderment and mini-me dress up. We must grieve the end of that chapter, so we can accept and birth this new one that evolved from it, and also offers more depth and closeness in the present.

‘Becoming a mother leaves no woman as it found her. It unravels and rebuilds her. It cracks her open, takes her to her edges. It’s both beautiful and brutal, often at the same time’. ~ Nikki McCahon

Matrescence is the adjustment period to motherhood, and I think this initiation of becoming a mother to teens needs its own great passage or marker so that we don’t step into it unconsciously or uninitiated, but rather with our eyes wide open. I thought i was moving out of the stage of motherhood, only to realize that it is more that i was moving into a new stage OF motherhood. I was getting excited to claim the identity of Mage/Queen/Virgin, but i am not there yet: I may be perimenopausal and i am still mothering. I’m a baby mage, eager for this new stage of life but it is not yet where i stand.

I’m still crawling.

I am one of the mothers now who are in perimenopause while my children are in puberty. We are not supposed to be at these intersecting stages. In a recent issue of Hot Flash Mag, Jessie Harrold says it so well: “Here we are losing that biological wiring to nurture, and our kids actually need more from us than they probably would have for our foremothers. So there’s this real tension and conflict. The mothering I thought I was going to be doing at this age is very different from the mothering I am doing, which is far more intensive.”

A part of the becoming that happens is that we put on a new suit as advocates and mama bears for our children. No one‘s going to have our kids back like we do; even when we say no to our kid it’s because we have the best interest for them in mind. The tension is that our kiddo may not see it that way, and we need to stand our ground.
This is where the messy hormonal conflict can pay a role, and be a toll on our connection. I need to remember my role as a parent is to guide my children to their fullest potential, to grow and evolve, to reach maturation. For this wisdom, i thank Gordon Neufeld.

Parenting teens is learning to embrace your new role as the lighthouse keeper. You are now watching from the beach. You are close enough to touch them, to see and hear them and just enough distance for them to find their own way. In Kim Jon Payne’s book, The Art of Discipline, he offers another theory – the 3 stages of Parenthood – the Governess, Gardener, and Guardian. I am embracing the newly minted Guardian role. It is a time of becoming the guide for my children, not activity playing or weeding like i have been.

Whenever i get a bit lost in the waters of motherhood in modern-times, i come back to my anchor, that is remembering my role as a mother. In their book, Sil Reynolds (now Read) and her daughter Eliza, Mothering and Daughtering, offer us some insight and guidance on how to move through this messy stage. To start, Sil shares that “Mothering” can be seen as a verb, the action of helping our children become the adults they are meant to be. She also offers that we need to incorporate intentional quality time together – like my big trip with my kid and watching teen dramas together. It also serves us to understand counterwill and learn to read our child’s cues. This has been such a life saver of mine over these last few months. And it’s still a work-in-progress.

I was recently gifted a beautiful deck of cards by my friend Jessie Harrold. She wrote the wonderful book Mothershift, which is a guide through matrescence and finding our north star as parents. This deck is a visual reference that helps us see what kind of mother we are at a specific moment in time. I am no longer the Crafty Mom or archetype. According to Jessie, I am the Heron Mom: I am walking the threshold between who i was a mom and who i becoming. That means i need to trust the magic and also grieve what is no longer true. I can feel the pull of the Imaginal Mother who is becoming who i truly am, but it will take time to mothermorphize (a word Jessie and i made up) as my kiddo has to adjust to being in high school herself, first.

Speaking of getting lost in the waters, one thing i do when i feel like i’m drowning in unfamiliar waters is to seek out who has been here before. This new terrain of mothering teenagers may be new to me, but i am not the first parent to do so. This is not uncharted territory. Ideally, this is where mothering mentors come in. I have found some older mothers in my life that i can turn to at times, but not consistently or for the actually themes i need support in. Since we live in a society that is void of true mentorship, i have to turn to some other guides. Folk tales, myths and the timeless stories of our ancient ones and ancestors.

And, for me that includes looking at mythopoetic stories that depict motherhood in universal time and space. It’s a good thing that there are many examples. One of my favourites is the story of the Greek goddess of Harvest, Demeter, and her daughter Persephone. It is Persephone (or Kore’s) journey to the underworld and her mother’s grief of losing her daughter that we can thank for our seasons.

