askyermom

Last year, I wrote a piece about why I believe there are no toxic people. My thoughts about parenting with childhood trauma sprung out of that, and while I touch on it in my book, it deserves a lot more depth from someone smarter than I am.

As an aside, I would like to mention that I am not being self-deprecating when I mention that I’m not very smart. It’s easy to assume self-deprecation, but I accept that I am not nearly as smart as people have been telling me I am all my life. This is great news for you, smarter people. You don’t have to take me seriously, but just let my semi-stupidity wash by, like car wash water in the rain.

Parenting when you have had a generally unpleasant childhood experience is incredibly common, but not always acknowledged. I have spoken to people with trauma so severe they simply do not frame it in any personal terms. There was bad luck, things were lost, and events are described from a distance like a story where they were not written in as characters.

Sometimes the suffering we don’t acknowledge came straight at us from a parent or two. It’s perfectly logical that we would want to avoid mimicking that behavior toward our own children, but resolving to behave differently is not enough. It’s a fantastic start, though. If that’s all you have at the beginning–great!!–just keep in mind that you aren’t done yet.

When it comes to your own mistreatment, go ahead and be angry about the mistreatment you have suffered, but don’t stop there, either. It’s up to you to understand what this experience has truly meant for you. Is it feeding your fears and limiting your life? If it’s not, is it even technically a trauma?

Maybe we don’t have to accurately label it to understand it in a personal way. If it feels important to you, it is worthy of your attention, whether it is trauma or merely trauma-ish.

For me, any time I am suddenly angry or losing my tempter, it is a big clue that something nearby has touched on a childhood wound or situation. It explains my irritation with all dentists. Any time someone tells me to brush my teeth, I am oddly enraged. This is definitely a “me” problem.

Growing up, I was continually lied to about the nature of love. Love is not a word you say while acting to mistreat and ignore another person. Sure, you can joke by saying, “I love you, now get lost!” but it’s not funny to kids if it’s the theme of every day.

Learning how to love people more properly was my focus for a very long time as a mom, but I didn’t seriously consider loving myself as a basic requirement. This is more evidence that while I’m supposed to be smart, I was not actually that smart.

Any place where people bloviate about self improvement online someone is likely to say, “Put on your own oxygen mask first” (this is a reference to flight safety if you are somehow innocent of this instruction). I can attest that it’s possible to hold your breath for decades in this metaphorical fashion while caring for others, but it would save so much of our liveliness to get our own breathing worked out first.

While it’s certainly not as efficient as getting your childhood healing done before you support someone else’s childhood, doing both at the same time is possible. Most families you know are dealing some version of this.

As a recovering parent, when you see your kids wrestle with painful situations, you may be drawn in to share their emotions in an alarming way. Usually, this empathy is not helpful for them. Just my opinion!! This strong empathy is a signal to you: you have some archaeology to do on your own past and patterns.

You can see that signal, while also trying to support the kids as they learn to accept or act for themselves. You can do both! Just try not to confuse your stuff with their stuff.

In the early years, my mother always used my crises to dump her worst stories on the table. It was the opposite of helpful. What this did was signal to me that my problems were never important and that it was up to me to soothe her feelings in every situation. I was the emotional janitor for both of us, and while she got a grip for a bit in midlife, she tried again to hand me the mop for her feelings once she was seriously elderly.

This is one of the most frustrating things about raising your parents, they may not stay grown up but come back around in a spiral of pushing you to parent them again. It’s okay. People are crazy.

Kids also have spirals of growth and regression, and naturally, as their parent, you will do the same thing. Sometimes we forget that growth and progress aren’t some one-way trip, like moving up a ladder. Every ladder has at least one chute. Maybe it’s better to imagine we’re climbing a mountain that has slippery bits and mudslides with movable base camps. Sometimes you are tending the camp for your climbers and in the case of parenting you are mostly that camp tender.

Every now and then, you get to be the climber in relation to your kids, while they tend camp for you. It’s just another reason to make the most of showing them how it’s done.

You can do this and you can be kind when you can’t quite do this. It’ll be okay.

Love,
yermom

My new book Don’t Eat Your Children is available at most retailers for mail order. Try this one: Bookshop.org. If you subscribe to my newsletter or my substack, you will be in the loop for whatever comes next, like paperbacks.

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