various and sundry family things

• I have a friend whom I met through SIL#1, although neither of us is currently friendly with SIL. Was chatting with the friend last night and she reminded me about how SIL dumped her (the friend) several times for stupid reasons that basically boiled down to the friend not meeting SIL's total approval for coolness and doing things just how SIL does them. Good reminder to me that when it comes to Bro#1 and SIL#1, it's not me, it's them. I mean, she "took a break" from the friend because she didn't like her house. You know, when somebody invites you to visit their new home and you don't love that house, the nice thing to say is "Congratulations! How do you like it? What's your favorite part? Give me a tour!"

• On the less-nice side, I met yet another person who already knows Bro#1 and wanted to gush to me about what a great guy he is. Ugh. Sometimes my city is too small for me. Yes, he's oh so talented and great with kids and yada yada. He's also an ass who can't separate from his abusive mommy. Can we stop talking about him, please?

• Something I recently learned about my brothers: apparently when my two youngest brothers were in high school, the younger brother (Bro#3) was starting to learn how to shave and my mother videotaped him, then teased the older one (my middle brother, Bro#2) about not being able to shave yet. What kind of a parent does that? I mean, way to emasculate your son, lady. Teenaged boys have enough emotional garbage without their mothers pointing out that their little brothers are manlier than they are. I cannot imagine making fun of one of my sons this way, especially not about something that he's probably sensitive about to begin with. How cruel. 

• Got a Christmas card from my parents. Years ago, I would have returned to sender. Then I would have had my husband open it. Then later I would have just recycled it myself. This time I decided to open it. I can handle it. "We miss you and we love you." Oh, so pathetic. If you miss me and love me so much, where's your attempt to truly heal the rift? It stinks that they hurt, that they caused their own hurt, and that they are so totally clueless about it. 

• Speaking of clueless estranged parents, my husband's brother has been on the outs with my in-laws for about a year and a half, ever since they were total jerks to his girlfriend when she and he were visiting. They're pretty passive-aggressive and judgmental and at some point in my relationship with them I had to stand up to them about it, and ultimately they chilled out a bit and now my husband maintains the boundaries well enough that we don't have major problems. But they had been dicks about this girlfriend since the beginning, and they treated her really poorly, and BIL had had enough of it, and has had very very little contact with them since. The in-laws, of course, don't understand at all and place blame on him, the whole typical dysfunctional parent song and dance. Well, he called them on Christmas and talked to them briefly, after which FIL went on and on about how he wishes he were there to help BIL, that it's so hard when your child lives too far away for you to help them when they're in a time of trouble. Turns out he thinks BIL is depressed. Because, you know, when a kid decides not to spend time with his parents, it's because he has emotional problems, not because the parents are being assholes. *sigh*

• I have a big huge extended family on my mom's side and there's an annual party for my grandmother which I haven't attended in years because I'm a) not close enough to that grandmother to want to drive across several states and pay for lodging for this party, b) not close to any of my cousins who would be there, c) my mother would be there (yuck), and d) the aunt who hosts the party is the "bury the hatchet" aunt. I'm not really into attending things hosted by people who are emotionally unsafe people for me to be around. Spending time with flying monkeys? No thanks. But anyway, another aunt (my mom's youngest sister, who is a bit of a black sheep herself) apparently told my sister to pass on to me that she misses me and wants me to know that she thinks my mom is a bitch and she totally gets where I'm coming from, and that I should feel free to call her any time. I have been wanting to talk to this aunt so much, y'all. I suspected that she might feel this way, but at the same time, I'm leery of talking to people who are probably more loyal to my mom than to me. So it was really good to hear this message from her. It means a lot to me. 

on the up side

It's a funny kind of up side, and might not sound like one, unless you're an ACON. 

My oldest son is hitting the very beginning edges of puberty. We're not dealing with body odor and hair in strange places and long showers and such yet, but oh, the mood swings. It's bringing me back to when I was his age, and emotion was JUST SO INTENSE, out of the blue. Gotta love those hormones.

I spend a lot of time lately feeling like I am totally failing at this mom stuff. The pre-teen challenges make me feel so, so, SO out of my depth. Babies are easy. You change their diapers and snuggle them and feed them and carry them around and their needs are met. Preschoolers are a little more challenging but you can still keep one step ahead and figure out strategies for handling the tougher days. And there are oodles of books and websites and people in general out there in the world handing out information about little kids and ideas for how to live with them. But this. THIS. I have no idea what to do with preteens and teenagers. I have had no role models for how to be a great parent to a teen. There are very few books about interacting with adolescents and guiding them in a way that jives with how I want to raise my kids. I am SO lost.

Suddenly, kiddo numero uno is very, very, very aware of people all around him. People who can see what he's doing. People who can hear everything he says. People who might be JUDGING him. I can see little adolescent insecurities getting their nasty goblin fingers around his guts. And I know so well, having been that age once myself, that there is no amount of logic that will convince him that other people are not paying close attention to him. That it really doesn't matter what you wear, that you can just get over being insecure and not care.

He and I were in a children's clothing store the other day. This store carries a comfortable brand of underwear that kiddo #1 has been wearing for years. Recently, I have retired some of his underwear because they are worn out or too babyish (airplanes and cartoon moose are a definite no-go now). So I suggested that we pick up a package or two of new ones. He immediately started looking angry and upset.

Me: "what?"
Him: "I don't need any underwear."
Me: "Yes, you do. You don't have enough pairs and some are wearing out."
Him, between his teeth, getting pissed: "I Don't Need Any Underwear."
Me: "We're buying some. You prefer solids, right? No stripes? I know you don't want the other patterns."
Him: "MOM. I Don't. Need. Any. Underwear."

By this time, he looked really mad and he was starting to tear up. Apparently buying underwear is a big deal. I didn't know it was a big deal. Besides, he needs some. I ignored him and went to look through the rack. They were missing his size, so I asked a saleswoman if they had any in the back. She went to look. I turned back to kiddo #1 and his eyes were wide with RAGE and brimming with tears. I was irritated with him. He does need new underwear. He was being unreasonable. What's the big deal? It's just underwear!