What i have also found is that the story of Persephone as many variations. For instance, Carolyn Elliot shares in her powerful book, Existential Kink, that maybe Persephone’s journey was in fact subconsciously manifested by herself as a way to integrate her shadow parts and becoming whole. We need both our conscious and unconscious parts to complete us after all. And maybe, Persephone’s flight to the underworld was her way to get space from her over-bearing mother. Maybe she needed this time to find out who she was. So she rebelled and flew the coop (like i did at 16, incidentally). This allowed her to find herself and integrate the tension of opposition and reliance, struggle and ease, independence and connection. And Demeter herself had to reckon with the truth that her daughter needed to find herself separate from her role as a daughter. I like to think that Demeter had to grieve losing her daughter as a maiden in order for her to find herself in mid-life as a woman herself, and not just her leading identity as a mother. In her acceptance and surrender of Persephone’s individuation, Demeter was initiated into Virgin Mother territory – a woman who belongs to herself first, who is whole unto herself and who has the qualities and strengths of a Mother. She no longer puts her needs last, she models that having needs is not only okay but a part of being human. In fact, it is through her practice of caring for herself that she is paving the path for her child to reach individuation and maturation herself.

So maybe the story of these two goddesses set the stage for us all along. Maybe they carved a path for us to follow but we forgot that Persephone needs to find herself on her own, and we are meant to grieve what is ending – not the relationship but itself but the duties that came with it change over time. Grief means needing to say goodbye to what was in order to become anew and also find our new meaning. Maybe our modern-day experience raising daughters is not that different than Demeter and Persephone’s. What offers me solace is that it is just a stage and Persephone comes back. When we trust this, it makes the grief in Winter tolerable.

In the Womb of Winter: Midlife Apprenticeship for a Future Crone

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We are in the final weeks of Winter where I live. It’s connected to the sacred feminine energy of the Crone, the elder matriarch who models rest, wisdom, and patience. Winter is seen as the menstruation time of shedding, of turning inward, of pausing. The crone also embodies the dark feminine qualities of not caring about what others think of her, and being able to create on her own terms for her own needs. She holds the balance of sovereignty and solitude, and sits at the tension of becoming conscious as an elder who embraces love, joy and compassion, instead of resisting them and living from a dark and disparaging place.

In North American overculture, we have not revered our elders, especially our grandmothers and older women. Patriarchy has intentionally cast them to the side. Our modern-day witch trials all but made this so. Gone are actual fires (thank goodness) so instead are offers of botox, hormone supplements, and weight loss programs (called Raven no less!) to keep us looking young, beautiful and vital.

We don’t have to look far to know where this is coming from. These first 2 months of 2026 have been accompanied by files that have opened up the dark side of humanity, to no one’s surprise really. These are the pandora box nightmares of our times. It also confirms that the patriarchal Kings of men have been grooming us all to stay young-looking, and ultimately reliant on their products, preferences, and power. It is inspiring to see how many of us are resisting this oppressive and violent system, creating by pedophilic patriarchal men. It is long overdue.

It is not lost on me that we live in a world where blood is shed in war and violence, and yet it is monthly blood and anything to do with the womb that really terrifies men in power. We don’t have to look farther than these files that remind us just how young and pre-pubescent men in power want women to be, before we claimed our power.

In her book, The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter, Marion Woodman wrote, “I cannot grow in the life of the spirit until I grow to love my body. Only when [women] surrender to that spirit will their body reflect that totality instead of seeking the spirit outside, women must learn to hear the voice of their own abandoned self, and that’s reconnect with their own inner mystery. The woman who has not found herself in her own body is dependent on a man to help her to be born on this earth, and is therefore inclined to project herself onto the man she loves. By whatever route, she must find her own God within.”

I have been resisting internalizing the male gaze and preference for many years, and yet it can be so hard at times. We are inundated over and over again and absolutely without our consent or full consciousness. The story that the ideal woman is of a certain age, calibre and creation. Perimenopausal women are forced to fight against this inevitable unfolding that comes with age. We need to embrace our changing body as a natural life stage, like puberty. It is not a disease! This means having autonomy over how we can for our body, as well as address our internalized sexism and ageism.

We don’t have to look any further than social media and pop culture to know just how true this cultural norm is.

I’ve been watching a show that captures this tension quite well. It’s an older show that I only recently discovered and seemingly have become a bit obsessed with. It’s called Younger and is the story about a woman in her early 40s who can’t find work after her divorce, and so decides to portray herself as a much younger woman in order to be employable.

While it’s entertaining to be sure, it does provide just enough of a dose of satire and a feminist lens to still be seen as light. And yet I wish it was even stronger. Though my journal here isn’t a review of the show, it makes my point that women of a certain age become more invisible as we age; the show has only mentioned perimenopause and menopause one or two times in one episode (though i’m hopeful it comes up again in later seasons). and of course, the fact that this actor portraying this woman is young-enough looking to pass for 26 is also something to not glance over.

