Mothering, Managing, and Mentoring: Waddling to Swaddling to Coddling to Modeling.

Do you suppose that the Queen of Heaven waddled around in this last month of her pregnancy with Jesus?   

My mother would push up her bottom lip disdainfully and say “Johhhhhhhnnnnnnnn! That’s sacrilegious!”  But Mary was, after all, human and Advent, which I’ll call her waddling period, begins for all of us the human condition of holding in, holding on, and humanizing.

This is not just a mother thing, or even a woman thing.  It’s a human thing.  We all, men and women, are inclined to do it with projects or teams. 

Waddling:  It’s growing large in us – this child or this project or this dream.  It is ours alone, and it is increasing our awareness of our capacity – and we like that.  But as it grows, it begins to weigh us down, inhabit us and inhibit us.  It struggles and moves in us, wanting to emerge and grow beyond our limits and constraints.  It is time for us to release it, and for it to be born.

Swaddling:  Birthing is not a letting go, it is just a letting out, a surrender to the inevitable escape of project or child or team beyond our physical boundaries.  Mothers don’t just drop babies like weeds drop seeds.  Managers don’t just drop ideas through slots in their door so that others can pick them up, interpret, and develop them.  Swaddling is an in-between time when the baby is wrapped tight, its arms and legs held close as they were in utero, so they feel the transition to freedom gradually.  The swaddled child (and swaddled project) is constrained for its own protection.  But it is as dependent as it was within us.  It continues to be an extension of our will.

Coddling:  Soon enough the project or the child or the team begins to exert its own will, to reach to grow beyond us.  Designer or manager or mother, we think (rightly or wrongly) that we are still needed to guide and form and feed and reinforce so that the child or project or design shapes up that we think is best...or is it feel?  This thinking/feeling ambivalence in us is perhaps the staying/leaving ambivalence that the child or team has, but we coddle it – applying sweet rewards to keep it close.

Until now, all of our actions are levels of control.  Perhaps it is we who are called to be born, to be released from the constraints of role as controller.

Modeling:  As the child or project or design begins to “find itself” in this chaos of external influence, we can discover the gift of becoming ourselves, of being present with the child or project or team, of letting it be influenced by us, of finding resonance and rightness within itself in those aspects of us that fit. 

Does this last step sound too confusing or complex?  That’s appropriate.  Once we abandon control and are born into our identity as no longer master but companion, life is no longer dogma, but nuance.  It is no longer math, but music.   “Right” is no longer something we prove, but something we feel.

Years from now, Mary will find her son Jesus in the temple, speaking precociously with the elders.  She thought he was “lost”.  But he was finding himself.  And, we are told, “Mary returned home with Jesus and pondered these things in her heart.”  The boy was out of control.  And, I propose, God looked at it, and said it was good.