What I wanted to say: "OH. MY. GOD. Will you GET OVER IT?!?! NOBODY is looking at you. NOBODY is paying attention to you. NOBODY CARES that your mom is buying underwear for you. It's JUST UNDERWEAR. THIS IS NOT A BIG DEAL."

What I actually said: "Honey, almost everybody buys underwear. There's nothing embarrassing about it. Even that saleswoman probably buys underwear, and sometimes she probably asks people for help. It's not a big deal."

Less than perfectly empathetic, eh?

The saleswoman came back and told me that they were out of his size, so we left. He was fuming. I suppressed the desire to roll my eyes.

But then, as we walked to the car, I suddenly got it. It IS a big deal to talk about or be seen buying underwear in public. Not to me, but to him. This is his reality. And I am not going to be able to logic him out of this. There is not going to be a convincing argument. Because he has hit that age - the age at which everything is embarrassing, especially if your parent is doing it. Oh, god. Are we there already?I thought back to being his age and embarrassed, and said what I think pre-teen me would have wanted to hear: "I'm sorry that that was so embarrassing for you. It didn't occur to me that it would be embarrassing."

After getting to the car, I checked in with him to see if he was still mad. He was, so I waited a while, and after he had cooled off, this is what I said: "So, I'd like to know how I could do things differently so you're not so embarrassed. Right now you don't feel like you need underwear. Sometime in the future you might need new underwear. What kind of plan should we make so that you can let me know what you want, but you don't have to feel embarrassed?"

I realized that my kid is in the perpetually-embarrassed stage, I apologized to him for not getting it, I thought about whether or not it's absolutely necessary to ask him in public about underwear (it's not) or to shop with him for it (also not). There are other ways to do this, ways that respect his right to be an awkward, self-conscious pre-teen. He will grow up later. He will, one day, be a twentysomething guy who can walk into a store and buy a pack of underwear without a care. Ok, maybe it will take him until 30. But it'll happen. Right now, this stuff feels hugely important to him, those feelings are very real, and I can recognize his feelings for what they are without getting my own panties in a bunch about it.

I'm sure I will embarrass him again in the near future, and again, and again. I'm also sure that there will be times when I'm not willing to change what I'm doing, and he will be forced to deal with his own embarrassment. But there will also be lots of times when I decide that I can give the poor hormonally-addled, frontal-lobe-growing, mortified kid a break. Because I have the ability to empathize and show compassion. And THAT is the up side, my friends. 

free to disagree

Dropping in to quickly share a thoughtful Facebook post from The Peaceful Parent Institute.

I love how free my children are to give me honest feedback about what they do and don't like. I love how clearly lacking in inner conflict they are when they express frustration that's resulted in some way from what I've done/said, not done/not said...the next time your child is giving you feedback that's a little bit hard to swallow, try to hold that you're giving them a HUGE gift of allowing, supporting and validating their feelings, their right to have "negative" feelings in close relationships and a right to explore, identify, put words to and express those feelings.

You can read the rest here.

parenting resolutions for the ACON

 

 With the start of a new year coming up, many of us are thinking about who we want to be in 2013. For some this means a plan to diet and exercise, or to accomplish a specific goal. For me, new year's resolutions are more about touching base with my core values than a to-do list. I started calling it a "mission statement" a few years back, and make an effort to check in with it from time to time, to see if I still value the same things, and to remind myself of my intentions.

I wrote the following two years ago, as part of a post about coming out of the FOG, but I think it can stand alone as a mission statement for parents who are also children of narcissists. I'm considering printing it out and hanging it up somewhere where I can see it more frequently.

I will be myself. I will work to overcome the anxiety, fear, and shame that shackle me. I acknowledge the heredity and upbringing that contributed to these issues in the past, and take responsibility for handling them in the present time.

I will not fraternize with people who do me harm, physically or emotionally. I will not subject my children to such people. I will continue to build a community of reciprocal relationships with friends and family members who play actively positive roles in our lives and who show a willingness to work constructively together in times of interpersonal struggle.

I will not allow any person to bully and intimidate my family via threats of legal action.

I will be a compassionate witness for others who need to share their stories and come out of secrecy, whether it is about abuse or any other personal trial. I will express my gratitude to the friends who share their struggles with me in order to let me know that I am not alone.

I will work hard to be a truly loving parent who understands who her children are as people, who will respect their rights, who rejects control-based parenting advice with its negative views of the nature of children. I will listen to my children's concerns. I will acknowledge my mistakes and apologize genuinely to them. I will not shame them or withdraw love from them when who they are is at odds with who I am. I will not use my size, experience, or age to oppress them. I will exercise patience, self-restraint, compassion.

I will expect my husband to confront me and support my children when I harm them. I will support them when they believe that he has done something unfair, or when I witness him doing something hurtful. We will work as a family to encourage an atmosphere of respect for all members, regardless of age.

I understand that my children may choose their own paths. I will work to be open to their criticism and understanding if, despite my intents in this time, I fail to play a significantly positive role in their lives. I will accept whatever relationship they wish to have with me in the future. I do not own their bodies or their minds, now or ever.

If you are a parent, what is your parenting mission statement, and how is it affected by also being an ACON?

you and i and she and he are beautiful

Earlier this year, I joined a "boot camp"-style workout program. If you're not familiar with the boot camp fitness model, the idea is that you're more likely to push yourself physically if you're with a group of people rather than working out on your own, and you're also more likely to stick with it. Why I signed up for something I would ordinarily hate is another story. For now, suffice it to say that I'm in better physical condition than I have been for most of my adult life. I'm down 20 pounds and up a fair bit of muscle tone. This is the first time in my life that I have a) enjoyed exercise, b) exercised regularly, and c) had enough muscle to see and feel. I love it. I mean LOVE it. I might be a little obsessed with my biceps, which are far from Linda Hamilton-esque, but *I* can feel those guns, and sometimes I find myself rubbing my arm, enjoying how healthy skin over healthy muscle feels. It's lovely.