I also love spending time with multigenerational women, for the most part it’s with women 15 years or even 20 years younger than me. What inspires me about that generation is how they are already embracing their spiritual soul in a way that I never got to then. We need these mutually beneficial relationships where support is reciprocal. There is strength in these bonds. And yet, i can’t help but also notice that there are no elders for the main character. She has a couple of friends her age, and yet there’s no one to guide her to reclaim her rightful place. There’s no one there to help her see that she is already valid and worthy based on all the experience she’s had.

It’s also hard not to notice the reality of her needing to become a maiden in order to start over again after divorce. The rite of passage wasn’t completed so she has to start over and have this do-over opportunity. I don’t know where her parents are: She’s a bit like me, flailing without elders and so it gives me pause to remember this challenge i am taxed with. As I enter 50, I’m in this midlife portal, midwifing my way through midlife. I’m nowhere near becoming an elder, and yet I think if I really consciously embrace each life stage, it allows me time to apprentice with elderhood: To really learn about what I will need to be an elder for my children and others, what tasks and skills i need. So I’m doing it now – gathering and gleaming gems of wisdom so that I can store them away in my cauldron of transformation that might come out if I’m lucky in 20 years. It’s a time capsule in reverse, casting a vision for my future. As I see this, what feels really true is my wise older self is with me now, thinking about the future and not just mine but the way that I hold support for others.

“There is no birth of consciousness without pain. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness, with suffering and longing back to the primal state.” He also shares that “the greatest potential for growth and self-realization exists in the second half of life.” Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

A Conscious Path to Crone and Elderhood
I have been reflecting on my mom’s story, especially the psychological wound i inherited from her, that of loneliness and elder-loss. My mom came to Canada in her early 20’s and was never really mothered again. She left behind her whole family and home country. She went through childbirth, learned English, gained weight, lived in an unhappy marriage, and also experienced menopause all without being mothered. Food was her comfort and inner mother, feeding her with support and some presence.

As we are sitting in this liminal space between one season coming to an end and not yet entering a new one, it’s a beautiful moment to remember how we too have our own inner seasons. Rebecca Campbell calls Inner Winter the time of the fertile void. It is the medicine of Winter, where we are called to rest so we can regenerate and ultimately be born anew in Spring. Seasons and life mirror each other – an ending is a beginning. The seed in the fertile womb of earth needs to evolve into a new iteration, and not remain the same. This is how the tomb of one ending becomes the womb of a new version of ourselves, at each threshold.

Liminality holds the tension that is developmental transitions like menarche, matrescence, and menopause. When we can embrace the transition as an all-encompassing rite of passage and infuse ritual and ceremony to it, we can endure the challenges that come with it and also not feel so alone in the process. Take perimenopause for example, on one side of the coin, it is called a midlife crisis. Whereas i see it as a midlife awakening, a portal that opens up if we can step through it with consciousness and be transformed – that it is the reward of transformation and integration. We need to accept we are no longer who we were, and not yet this new version rite of away. This is the liminal in-between that offers us time to embody who we are becoming. We are incubating in the goo of the chrysalis, not quite a butterfly.

We need to navigate the paradox of what needs to end in order to birth a new reality as an Elder, a wise woman, a Crone. A big component of this acceptance is learning how to validate all of the feelings they come along for a ride, including anger, and not perpetuate limiting beliefs that view anger with shame.

I’m really feeling this alignment with the seasons in my late stage dance with perimenopause, and also this idea of a second spring being an opportunity to begin something again. Second Spring is a term that Kate Codrington coined as a way to take the first step into life in our Post-menopause. It’s not that I’m in this brand new phase of life like the magician card in tarot, but rather this next iteration or evolution of the wheel, where I’ve moved up and over the second mountain of life a little bit.

The Red Thread
As someone who honours cyclical living and the moon phases as a guide, learning about my own mother line through the red thread story is playing a key role in how I navigate this new landscape. Red thread work includes healing our lineage and mother wound, and also having a reparative experience with an intentional ceremony to honour this rite of passage. For many people who menstruate, we did not have an official way of being honoured when our menses started. This is a healing re-authoring opportunity. Do you remember the first time you bled? How was it honoured, how did you feel about it? Do you know your mom’s first initiation and if it was honoured at all?

