On Becoming the Bow

On learning to be the bow, not the sculptor, for the lives that pass through us.

There is a passage I have carried with me for most of my life.

I first met it as a teenager, hunched over a slim book with a strange, serious cover. The language felt both simple and impossible. It spoke about children as arrows, parents as bows, and an unseen archer bending us toward a mark we could not quite see.

I didn’t understand it, not really. But something in me recognised the picture.

An arrow is meant to fly.
A bow is meant to bend.

Learning to nurture, unlearning “teacher”

Years later, when I began studying education, that image followed me into lecture halls and classrooms. We spoke about how children are not empty vessels to be filled, how the work of a teacher is to notice what is already alive in a child and help it grow. We studied learning theories and psychology and all the right words for what my gut already knew: control is not the same thing as care.

Control is not the same thing as care.

And yet everywhere I went, the pattern felt the same.

Rules stacked on rules.
Adults policing behaviour with one hand while modelling the opposite with the other.
Children punished for expressing, in clumsy form, the very frustration and confusion the adults were refusing to name.

I found myself thinking back to that bow and arrow.

If a bow is warped, over-strained, or badly made, it doesn’t matter how perfectly shaped the arrow is.

Pregnancy and the weight of love

When I fell pregnant much later in life, that passage shifted from beautiful idea to hard, practical question. I had wanted a child for a long time. I had also made enough serious mistakes to know that living well isn’t easy, and that loving someone is no guarantee you won’t hurt them.

The weight of that knowledge was terrifying. I remember lying awake at night, one hand on my belly, thinking: How do I do this as well as I am capable? What does “my best” actually look like in real days, not fantasies? What will she need from me, and how do I become the kind of bow that can give it?

Gibran’s words steadied me: she would come through me, but she would not belong to me. My work was not to control her life, but to become a bow strong and flexible enough to let her fly.

In those months I went back to the passage again and again. I would read a few lines, close my eyes, feel her moving inside me, and try to breathe.

Your children are not your children…
They come through you but not from you…

The words met a belief I had been slowly growing for years: that children are not born evil, broken creatures who must be beaten, shamed, or moulded into worthiness. They arrive into a world that is already both beautiful and brutal. From the beginning, they’re affected by what we eat, feel, say, and do, long before they can put any of it into language. But affected is not the same as defective.

When control masquerades as care

What I came to believe is this:

A crying baby is not “naughty.” It is a human being with only one way to say, something hurts or something’s wrong.

A furious toddler on the floor is not a criminal in training. It is a small person whose capacity has been exceeded, whose words haven’t caught up with their feelings.

And a parent screaming, shaming, or hitting in response is not “teaching them a lesson.” They are modelling exactly the loss of control they’re punishing.

It took me a long time to admit how often I was that parent in potential. How thin my own patience could be. How quickly fear or exhaustion could harden into control, or spill out as fury or tears.

The passage wouldn’t let me look away.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts…
You may house their bodies but not their souls…

I began to see that my real work was less about shaping my child into a particular kind of person, and more about becoming a different kind of person myself.

Not a perfect bow — there is no such thing — but a steadier one.
A bow that does its own repair work instead of expecting the arrow to fly straight through splintered wood.
A bow that understands it will be bent, and chooses, as far as possible, to bend for love rather than fear.
A bow that trusts the archer sees further than it does.

This didn’t magically solve anything. I still lost my temper. I still said and did things I wish I could take back. I still watched my daughter face pain I could not spare her, and felt that old terror of not being enough.

But the passage gave me a different question.

Instead of, How do I make her behave? it became, What sort of bow am I being right now?

Am I stable enough for her to lean against?
Honest enough to apologise when I’m wrong?
Soft enough to hold her, strong enough to let her go, again and again?

Beginning with the bow

I don’t believe our children are blank clay and we are the sculptors, chiselling them into something acceptable. I don’t believe they are born guilty and must earn their way into goodness. I believe they arrive carrying their own seed of personhood — mysterious, particular, already on its way somewhere — and that our presence will leave a mark on how, not whether, that life unfolds.

The bow image keeps me in my place.

It reminds me that I am part of the story, not the author of it.
That I am responsible to my child, not for every outcome of her life.
That love is not ownership, and control is not security.

I think that is why this passage belongs here, in the Art of Becoming.

Because so much of what breaks us — and so much of what heals — is tied up with how we were held, or not held, as children. With the stories we were told about who we are. With whether we were treated as arrows to be launched, or as projects to be managed, or as extensions of someone else’s unfinished life.

I have come to believe the world would look different if more of us, parents or not, quietly sat with these lines and let them work on us. Not as a set of rules, but as a mirror.

Not to ask, How do I fix the world?
But to ask, What kind of bow am I becoming?

And then slowly, honestly, begin there.