In the middle of one of these moments of (healthy) narcissism, I suddenly realized: I don't remember my mother ever enjoying her body like this. I don't remember ever hearing her say positive things about her body. Not what it looked like, not what it could do, not how it felt. Nothing. That is not to say that she said negative things about it all the time, but in general, I had the idea that she didn't think she was pretty or shapely or strong. I don't remember her ever reveling in what her body could do. I don't recall any sense of physical prowess, of excitement at a physical feat. I also don't recall her engaging in beauty routines just for the sake of enjoying them. She only did her hair and makeup for the stage (she was an amateur actress in her younger days) or for social events that also had an air of performance - an important business meeting, a church gathering in which she had a public role. I don't remember her ever dressing up for my father or even just for fun. I certainly don't remember any indication that she sometimes felt sexy or pretty or kickass. A memory came back to me of the time in my teens when she refused to buy a black bra for me because black was "sultry and seductive." Funny thing is, all of her underwear was pale beige cotton. So not only was sexiness not for teens, but maybe it wasn't for adults, either. (Not to say that you can't wear beige cotton and feel sexy - but by her own definition and actions, I didn't get the impression that she ever felt that way.)

I know that she was proud of her weight in her early 20s - below 100 pounds - even though she also indicated that she was underweight and didn't eat well and had self-esteem problems at the time. She seemed wistful about her youthful slenderness, but also a little ashamed of it. She never considered herself to be pretty, and envied her younger sister's looks.  I thought my mom was beautiful when I was a little girl, but over time, after hearing her talk about how she was NOT the beautiful sister, she was the plain one whom boys never wanted, I think I learned that my ideas of beauty were wrong. She didn't like her skin. She didn't like her breasts. She didn't like her lips. She didn't like her hair. Eventually I didn't like them, either. I started to dread ever looking like her. This causes some problems for me now, on occasion, when I look in the mirror and see her staring back at me.

I don't remember her ever being fit. She disliked exercise and never engaged regularly in it. Exercise was a chore, one to be avoided. People who enjoyed exercise were weird. Physical prowess was something a person came by naturally, in which case being proud of themselves was vanity, or through fanaticism, in which case it was shallow, obsessive, and unhealthy (and still vain). If there is a physical activity that she enjoys, over thirty years of experience with her never revealed it to me.

Now, everybody doesn't have to be an athlete. And women don't all have to enjoy doing their hair and makeup or wearing frilly dresses. But I would hope that every healthy person would have a sense of enjoying living in their body and liking the way it looks and the ways it can be used, regardless of whether or not that body is "perfect" by societal standards. I suspect that my mother was (is? I don't really know her any more.) divorced from her body, in a way. There was no sense of liking any part of herself or wanting to take good care of her body for the sake of enjoying living in it even more.

I'm not sure what any of this really means within the context of her narcissistic personality disorder, or with regard to my experiences as an adult child of a narcissist. I do know that in the past decade, I have learned much about living in my body (which is, in many ways, very similar to the zen concept of living in the moment).

Two days after making these realizations, I saw an item linked by a friend, "I've Started Telling My Daughters I'm Beautiful." It strikes near my thoughts about my mother. Namely, if we want our children to feel beautiful for who and what they are, we need to let them know what we love about who and what we are.

I want my kids to be able to listen to their bodies and learn about them, and to eat and drink and work in ways that make their bodies feel really good to be alive. I want them to know about how thigh muscles can feel like springs when you run, and how nice it is to look in the mirror and love your eye color. I want them to know about dressing in ways that feel good on your skin, or look good to you in the mirror, or look good to other people not because sometimes looking good on the outside is not necessarily conformist, but can be a way of giving a gift to them through sharing what you like about the way your body looks and feels.

If I want them to be able to enjoy their bodies and the bodies of the women and/or men that they will someday love, I must show them how I can do that for myself. So I'm going to rest my hand on the curve of my bicep and tell my boys about how awesome that morning's workout felt and how I like the shape of my body and the things it can do.

Hopefully you can do this for yourself and your children, too.

simple truths

If you wished to be loved, love.

 Lucius Annaeus Seneca

How does this apply to your world? I would say that it's great advice for most of us in our daily lives, and also great advice for the narcissists we know, even though they are probably incapable of  everfollowing it. It's a good reminder to us, though, that we do not have an obligation to love narcissistic parents or spouses. Our feelings for them reflect their feelings for and treatment of us.

Note that the statement does not indicate any guarantee of being loved back. It only indicates that loving a person is one basic (and, in my opinion, essential) part of what it takes for somebody to love you  back. It's a good parenting mantra, actually. Most of us who have children do wish for them to love us, but we need to remember that if we wish for their love and not just something based in fear that might sometimes look like love, we must act loving toward them.

individual

At coffee with a friend last spring, she looked across the couch at me and said something about how I was really, really restricted as a teen. I think her words were "not allowed to live." And you know, she was right. I was, in many ways, not allowed to live. I was expected to live my mother's life - or at least the life that she had wished she had had, colored by her warped child-of-narcissist adult point of view. She was never a normal child, so how could she conceive of what normal and healthy adolescence should be?

A few days later, my husband reviewed our collection of Monty Python DVDs and reported to me that while we owned The Meaning of Life, we do not own The Life of Brian or The Holy Grail. Thinking about this transported me directly back to my days as a high schooler involved in the theater group. There were some kids who were clearly theater kids, and there were some kids who were involved in theater routinely, but were somehow not really part of the theater group. I was one of those. I remember that during my senior year, I was finally allowed to join the end-of-run cast party, held at one thespian's home (I never saw his father, I still have no idea whether or not his father was even present). We watched various episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it was completely, utterly, mind-blowingly new to me. It was a sense of humor that was completely different from anything I knew. And I loved it.

What I didn't know at that moment was that the reason this humor was so new to me was because it came from outside of my family paradigm. It was something that appealed to me, as an individual, as a member of a community that existed separately from my family. I was seventeen before I discovered this.

When do children normally start experiencing life independently from their family? I don't know, because my "normal" is different from the "normal" of my peers. All I know is that many of them seem to have been experimenting, exploring, testing the waters of individuality many years before I even started dipping my toes in. While they were figuring out who they are, what they like, how things worked for them, I was isolated. I was kept at home, allowed out for specific, strictly-supervised activities and nothing more. By the time I started exploring, they were all so far ahead of me that it made it nearly impossible to catch up.

