I believe our children chose us.

I mean that literally. I believe the soul isn’t born when the body is, and it doesn’t end when the body does. So the soul that came to me as my son, and four years later as my daughter, didn’t land in our family by accident.

In Sanatana Dharma, it’s said that when a child comes, the parents go through a huge shift. I used to think that meant less sleep and a messier house. It meant something much bigger. Each of my children turned me inside out, in a different way, and I’ve come to believe that was the point.

The soul has been here before

The soul doesn’t die. It just moves on to a new life. Krishna says it plainly to Arjuna:

There’s a word for the ties between people: rinanubandhan. Rin means debt. Anubandhan means bond. We meet the people in our lives because something is still owed between us from before. Something to give, something to receive, something to learn.

I think of it as a contract at the soul level. Before this life, two souls agreed: I’ll come to you, and this is what we’ll work on together. Neither of us remembers signing. But we both show up.

My son: the first shift

Before my son arrived, something started changing in me. I moved toward meditation. I started doing religious rituals, which I had never done in my life. I didn’t plan it. It just pulled at me.

Then he was born, and I went through severe postpartum. My nervous system was rocky. All that meditation, and I still couldn’t steady myself.

I think about Arjuna at the start of the Gita. Standing between two armies, he falls apart:

sīdanti mama gātrāṇi mukhaṁ ca pariśuṣyati / vepathuś ca śarīre me roma-harṣaś ca jāyate (1.29)

My limbs give way, my mouth is dry, my body trembles and my hair stands on end.

His bow slips from his hand. His skin burns. His mind is spinning (1.30). That is a nervous system in collapse, written down thousands of years ago. And Krishna doesn’t pull him off the battlefield. He teaches him how to stay on it.

That’s what I had to do. Postpartum wasn’t something I could skip past. I had to walk through it and keep up my practice, even on the days it didn’t seem to work.

When the postpartum finally settled, I realized something had changed at the root. I wasn’t hungry for external validation anymore. I was content and happy with what I had. The further inward I went, the less I needed from outside.

prajahāti yadā kāmān sarvān pārtha mano-gatān / ātmany evātmanā tuṣṭaḥ sthita-prajñas tadocyate (2.55)

When a person lets go of every desire the mind creates, and is satisfied in the self, by the self, they are called steady in wisdom.

I’m not claiming I got all the way there. But for the first time I understood what that verse was describing, because I’d had a taste of it.

Looking back, he was teaching me something else too: to let go of my stubbornness, my need to control everything. It started with my own nervous system, which no amount of meditation could command. I had a plan for how things should go. Being his mother kept showing me how little of it was mine to decide.

There’s a story in the Bhagavata Purana I keep coming back to. Little Krishna has been naughty, and Yashoda decides to tie him to a grinding mortar. She takes a rope. It’s two fingers too short. She ties on another. Still two fingers short. She brings every rope in the house, and every time, it’s two fingers short.

Finally she’s exhausted, sweating, her hair coming loose. She stops trying. And in that moment, Krishna lets himself be tied.

Many teachers say those two fingers are our effort and God’s grace. You need both. But grace doesn’t come while you’re still trying to force it.

That was my son’s lesson for me. The harder I tried to control, the shorter the rope got.

My daughter: the second shift

Four years later, my daughter came into our lives. I honestly thought I had learned what I needed to learn. Life has a twist, right?

This pregnancy was harder. The postpartum was harder. And then I watched my child struggle with eating, and that was harder than anything I had been through in my own body or mind. When it’s you, you can grit your teeth. When it’s your child, you can’t make it stop.

I kept coming back to one question: what is she trying to teach me?

It took me a long time to see it. Patience, and slowing down. Two things I never had.

Every parent says their kids taught them patience. I used to think that’s all this was. But the patience she asked of me was a different kind. Not waiting out a tantrum or a sleepless night. Watching my child struggle with something I couldn’t fix, couldn’t rush, and couldn’t carry for her.

Krishna has a word for this: titiksha. The ability to bear what comes without being thrown by it.

mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ / āgamāpāyino ‘nityās tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata (2.14)

Heat and cold, pleasure and pain, come from contact with the world. They come and they go. They don’t last. Learn to bear them, Arjuna.

They come and they go. Every hard meal, every hard week. I couldn’t rush any of it. I could only stay.

She brought us to Krishna

It’s also said that sometimes a child comes to bring the parents closer to God. In our home, that turned out to be true.

A while back I wrote a post here asking Rituals or Their Meaning: Which Do You Practice?. My husband and I both grew up in very religious families, but we were never ritual people. We weren’t temple goers. We kept rituals to a minimum and meditated instead. Rituals are the map, I wrote, and I cared more about the road.

Then our daughter came, and slowly that changed. We started going to temple regularly. We started reading the Gita regularly. Somewhere along the way, without either of us announcing it, we found ourselves on the Krishna path.

Krishna says people come to him in four ways:

catur-vidhā bhajante māṁ janāḥ sukṛtino ‘rjuna / ārto jijñāsur arthārthī jñānī ca bharatarṣabha (7.16)

Four kinds of people turn to me, Arjuna: the one in distress, the one who wants to understand, the one who wants something, and the one who already knows.

I think we came the first way, through the hard years with her. I hope we’re slowly becoming the second.

I still believe the map isn’t the road. But she showed me the map can lead you to it.

If you’re in a hard season with your child

I can’t tell you what your child came to teach you. Only you can find that. But here’s what helped me.

Change the question. When it’s hardest, ask “what is this here to show me?” instead of “why me?” The answer won’t come right away. It didn’t for me, with either of mine. Keep asking anyway.

Keep your practice, especially when it isn’t working. Meditation, prayer, the Gita, whatever yours is. Through two hard postpartums there were days it felt like nothing was helping. It was working underneath.

Remember they’re not yours. Your child came through you, not from you. They have their own path. You’re there to walk with them, not to steer.

Even Krishna doesn’t force Arjuna. After eighteen chapters of teaching, he says:

vimṛśyaitad aśeṣeṇa yathecchasi tathā kuru (18.63)

Reflect on all of this fully, then do as you wish.

If God can teach and then let go, so can I.

Whatever we promised

I don’t know exactly what my son, my daughter and I agreed to before this life. I may never know. But I know I’m not the person I was before they came. Whatever we promised each other, I think we’re keeping it.