This stage of life is being experienced by more people than ever before. Not only are we living longer, we are also more severed from our ancestors’ practices and customs about rites of passage. Our individualized society and prioritization of the nuclear family has led to a devaluing of community and ceremony. We see more folks striving to de-colonize their therapy practices and everyday life, surely. Our mothers are not sharing about their menopause transition so easily so we are left to learn about it on our own, without the mentors we so desperately need. So, the vultures in the medical system sneak in and make us feel the only options to support our symptoms are physical interventions. There is not enough guidance about what is waiting for us on the other side of this portal – more life, and one that is more ours.

We need to remember that we are not meant to be alone in life transitions. In fact, when we face them alone, it has a risk of more psychological strain and struggle on us. We are not seen or supported through the thresholds that are part of our human experience. We move through life uninitiated. We are ashamed about our body’s changes, confused about what to do, and also left alone in the overwhelm.

The symptoms that accompany menopause are natural processes that should support our maturation into elderhood. What we call hot flashes may be our body’s way of trying to get our attention to slow down. Our brain fog may be a quiet revolt about thing we no longer need to know. Our body’s changes can be like a tree’s age rings that shows wisdom and a life fully lived. Developmental transitions such as this are not unlike puberty, which is also a biological change. That one is an initiation into eventual adulthood, whereas perimenopause is a signifier that we are starting to age out of our relevance. At least accordingly to North American overculture. In other areas of the world, there is still a respect for elders and the wisdom that accompanies age. In Japan, menopause is known as ‘konenki’. The symptoms are seen as signs of the transition, not a problem to fix. It is seen as the ‘second spring’ and a time of renewal, wisdom, and a chance to reclaim the life we are meant to have. In North American, patriarchal power is afraid of women who are reclaiming their freedom and creativity in their later years.

A psycho-spiritual lens to perimenopause inspires the image of a threshold or portal to step through. Instead of going through the experience with legacy burdens or limiting beliefs, we can have clarity and compassion. With this change comes grief and the loss of an established identity. This identity or midlife crisis can be a descent that inspires an awakening. Looking back at the Heroine Journey, we can see that initiations are a time of descent and sacrifice that create transformation.

When we accept this initiation as a rite of passage and the gift of it, we also get to experience a more transformational shift as we step through the perimenopause portal with conscious awareness. What is waiting for us is the felt sense experience of calm, clarity, renewed focus, re-found strength and a deeper connection to our purpose (research conducted by Dr. Kirsty Holland and Dr. Jennifer Hacker Pearson).

Seven Tasks of Ageing
I spent most of last year in this soul mystery school of sorts with the wise teacher Sil Read. She herself was mentored by Marion Woodman years ago. The class was broken down into three trimesters, helping us hold the tension of opposite realms of conscious feminine initiation. We wove a web via the archetypes of Mother through Virgin, all the way to Crone. I am in the era of the Virgin; a Sovereign woman who is whole and embracing myself. I am doing this with more balance and grace now as i enter my 50s consciously. Looking back at my life now, i see how i attempted to find the balance as i entered other stages of life. The messy adult initiation of 23-34, my mothering threshold at 35. And now, stepping through the portal of my Virgin era (officially 50-70) feels more fully present and possible.

In Carl Jung’s body of work, he shares tasks of aging. I love the consciousness that comes with stepping into this role with integrity and intention. I chatted with a dear friend about this and we got curious about the elders we want to be someday. I’m nowhere near ready to be a crone as I’m just now finding my footing in my virgin/queen era. To be an elder is a privilege that most older adults don’t get. To be seen as wise when i am a 75 woman is the biggest accomplishment and achievement for me. And not for the work i do and the success from that. Rather, it is from a life fully lived, and to have people sit at my fit and ask for my life story; that will be such a gift and honour. And yet being wise is embodying my knowledge in putting it into action and so this is one way that I am tested with apprenticing with becoming an elder someday. If I am so lucky to be one, I will do it with a badge of honour: That means I need to do it with joy over despair, love over being negative.

Our grief phobic and illiterate overculture is afraid to face the reality of aging and death. When we accept this inevitable ending, it offers us an opportunity. How we choose to begin to face the reality of this is the key to unlocking this door that stands at the crossroads.

We are never “old” old because in each new moment you are new. It is in this newness that i seek to explore more in my work. The nature of circling back to myself and my life already lived is a practice of remembering what younger versions of me wanted, and being able to fulfil those dreams now because I also want them still AND can birth them. And it’s having that wisdom to know how to apply all i have learned along the way. When we take time to sit with who we are becoming, and what we hope for our life – this allows space for sovereignty and agency.