My oldest son is not quite a "tween" yet, but I can already see him starting to stretch his individuality a bit. Even though I've been working on my initial, pre-programmed "nip it in the bud" reactions to my kids for almost ten years now, I'm still finding new things that make me balk and feel like digging in and saying "no" just because, I don't know, it seems like I should shut this stuff down? How stupid. And yet how conditioned I am (and most of us are!) to think that we should say no, no, no to most requests from kids. My son asks for small things and my immediate impulse is to deny his request, and I have to force myself to slow down, think about whether or not it really matters, and say yes. We're talking about little things like wearing daytime clothing to bed instead of pajamas. Meaningless stuff...except that it's not meaningless to him. It's his first steps toward figuring out how he likes to do things, what other things feel like. He's supposed to be doing this at this age. He needs "little things" to explore right now, and we have to support him in figuring out how to make decisions about what to explore now, before we get to bigger explorations like sex and drugs and driving and such. Thinking about my son and his non-pajama sleepwear reminds me of the time when I was a teen and I wondered what sleeping in the nude was like (I had heard that some people did it), so I tried it. My mother woke me up in the morning, noticed the lack of clothing on my shoulders (the rest of me was under the covers), chastised me for not wearing a nightshirt, and let me know in no uncertain terms that this would not happen again. Why? What did it cost her for me to choose how much clothing I wore while sleeping? How was a decision about my body hers to make at all?

I don't want to make all of the decisions for my children. I want them to be able to explore who they are in both little and bigger ways while they're still living in my home and have the safety net of mom and dad to fall back on. I hope I'm able to remember this as they get older and more separate from me.

for all the loving mothers

This is for you

the mothers who strive each day

to nourish

to embrace

to be healthy

to be whole

to raise children

with compassion

with grace

with insight

with humility

This is for my mother-in-law

daughter of a mother who has just left this world

this is for the nurture she did not receive from her mother

this is for the nurture she tried to give my husband

this is for the nurture she gives to me

This is for my friend

daughter of a narcissistic father

daughter of a deceased mother

this is for the mothering she gives to me

this is for the nourishment she gives to her children

this is for the honesty she gives to herself

This is for you

daughters of the self-absorbed

this is for the women you strive to be

this is for the mothers you may become

May you always be willing

to look into your own soul

May you always be ready

to extend empathy to your children

May you receive love

from those who mother you.

no excuses

The other thing that stuck out for me amidst the reactions to Jezebel's coverage of Project Unbreakable was this comment from user VisforVanity:

I'm always a bit angry (okay, more than a bit) when people try to use "Well, I/he/she/they were abused as kids..." as an excuse for passing on the cycle of abuse. It is ALWAYS possible not to abuse your kids and to change that cycle

I struggle with the idea that I should have more compassion for my mother, who was abused (physically, emotionally, and possibly sexually) by her father. The abuse she received at his hands was worse than what I experienced at her hands, and I have the feeling that I'm supposed to be grateful that she was better than her father, and let her off the hook. "All parents make mistakes," after all. But again and again, I come back to the fact that it is NOT OK to abuse people, whether you do it a little bit or a lot. Regardless of what she experienced, she chose to have children, she chose not to get help, she chose to seek parenting advice from people whose own control issues and abusive temperaments should have been glaringly obvious. She was a psych major for a while, for goodness' sake. She should have understood normal development and the importance of parenting and the risk of passing on abusive behaviors. She knew her father was abusive, yet she didn't ever consider herself at risk for being an abuser, herself.

It is ALWAYS possible to break the cycle.

afraid

If you haven't already heard of Unbreakable, a project intended to support people who have experienced sexual abuse, I highly recommend that you look into it, whether or not you yourself have been assaulted. This effort, started by a 19-year-old photography student, seeks to foster healing, remove the stigma associated with having been abused, and illustrate the horrible reality of rape and molestation. But before I link you to it, I want you to know that it has the potential to be very triggering to women and men who are survivors of sexual abuse, so please make sure that you are in a safe and healthy place before viewing it: Unbreakable.

(I should come right out and say that I was not sexually abused by my parents, even though my mother insists that I have insinuated that she did. Let the record show that I do not have any evidence that my parents sexually abused any of their children.)

I came across the site last night and as I read parts of it, I was reminded several times of the way that sexual abuse relates to other forms of relationship abuse. The quotation above about fear resonated with me, not from the standpoint of having experienced years of sexual abuse, but from experiencing years of emotional abuse. So often, abusers seem shocked and incredulous that their child would fear or dislike them, even though they spend many years carefully training us to fear.

I was trained to fear my mother's disapproval or disappointment. "Not living up to your potential" was something that hung over my head well into my thirties, and still sometimes lurks. I became what Karyl McBride calls a "Mary Marvel" type of daughter - always striving to excel, to achieve, to be the best at everything that I tried (and not try anything for which I might not be the best). "Ohhhh, Claire," is, to this day, a lamentation that haunts me. All my mother had to do was utter that phrase and I knew that I had, once again, both failed to meet my mother's expectations and simultaneously completely fulfilled her expectation that I would fail. I was expected to rise above her expectations of me. I feared expectations, because they essentially said "you must pass this extreme level of excellence in order to be considered a good person, but we all know that you're really a flighty, ditzy, bitchy, lazy thing, and will probably manage to fuck it up."

I was trained to fear my mother's anger, and to fear punishment. She purposefully led me to fear these things. She explicitly stated a belief that children must fear their parents in order to learn how to behave. She used pain, degradation, and humiliation to keep us in line. She considered other parenting methods, especially those based in compassion and gentleness, to be bad parenting, and said so often.

I cannot understand how somebody can so purposefully, so carefully train her children to fear her, who says point-blank that she doesn't want to be a kind, generous parent, and then be surprised and dismayed by the fear itself.

labels

I'm reading David Burns' book Feeling Good, and while I'm actually becoming less of a fan of cognitive-behavioral therapy while reading it, I did like this passage:

"Labeling yourself is not only self-defeating, it is irrational. Your self cannot be equated with any one thing you do. Your life is a complex and ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and actions. To put it another way, you are more like a river than a statue. Stop trying to define yourself with negative labels - they are overly simplistic and wrong. Would you think of yourself exclusively as an "eater" just because you eat, or a "breather" just because you breathe? This is nonsense, but such nonsense becomes painful when you label yourself out of a sense of your own inadequacies."

