Inspired Magazine

Previous page Maggie
is all about encouraging
kids to be kids – with
days filled with outdoor
freedom and fun.
Above A younger Maggie.
Above right Maggie
with three of her four sons
when they were young.
Opposite page, top
Maggie and her
four boys.
Opposite page, bottom
Maggie is now a highly
sought-after parenting
educator and speaker.
Devastated at the fail and what she made that
mean for her self-worth, an 18-year-old Maggie
took a bottle of pills and downed pill after pill in a
suicide attempt. But one of the pills cracked in her
mouth and the foul taste caused her to vomit. “I
remember laying there in the foetal position, in this
really dark, low place, sobbing, snot everywhere,
completely alone and all of a sudden this light
shone into the window onto me and I felt that
happened for a purpose,” she says. “I sat up and
thought ‘well I’m not supposed to die’.”
SPARK OF POTENTIAL
The experience made Maggie realise the fragility
of the teenage mind – just one failure and a life
was at risk. It made her determined to do what she
could to prevent others from making the mistake
that had so nearly cost her life. So Maggie became
a teacher.
“Teaching was so much fun,” she recalls of her
time as a high school English teacher. “I couldn’t
believe I was having so much fun. I just got my
students, I could read their masks, I could make
learning fascinating and fun, and I really valued
each one of them.”
As a teacher, Maggie came to realise there’s a
‘spark’ inside everyone that needs nurturing. “It’s
a bit like the human spirit – it’s this pulsing place
within us that I could see in kids,” she says. “Inside
every single child there’s this pulsing place of
potential that I think we’re buggering up.”
Maggie sees the results of this spark being
quashed every day, particularly in the women she
encounters. “I’m often nudging women saying ‘is
there something in you, something that was shut
down as a kid or in your early teens and you need
to bring out because you’re going to be restless
until you have a look at it?’. I still think that’s some
of the best work that I do.”
DEEP PERSONAL INQUIRY
A few years into teaching, Maggie started
producing her own little sparks of human potential
– four boys of her own. While revered as a parenting
‘expert’ today, Maggie scoffs at the notion.
“Parenting is the hardest job on the planet,” she
says. “And a house without conflict does not exist.”
One day she found herself overwhelmed and fed
up, with her hand raised to smack her two-year-old
son. She stopped and realised she wasn’t being the
parent she wanted to be. She questioned where the
anger had come from. And she went on to launch
a deep and long-lasting personal inquiry into her
own childhood and why she’d become the person
she had become. This inquiry would help Maggie
realise she’d made up ‘stories’ about herself that
were not real. She realised she had the capacity to
design her character and her life in the way she’d
like – something she encouraged other women to
do by going on to lead women’s retreats.
GIVING UP THE MEANINGLESS
When Maggie’s third boy was 14 months old,
she had a near-death experience which would
shape the way she would go on to parent. It was
Christmas Day and her three boys were home with
chickenpox, or ‘chicken pops’ as they called it, and
Maggie was watering the lawn when she felt blood
trickling down her legs.
As the blood poured out of her, Maggie called
a friend who realised something was drastically
wrong. At hospital they thought she’d suffered
a miscarriage. But the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
Maggie began to vomit. Her blood pressure dived. “I
remember being so close to death – I saw a golden
tunnel and everything,” Maggie recalls. “I remember
in that moment thinking I can’t do this anymore
and giving up but then remembering the three
boys. If you have a near-death experience your
experience as a mother is transformed forever.”
68
MAGGIE DENT