You might feel too tired to parent at times. Does that make you a bad person?

How much time can you really spend with your children? How much do you like it when you do? When you spend time with your children, how much time do you spend doing what they love? And how much do you love it?

If we honestly answer these questions, the answer is this: We are too tired to parent a LOT of the time. There is resentment of time taken away from us being who we are before we had children; who we are outside of our children; and who we are allowed to be despite having children.

I want to talk about this because THIS exists. And the more we shame ourselves when we feel it, the more we are invalidating WHY we feel this way.

You are not a bad parent when you feel like this. You are human.

Lean into the resentment. Now, feel it. Understand it. Get curious. Feel compassion. And accept it all. Every bit of every feeling, whether resentment or anger, and give it some space to speak; to scream.

And tolerate it all. It is when we ignore these dark feelings that we suffer. Without space to speak, the voice builds up, suffocating in its intensity, ruling you from within, till you become all of it.

The irony is this: the more shame, the more anger, the more guilt you feel at yourself, the more you suffer because you are not accepting all of you.

When you do, this is what happens: You start feeling free; you start feeling held; you start loving all of yourself. And then, magically, the feelings leave.

The biggest mistake we make is identifying ourselves with our dark feelings. Darkness is fleeting, just as happiness is. Joy is a part of life just as pain is essential. It is when we deny the other half of ourselves, of existence, of ourselves, that we suffer.

Being a parent is idealised in ways that is designed to shame us. But just because we are parents does not mean we are devoid of humanity, of emotions, of the essence of life and living. We are human beings. And the problem is that when we become parents, society and the world says we should not be human, have natural feelings that all of us have. In that denial is the agony. And we suffer.

There is no night without day. So, why would we be all light? We are extensions of the world that surrounds us, that holds us. The darkness from which we came is the source of the light that resides within us.

And so, we are everything. I want to embrace my dark side because that does not make me a bad person; it makes me human. And when I look at myself, in the mirror, I know that the darkness that exists comes from pain I have not addressed. The moment I shine light on that, I breathe, I become, the best mother to myself, to my son. This is parenting, all of it. So, embrace it ALL and shut the voices around and within you that tell you otherwise.

• Lifestyle
• Dubai