He goes on to talk about labeling others: "When you label other people, you will invariably generate hostility."

These aspects of self- and other-labeling brought to mind both how narcissistic parents tend to label their children (cold-hearted, the artistic one, dependable, moody, forgetful, bitchy, good, bad, etc) and also how we internalize those labels and apply them and others to ourselves. It also reminded me of the special ed mantra "put the child before the disability," because saying "an autistic child" focuses on what you think is wrong with the child, while saying "a child with autism" allows you to think of the child as a whole person, and their diagnosis as just one aspect of who he or she is. It helps you to think of the child in terms of what he or she can do, rather than what they can't.  This is true of any child, not just those with a medical or psychological diagnosis. The difference between a "difficult child" and a "child who is sometimes difficult to parent" can be vast. The same goes for labeling ourselves. Am I lazy, or am I a person who sometimes feels sluggish? Am I forgetful, or do I sometimes forget to do something? 

I'm going to think about what labels I put on myself today. Where did they come from? When do I use them? Can I change the way I apply them?

parenting the troubled teen

A friend posted this on Facebook because she thought it was funny. Before you click on it, I want you to know that it may be incredibly triggering to survivors of emotional abuse, as well as to those with anxiety.  The first time I tried to watch it, I had to turn it off after less than a minute. I watched it the next morning when fullly-rested and feeling peaceful. By the time it was over, my heart was pounding in my chest in a way that I recognized from my adolescence and young adulthood. It was the adrenaline-filled, trapped feeling that I would have when my mother was devaluing and punishing me.

In the video, Tommy Jordan, father to a 15-year-old daughter, reads his daughter's Facebook diatribe against her parents, then tackles her complaints point-by-point. Throughout the video, he shows disgust with her point of view, mocks her, talks about how infinite her grounding will be, and belittles her. The video concludes with his idea of justice: he unloads a handgun clip into her laptop computer and informs her that she is responsible for replacing her own laptop as well as reimbursing him not only for the software he installed on it, but also for the nine bullets he put into it.  Transcript here.

Many people are congratulating Jordan on his parenting choice. Many more, myself included, are appalled. Some people saw a take-charge, tough-love dad asserting his authority and giving his daughter a taste of her own medicine. Justice! Discipline! Here's what I saw:

• a daughter venting her frustration about balancing her workload and personal life at a time when her school assignments have become harder and take more time, her family responsibilities have increased, and her social needs have also become more complex.
• a daughter who feels like the assignment of family chores is unjust.
• a daughter who is behaving in a manner emotionally consistent with adolescence.
• a father who takes her rant personally.
• a father who decides to respond in an "an eye for an eye" vindictive method of justice.
• a father who mocks his daughter's statements.
• a father who seems unaware of how normal his daughter's behavior is.
• a father whose reaction is out of proportion to his daughter's action.
• a father who states his intent to humiliate his daughter.
• a father who uses shame as a parenting tool.
• a father who threatens to restrict his daughter's physical liberty.
• a father who destroys his daughter's property.
• a father who does not use one single compassionate word in his own diatribe.

This dad has some baggage, to put it mildly.  His reaction shows his own emotional development to be somewhere in the adolescent range. An emotionally secure and healthy adult (heck, even many of us who are flawed!) would certainly be angered and probably embarrassed by a child's angry rant - even more so if our child posted the rant in a place where it could be easily read by over 400 people - but would, hopefully, take some time to get perspective, then think of a compassionate way to listen to her feelings, communicate our own, and find a solution to the situation. 

In fact, that's pretty much exactly what the book How To Talk So Teens Will Listen & Listen So Teens Will Talk (Faber & Mazlish, 2005), which I have been reading lately, recommends. The authors outline a five-step process to conflict resolution:

1. Invite your teen to give his point of view
2. State your point of view
3. Invite your teenager to brainstorm with you
4. Write down all ideas - silly or sensible - without evaluating
5. Review your list, decide which ideas you can both agree to and how you can put them into action.

Notice that the first step is to listen to the kid. Nowhere in Jordan's rant does he ever give any indication that he understands that his daughter is a thinking, feeling human being who has her own perspective on their family situation. I know he's hurt, but it's a parent's job to get over your own shit and focus on the child. I don't know of a single parenting resource that recommends shaming and lecturing children, public humiliation, and destruction of property. In fact, those are all elements of an abusive relationship based on control and domination. 

As a parent, I get that Jordan wants to teach his daughter a lesson. Is public shaming a good way to do it? Do lectures work? No, and no. You know what works? Teaching by example. Jordan wants his daughter to show respect, but he doesn't show any to her, so where will she learn how to show respect? Jordan wants his daughter not to air her grievances in public, but he airs his publicly (his YouTube video will surpass 12 million views today), so how will she learn other ways of resolving conflict? Even the average person on the street these days knows that "do as I say, not as I do" is a piss-poor way to parent. The argument that a child has had values "instilled" in them and "knows that there will be consequences" (frequent retorts from emotionally abusive parents) are bogus. One does not "instill" values into a child by simply telling them those values at top volume. Values are taught by example. The example this girl is seeing is one of a controlling, manipulative, vengeful parent. Will she go on to be yet another mother who makes abusive parenting choices because her father, God bless him, taught her the value of an ass-whoopin'? 

Jordan argues that his daughter (who is named in the video) has not been damaged by her facebook notoriety.  He mentions their "amicable" chats about previous punishment and says that she sees the humor in this particular event and will grow up "happy and healthy." I call bullshit. This girl has probably learned that there's no way out of this controlling relationship.If you can't get away from your abuser, you lay down and take it. You even thank him for it. You convince yourself that these are, in fact, the actions of a loving parent. You smile and say "I love you, daddy," and perhaps earn a hug from the abuser, who is pleased to have bullied you back into your proper submissive place.

