What is mother? Mama, Mummy? Stop and feel the words. What do they do to you? If there is any pain or recoiling from personal memories, feel even deeper. What is the deepest resonance of Mama? What is father … Daddy … Dad … Da?

Recently, I was woken up at 3 a.m. by the Voice. “You are a father,” it said. I knew this must be important, because it was exactly the same guy who told Kevin Costner to build a baseball field. But no further instructions came, just that. “You are a father. A father.”

I sat up in the bed and felt the word father. What does it mean? Of course the word can simply define a role. Father is the man who provides the sperm that fertilizes the egg, the man who drives the children to school, helps with homework, takes them to the game, and embarrasses them by cheering too loudly. I felt my own father, there in the silence of the night. He is old now; he may die soon. Of course he fulfilled a long list of obligations: material ones, financial ones. My father came to the hospital when I was sick, he gave me things, and he made sure I was well educated. How do you remember your father?

But there is more to father than all those roles and duties. I can also feel a paternal caring that came through my father, a quality of authority, presence, and strength that was often there despite his personality, not because of it. This quality of father is very big; it is not personal. It comes through the parent, not from him. This deeper dimension of “father,” which I felt in my own father, is the same quality my children feel in me. Sure, I am a provider, a broker in the limited beliefs and opinions and traditions I would just love to palm off on my children, given half a chance. And … I am also something like an antenna for the real father, the Big Father energy that is absolutely trustworthy, protecting, and truthful in a way that individuals can only aspire toward.

When we are most caught in Iago, as we all sometimes are, small father and small mother are all we have to offer. Then we feel the obligation to raise our children according to our own values, to teach them to be just like us. Ironically, small mother and father have an exaggerated sense of their own mastery and wisdom. Translucent parenting means to see our utter incompetence as individuals to teach anyone anything useful at all. Don't follow me, I'm lost. Translucents have the wisdom to cease trusting their own minds, and so step aside, allowing space for Big Father, for Divine Mama.

We all know what Big Father feels like. Big Father has relaxed authority, power without force, firmness with absolute love. Big Father has no biased opinions but can feel deeply into what is best in each moment, and takes action decisively, like a samurai. Big Father can show wrath like thunder but is not lost in anger. Probably you have felt Big Father, at least at moments, in your own father, even if it was not there all the time. If you are religious and you pray, you may feel Big Father then. You may feel Big Father when you look into the sky or feel beyond your own small story. If you are a man and have children, you cannot be big Father or do big Father. You can only become translucent enough, become still enough, to allow Big Father to do you.

And we all know and love Divine Mama. She is soft, absolutely loving, forgiving, and playful. Her laugh is like a waterfall that gurgles deep in her belly. Her breasts are so soft and welcoming they can heal every pain and bruise we have ever known. She welcomes you, embraces you, adores you exactly as you are, and needs nothing from you. She does not do love, she is love itself, she is the ocean in which we can drown and be reborn. Have you ever seen how a woman is transformed when she is breast-feeding? If you are a woman, and you have had children, you may feel that in your mothering you have had your most mystical experiences, that you have been taken over by love. She will do you, when you give up, and accept that this little personality would mess up looking after a mouse, let alone a human becoming. In the defeat of utter incompetence, you step aside and let Divine Mama do her thing.

Whenever we drop our agenda as parents, whenever we are willing to not know, whenever we can show up and feel our children beyond the notions of “shoulds” we have inherited, when we can feel our children as autonomous human beings, we are breaking the chains of countless generations. We are setting a new tradition in motion, which will allow us to give our children space to discover their limitless nature and potential. Small mother and small father retire their habits of handing down the chains of restraint and limitation. Parenting becomes an act of translucent surrender to our core as Big Father and Divine Mama, the only dimension of us that knows how to amplify freedom from one generation to the next.

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