Parenting as a Fool

Off the edge I go

Art from the Robin Wood Tarot deck

Lately I keep getting The Fool card. No matter which tarot deck I work with, or how I shuffle, it’s the same…

There’s a jovial figure laughing, joking, dreaming with abandon… as they dance themselves over the edge of a cliff.

The Fool is the very first card of the tarot. At number “0” it’s not even technically a part of the sequence of the journey. The Fool is the one who is about to go on the journey. Which means that when you get The Fool card, it’s signaling the beginning of a whole new cycle.

Whenever I pick The Fool card, I’m ok with it.

Because when it comes to parenting, I’m a Fool.

I never had much experience with taking care of children before my daughter came. I eschewed babysitting as a young woman, wasn’t present at any of my friend’s births, and am the first person in my family to have a child.

I remember the last trimester of being pregnant, when I tried to read up on all the things—birth, infancy, post-partum, taking care of a newborn—and I realized just how much I didn’t know. It was slightly terrifying. But I also knew there was no other way. This is how a new cycle begins, with us being willing to not know the outcome…and to do it anyways.

The Fool is the part of you that is naïve, unexperienced, a beginner. The one that’s willing to make a muck of things. The one who walks with innocence off the edge of a cliff, and tumbles head-first into the abyss.

It seems painfully ignorant and yet, it’s that same innocence that ultimately allows The Fool’s journey to begin. Because without The Fool’s enthusiastic naiveté, they would never take the leap in the first place. And without the leap, we cannot hope to reach the other side— that place where the new journey begins.

Stepping into parenthood is exactly like dancing off that cliff.

It takes a Fool to want to do it.

Blessedly, there are many fools among us.

Art by Lisa Sterle From The Modern Witch Tarot

Still, there’s times when I seriously wonder what I doing, if I’m doing it right, or what this is all supposed to look like.

On those days when I feel woefully out of my depths I have a mantra I often repeat to myself.

“I have no idea what I’m doing”

I repeat it to myself when my daughter has a meltdown and all the gentle parenting tools fail.

I repeat it as I reach out for a date with a new mama friend, unsure if they feel the same about wanting to connect with me.

I repeat it when I post here again on Substack, not entirely sure what I’m doing with these weekly writings except that I need this, this space, this community.

I stop and tell myself—“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

And somehow, just for acknowledging this, the sense of being unbearably foolish is miraculously transformed into the light-footed step of The Fool.

The Fool has no idea what they’re doing.

And, bless them, that unknowing is the best possible thing.

Art by Walter Crane and Earnest Fitzpatrick in the Harmonious Tarot

I used to be a big time planner.

If there was a cliff I was jumping off of, I’d already mapped it. I knew the quickest path to the top and the best place to launch myself for landing cleanly on the other side.

But there’s something about the leap into parenthood—a free-fall that has, a least for me, not yet ended—that has broken every strategic bone in my body, making me more comfortable with being The Fool than ever.

The archtetype of The Fool is a sacred one.

Closely aligned with the trickster, The Fool is the one who can lead us back to the truth through an obscuring of what’s right in front of you.

The one who reveals a deeper order through creating disorder, who can help us find trust in the mystery by taking away what we thought we knew.

In some descriptions of The Fool’s journey the figure is described as a newborn. Spontaneous, trusting, innocent.

In this way, children are the ultimate Fools.

Kids know nothing about how the world works, and because of that they show you over and over again what really matters in this world.

They venture with undimmed enthusiasm to the edge of the porch steps, to the band playing on the street, to the beautiful stranger with a limb difference, and ask only to know, to connect, to experience.

Through parenting them, children teach us how to embrace the Fools that we are. And if we can only accept it, this can be a life-resurrecting experience.

The more I parent, the less I know.

The more I parent, the more of a Fool I become

And this, I realize, is the medicine that this world so deeply needs.

To recognize that we don’t know, that there’s so much we are here to learn, that we’re just beginning.

To be willing—with trust, enthusiasm, innocence— to walk right up to the edge of what’s to come. To embrace the journey that is bigger than can be named.

To say “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

And then to jump.

Because that’s how the other side will rush up to greet us, sure as a hug.