Another friend of mine commented that we really can't judge this guy's parenting from one video. I would contend that we can. A healthy parent would not do this. Period. If this were a parent beating a child in the middle of a public place, we would not hesitate in the slightest to label it as abuse, intervene to protect the child, and call the police. Emotional abuse is abuse. It might not be inflicted with punches and kicks, but it is no less harmful, and we have the same obligation to say "this is NOT OK," to explain what isn't ok about it, and to point the way to more compassionate, loving parenting choices.

This girl needed an adult to say "you were feeling really angry, can we talk about it?" and to hear her - really, fully hear her. She didn't need somebody to tell her why her thoughts and feelings are wrong. She didn't need somebody to quibble over the facts. She didn't need to be shamed and threatened. She did need to hear the feelings her parents had about her actions, but probably only after she had been given a chance to vent. She needed somebody to feel sympathetic to her difficulty in figuring out the work-life balance that even most adults complain about. I'm willing to bet that if they had had a truly open-minded, open-hearted chat, they would have been able to find a resolution to this particular situation, and more importantly, she would have been nurtured and learned another way of handling conflict.

Instead of doing this, her father acted like an overgrown, gun-toting adolescent himself: impulsive, rash, without a thought for the potential consequences (like hell he didn't know it could go viral).

I hurt for her. I know what it is to grow up with an emotionally-stunted parent who overreacts, takes things personally, and lashes out in retribution. It's my hope for this young girl that there's a kind adult in her life, if not now, then in the future. I'm sure that she thinks her life is normal and that her father is loving. Most of us abused kids do. I hope that via life experience, a loving friend, counseling, or some other avenue(s), she is eventually able to understand what really happened during her childhood, heal, and change her own path. 

the elegance of the hedgehog

Yesterday I stumbled upon several quotes that I had copied from The Elegance of the Hedgehog when I read it about a year ago. The book explores narcissism at times, and while narcissism is by no means the emphasis of the book and, in fact, did not detract from my enjoyment of the book (as it did for Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections), I still found that these passages leapt off the page when I read them.

The first reminds me of myself in my twenties, when, despite having some issues with my mother, I still believed that her general controlling approach to parenting was the right way and that touchy-feely "gentle" parenting methods were "lax" and "permissive" (you must say these words with a sour sneer, as if picking up soiled underpants from the floor). At that time, I thought of discipline as synonymous with punishment. I thought of children as unformed creatures who had to be trained and broken.

"The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. 'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that it's not true, it's too late.  The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things.  All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children." (page 22)

When my first son was an infant, I still clung to the belief that my mother's childrearing practices were mostly good. I was not yet ready to put myself in my son's place and consider the possibility that I was raised in a way that was often unkind and injurious, and denied my autonomy from birth onward.

This next passage immediately called my mother to mind:

"She cannot feel safe if she hasn't crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. A world where there's room for other people is a dangerous world...at the same time she still needs them just a bit, for a small but essential chore: someone, after all, has to recognize her power...she would like me to tell her, while her sword is under my chin, that she is the greatest and that I love her." p 84

For some reason this reminds me of my mother speaking scornfully of anyone who didn't do things the way she liked, like a woman down the street, who worked with my mother, and who had a pair of sons with whom we liked to play. These children sometimes forgot to be perfect please-and-thank-you automatons, and were accustomed to calling adults by their first names. The woman, who was also a single mother, was held up by my mother as an example of all that was wrong with permissive parenting. She was a failure, a bad person. Her children were beneath us. We were discouraged from playing with them and I believe my mother stopped having a friendly relationship with the mother. My mother seemed really hung up on the fact that the boys had a hard time remembering to call her "Mrs. Clairesmom" instead of by her first name. 

Everything was a fight to determine who was right. Her parenting was the right way. Her religion was "The One True Church." Her ambitions at her job reflected the only correct way to run the place, and heaven help those who stood in her way.
One more quote gets to the heart of the matter:

"If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed." (page 85)

Yes, that explains so much. It's very true of my mother, that she took all the faults she found in herself or with the world and turned them into a moral code, a set of absolutes. Nothing was ever a grey area. Nothing. I can sometimes feel the same tendency in myself, stemming from my own alienation from her, from the world, from myself. Again and again I fight that tendency, and struggle not to pass on the universal lie to my own children.

be excellent

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” 

- Jim Henson

i am NOT my mother

I've never been a post-it affirmations kind of girl, but lately I feel like I should stick little pieces of paper all over the house with this mantra on it. I am NOT my mother. I am NOT my mother. I am NOT.

Motherhood is full of NO right now. No, you may not eat nothing but granola bars all day, every day. No, you may not stay up until eleven o'clock. No, we cannot have a playdate with your friend today. No, you can't run up the wall in the house. No, it's not ok for you to hit your brother because you didn't like the face he made. No, no, no. I really do know many ways of saying YES to children, of setting them up for success, of relaxing and letting go of my agenda, but lately my kids have been pushing pushing pushing. It's one thing to provide lots of options to which I can say YES, it's another when you're being asked for the six millionth time for something that you simply are not going to give to the kid.

I'm a "gentle discipline" kind of parent, but sometimes after patiently explaining and redirecting and modeling and teaching for the umpteenth time, I just want to scream, "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!" I mean really, sometimes kids are a royal pain in the ass, no matter how developmentally appropriate and normal they are.

And then I start to remember how many times I heard my mother use the exact same tone of voice that just came out of my mouth, and cringe. I think of how I lived in fear of her anger, how I disliked her even as a child, how unfair and excessively strict she always seemed to be. And I wonder, was I really just being an annoying little kid? Am I just forgetting the thousand times she responded patiently and kindly while remembering the thousand-and-first time, when she got exasperated? Have I become my mother, unreasonably strict and controlling, or have I misjudged my mother, and was she nothing like I remember?

When this merry-go-round starts turning in my head, it's time for a reality check.

I have no problem with the fact that my mother expected us to eat healthy food, get enough sleep, refrain from injuring siblings, say please and thank-you, value family, respect authority, et cetera. Those are things that every parent should teach her child.

I don't even really hold a grudge regarding the many times she lost her temper, or the choice she made to have more children than she could emotionally handle, or the level of control she exerted over her children through their childhood and extending beyond their adolescence. I think they were poor choices, but I understand the factors that led to them - both the realities of being a frazzled parent, and the context of her own personal history.

When it gets down to it, I don't even really take issue with my childhood. I mean, yes, I do take issue with it, but only because it serves to illustrate that the problems I have with her in the present did extend into the past, and demonstrate a consistently dysfunctional relationship.

The real problem, the thing I'm truly worried about when I hear my mother's voice come out of my mouth?  Who she is today, and how she treats me today, and what I worry will happen to my relationship with my own children as they get older.

I do not want to be a woman who:

• refuses to take ownership of her actions
• never acknowledges hurts that she causes to others
• never apologizes
• considers tactlessness a character strength
• acts like her children are uninteresting or obnoxious to her
• plays her children against each other
• has favorites, denies having favorites
• demeans and shames her children
• has to have everything her way, cannot set her wants aside to meet children's needs
• will not acknowledge that her children are experts on the topics of their own lives, experiences, thoughts, and feelings..as well as other things
• makes fun of people who are smarter, dumber, fatter, thinner, prettier, uglier, richer, poorer, less talented, more talented, etc than herself
• projects her own insecurities onto her children
• lists her children's flaws when she is frustrated with them
• cannot allow her children to make their own choices
• identifies the parts of herself that her children need for physical or emotional support, and uses those things to manipulate them
• disregards her children's autonomy and physical or emotional boundaries

How do I know that I'm on the right track? How do I know that I'm not doing irreparable damage to my children? How do I know that I'm making choices that will help them to be healthy in the future and will ensure a healthy relationship between them and me?  My mother didn't know. What makes me think I can be any more self-aware than she was?

breaking the cycle

Once I read that breaking the cycle of abuse takes three generations. I don't know how they arrived at that number, but the idea that changing family dynamics is a gradual task that more than one generation must shoulder makes sense to me. Each person can probably only improve upon her upbringing but so much. And if the goal of completely breaking the cycle is to produce an intact, healthy family, that suggests a healthy extended family, and clearly a first-generation cycle-breaker cannot offer his or her children healthy grandparent relationships. It will take time.

Sometimes I wonder - which generation am I? How effective can I be? My mother's father was a pathological narcissist, and I know that she wanted to be a better parent than he was. She succeeded, but not by much; while she avoided some of the specific harmful behaviors that he committed, she kept the same controlling mindset, the same scornful view of children and their needs. Without a change in philosophy, how could she truly break the cycle?

When I started my parenting journey, I was still fairly enmeshed in my family. I accepted my mother's childrearing beliefs and most of her practices. I thought that my beef with her was limited to my adolescence and the occasional irritation in the present. Philosophies like Unconditional Parenting and gentle discipline seemed ridiculous to me, irresponsible, "lax". My son and some chance meetings with more open-minded people taught me differently.  With time, exposure to people who parented differently from my parents, and lots of reading, I came to have a different understanding of who and what children are, and how adults can relate to them.

Is that enough? I can tell you, I struggle with being a compassionate parent. My first instinct is often to feel angry and to criticize.  Author Naomi Aldort would call those "old scripts" - the way you've been conditioned to react, even though it's not consistent with who you want to be. With time, that's changing. I'm a much kinder, more thoughtful person today than I was ten years ago. But young children don't wait for you to heal yourself. They're here, soaking things up as they happen. I was not as kind a parent to my first child as I have been to my third child - and even with the third, I have trouble staying engaged and not sending them the "mommy's too busy doing her own thing, don't bug me" message. Did I change too late? Have I changed enough?

Will my kids' first reaction to their children be less irritated than my own? Will they have imprinted different reactions and behaviors than I did in my childhood? Will they have better emotional tools at their disposal? Are their children going to be the third generation, the one that grows up with parents who can access empathy easily?

obey?

I was just reading part of a website from a former "quiverfull" woman/mother, and this line jumped out at me:

A relationship in which one party must make all the concessions has nothing to do with love and everything to do with power and control.

This is true not only in marriage, but in all relationships. Husband-wife, parent-child, friend-to-friend, coworker-to-coworker, boss-coworker, teacher-student, and so forth. I'm glad that this woman is "not quivering" any more, in the large-family sense or in the shaking-in-fear sense.

bullying

A while back, when the shit was hitting the fan because I was no longer willing to play the crying, wheedling, please-mommy-I'll-be-good-and-do-whatever-you-ask daughter, my mother wrote me a long letter telling me everything that's wrong with me, and I wrote a short letter back. My letter could be summed up as saying "I won't allow you to treat me this way. You may not bully me."  Using the B word struck a nerve. Nobody wants to be called a bully, least of all the bully herself.

My letter came to mind a few nights ago when I attended a parents' night at my children's school. The topic was bullying, approached not from the zero-tolerance, bullies-are-bad-people standpoint that I'm accustomed to hearing from schools, but rather from a very thoughtful, developmental-research-based angle. We discussed a definition of bullying put forward by Dr. Dan Olweus, a Norwegian professor of psychology who has been studying bullying for almost 40 years. He describes bullying thusly:

"A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself."

This definition includes three important components:

1. Bullying is aggressive behavior that involves unwanted, negative actions.
2. Bullying involves a pattern of behavior repeated over time.
3. Bullying involves an imbalance of power or strength.

Negative actions are defined as actions through which someone intentionally inflicts, or attempts to inflict, injury or discomfort upon another person. This may include physical abuse as well as verbal abuse like namecalling, threatening, taunting, teasing, spreading rumors, or also "indirect bullying" actions such as making faces or excluding someone from a group. In bullying situations, there is generally a power imbalance, in which the bully has greater power (social status, age, size, intelligence, etc) than the target.

This resonates with how I view bullying when it applies to my children (as instigators or as targets), but what was even more striking to me was that it was exactly what I have believed for many years about my mother and her treatment of me. Discomfort, both emotional and physical, was intentionally inflicted upon me and my siblings repeatedly. I heard her talk on many occasions about exactly why she did what she did, and it was all about manipulating people and intentionally making them squirm so that she could obtain/maintain the upper hand. While she also did this in her professional life, this MO was especially applied of her children, who were, of course, smaller, younger, and weaker than herself, and dependent upon her.

My mother's entire parenting philosophy centered on power. When she recalled problems with us in the past it was always framed as a power struggle, and the only acceptable outcome was for her to win. She made fun of parenting advice that focused on consensus-building or parents showing friendly compassion for children; her favorite parenting author was James Dobson, who wrote:

...Mom or Dad should have some means of making their youngster want to cooperate...I will suggest one: it is a muscle lying snugly against the base of the neck...when firmly squeezed, it sends little messengers to the brain saying "This hurts: avoid recurrence at all costs." The pain is only temporary; it can cause no damage. But it is an amazingly effective and practical recourse for parents when their youngster ignores a direct command to move.

That sounds like intent to cause discomfort to me. I suffered the neck pinch on multiple occasions, usually in public. I imagine it looked like a mother lovingly putting her arm around her child's shoulders. In addition to having to immediately comply with whatever I was expected to do, there was also the expectation that I not let other people know that I was being hurt.

My mother was a person who could read the passage above and think "yes, this is what I will do to my children, this is a good way to parent." How does this happen? Bullies are people. Why do they bully? Because of a fundamental insecurity that stems from receiving inadequate nurturing and/or inadequate limits. They bully to get attention, to get power, to elicit fear, to gain connection.

I would say that my mother is one of the bullies who is the way she is because of inadequate nurture. She didn't want to be like her father. She knew that he was an abuser because his mother both withheld appropriate nurture and did not set important limits. She knew that he visited the same neglect on her (although not the permissiveness). She didn't want to repeat his mistakes with her children, yet she never realized (and still apparently hasn't) that the key to being a good and loving parent was not merely to avoid doing the specific things that he did, but to examine her own neglected childhood and care for herself so that she would not turn to bullying her children in order to get the attention and power she needed but didn't get as a child.

In the schools, enlightened administrators know that in order for bullying to stop, somebody must help the kids who are doing the bullying. Those kids have a need that must be filled, by adults or by themselves. For enlightened parents to stop the cycle of abuse, we have to dig down and find that injured, neglected place inside and find ways to nurture ourselves. If we don't, we are doomed to repeat the errors of our parents and commit negative actions against our own children in our own struggle to find connection.

normality & unfulfilled promises

I don't know what a "good mother" does.

I imagine that in some families, the parents have had their own emotional needs met in childhood and are healthy enough to parent in a confident way, taking some middle road between coddling their children and abusing them. This shouldn't be confused with parenting "perfectly" - there are no perfect people, therefore there are no perfect parents. But I assume that some people are emotionally intact enough to parent competently, treating their children with sensitivity, offering guidance, providing limits, nurturing them in a way that is emotionally responsive and fosters independence.

What does that look like?

Yesterday my oldest son reminded me of a promise I had made to him to download an audiobook. I got testy with him, telling him that he needed to remind me at some time other than bedtime, and that perhaps he should write a note to me and post it somewhere where I would see it.

Later I realized what an ass I had been. The "write me a note" advice is dismissive and, moreover, pulled straight from my mother's playbook. How is it his responsibility to remind me of a promise? I'm the one that made the promise, I'm the one who has neglected to fulfil the promise, and why? Because I'm "too busy"?  I downloaded the file immediately, updated my iPod before I could get "busy" again and forget.

I wish I knew how frequently a "normal" parent fails to come through on a promise. When is it simply human, and when is it a sign of detachment, neglect, carelessness?

This morning I apologized to my son for not coming through on my promise, and for nagging him to remind me. It's not his job to hound me to do something I said I would do; it's my job. I'm the adult, I'm the one who made a commitment, and I'm the one who must see it through.

One of the things I wish for him is that he considers it "normal" for a parent to come through on a promise more often than not, without putting the burden of the promise on the child's shoulders.

sleeping beauty trips me with a frown

One day when I was probably three or four years old, I told my mom, "I want to be a real princess and live in a castle and wear beautiful dresses all the time."  At least, this is what my mother told me I said; I have no memory of it, although I do remember thinking as a child (heck, as an adult) that castles and gowns and fairy godmothers were all so utterly, wonderfully romantic.

For me the wish to be a princess was all about the fantastic unreality of it. In my imagination, princesshood meant beauty - not my own physical beauty, but being surrounded by beautiful things. Beautiful brocades, beautiful embroidered tapestries, beautiful architecture, beautiful landscapes filled with beautiful babbling brooks and beautiful meadows and forests.  Years later when I first encountered Keats and read "a thing of beauty is a joy forever," my soul thrilled to the same truth I had found on my own in childhood.  That love of beauty made every shrub in our yard into a palace and every plain sheet into a ball gown.

For my mom, however, my wish was anything but romantic. For her, it was a criticism of what she and my father could provide. Our house must be too meager, our clothing too plain. My wish was selfish, ungrateful, pretentious. It was an insult to her, a rejection of our commoners' existence. For many years my four-year-old fantasy was held up as proof of how self-centered and dissatisfied I was, right from the start.

For the thirty some-odd years in between, I felt misunderstood and scorned, yet also sympathetic with my mother, who struggled along with my father to make ends meet and must have received my daydreams of jewels and royal balls with a desperate sadness, knowing she could never make my dreams come true. But in the past few years, as my children have grown through early childhood, I have come to realize how every child romanticizes the world and has splendid, romantic wishes.  Why didn't my mother understand that I was just being a kid, exercising my imagination?  Why did she, instead, take my daydreams so personally?

Last week, I was playing a room escape game with my eldest son. The game was created using photos of an enormous mansion, and at one point, my son voiced a wish to live in a castle like that one. I'll admit, for a moment I felt defensive. Was he unhappy with our home? Does he feel deprived? But then I remembered my princessy wishes, and knew that it's ok for him to entertain fantasies of living in a home large enough to fit twenty of ours inside. It doesn't make him ungrateful or materialistic. It doesn't mean anything about me or him or our real life.

So I joined him in his wishing, comparing notes on our dream homes.  Realizing that I was able to get over myself and understand how normal his wish is made me feel sad for the four-year-old girl whose mother could not join her in pretending, choosing instead to form a permanent judgment of the girl's character. I also felt sad for the mother, who must have had a horrible deprivation inside herself in order to take such a universal childhood wish so personally.

Let us all remember the joy of creating imaginary castles, and join our children in roaming through those marble halls.