Surviving Your Parents or Breaking the Cycle #2

Did you have a parent that you did not always want to be around? Was there one that you just couldn't figure out? Was that parent actually the inferior parent, or were you just needing something from them?

As I shared in blog #1 - Let's face it- parenting is one heck of a job.  No instructions. Often little to no support. We are just doing what we think is best.  And sometimes that might make us the favorite parent or the not so favorite one.  I have been both so I reflect on the following with respect and no blame at all.

The Not-So Favorite Parent

Growing up, my mom was the not-so favorite parent.  This could be attributed to many things.  Mother - daughter relationships always came to mind first but for us it was much more.  My mom had to be the "hold down the fort" parent by the very nature of the circumstances of the times and our lives.

For most of my life, my mom was a stay at home mom.  When she did work, it was around my schedule so that she could be home when I got off of school.  This was how my parents had decided life would be, based on typical social norms of the time to create as much stability and security for their only child. Stability that my mom never really had.

In early elementary school, Mom was the Room Mother.  I remember her hand making felt heart candy holder with every child's name in my class beautifully handwritten in glitter on them.  And this was long before glitter pens.  She made cakes for Easter and fancy cupcakes for class parties all from her women's magazines and her Betty Crocker cookbook and file boxes.

In later elementary and middle school, she drove my friends and I anywhere we wanted to go, hosted almost weekly sleepovers, and took us shopping every single weekend. To the world she did everything she could to be the super mom. It is who she truly wanted to be.

Unfortunately, as I have learned, she had no real role models to sustain this.  Only the mothers on tv showed the superficial things that a mom needed to do.  They never, at that time, showed a child of trauma and neglect how to seek help and overcome her demons and break the cycles set in motion long before her own birth and unknowingly impacting her own mothering. Mental health was a taboo topic.  You kept issues quiet. And I learned early on that you told no one about things that seemed off or that happened behind closed doors, not even Daddy. Although I know he knew.

My mother worked hard to be the perfect housewife and mother but she was unprepared to cope with the trauma and learned unhealthy coping mechanisms she had to develop in her youth.  These things that stuck with her and crept into her soul permeating her daily life. So she had to work hard to balance what she wanted to be with what she could not control. She was a product of her environment and her traumas, and those translated into outbursts and irrational actions and words amidst the doing of what she wanted a good mom to be.  It must have been exhausting. Isolating. Maybe even scary. 

With all that she shoved down deep and tried to hide, tried to normalize, and tried to ignore, my mom was absent in her own ways. A Lot. And she was present in ways that were not to the benefit of her home.  No blame.  No guilt.  No sympathy asked.  LOTS of people experience this life and today kids have parents unlike anything I ever experienced.

The reflection on that is interesting though.

Reflection as a Kid

As a kid, I thought that my mother's outbursts and behaviors were my fault.  That somehow, if I was perfect enough, I could make her be the mom that she tried to be come to fruition every moment. I believed that I was the crux of most of the things that went down in our home, hidden from others. This and more added up to what I craved.  I wanted to have a special bond with my mom where I felt unconditional love and could get positive support, be picked up and comforted when I fell, and stop the the things that hurt us.

I sought out ways to get gaps in my needs met and coped in unhealthy ways.  I have mimicked behaviors I learned from my home and could never comprehend why I was unable to obtain the results and compliance that I had witnessed within the home out in the real world. Nothing made sense, but I knew I dearly loved my mom.

Reflection as an Adult

Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I learned that outbursts in anger that I had were not healthy.  I learned that living in a state of blame or victimhood or living how I wanted with little concern to the impact of others was toxic.  I learned that by living in a way that mimicked some of my childhood experiences that I was actually living in a state of depression and anger that I could not sustain.  I was living a life of self deprecation and I was carrying on with pieces of my young life that I hated the most.

These reflections began the very long road to my own recovery. Years of counseling and therapy- on and off.

I sought out help when I would hit a wall.  A place where I would either hit a new bottom, experience a new hump that I could not get beyond on my own, and eventually when I realized that I had recreated the dysfunctionality of my youth within my own home in some attempt to right that which I could not in my childhood, but now with my spouse. These were the times that I thrust my hands for to the life lines of professional support.  Why?  It was simple. 

I was continuing the cycle.  I was trying to create a different ending to the same situation over and over.  I was failing and I sought help at the most critical lows. But was it too late?  Nope- Better late than never (recycled quote from my now 19 year old).

Reflection as a Parent

As a mom, I realized that I had internalized many things from my childhood.  I became GREAT at creating the home life that I wanted everyone to see.  I became a master of normalizing that which was not normal within my home.  And I hid from the people who I knew could see through the act. I did everything I could physically do to give my kids the stuff, but on reflection, in the early years, could fall flat on the stability and emotional aspects of what they needed.  

My boundaries with them were written in chalk that could easily be erased.  My follow-through was abysmal.  And I modeled behaviors which they learned that were seriously unhealthy for us all- denial, self-loathing, poor self-soothing skills, and I am sure there is more.

But, better late than never.  At some point, like a light switch, I decided it needed it to change.  I know the day.  I know the event. It was the day that my oldest spoke out to me in a manner that was chillingly familiar and not good. 

I needed to break the cycle. I could no longer chip away slowly and bandage up the areas that hurt in an attempt to conceal them.  I needed to stop making excuses and seriously attack the trauma and demons from my childhood homelife and from things that happened to me outside of that home that I never spoke of.  I needed to learn how to love myself, model better behaviors, parent better, and basically get serious with the work of getting healthy.  I did not want to grow old, and bitter, and angry.  I did not want my children to grow into people that they were not truly meant to be.  There had been enough of that in my family tree. It had been passed down from my mom to me, and from her parents to her, and I am sure it was an unwelcome gift that they received from theirs. 

Again. No blame. No guilt (mostly). No sympathy or reassurance asked. LOTS of people experience this life.

But the choice is ours to make.  Do we want to control our future or have our past control us?  I wanted to control my future, or the parts of it that I could.

I learned some very, very important things from my mom:

1. Parents can make mistakes but it does not mean that they don't love you
2. Parents do the best they can with the tools they have
3. People are not bad or week because they do not seek help or have personality disorders
4. You do not have to expose yourself to toxicity simply because you are defined as family
5. Mental Health is not taboo and there is no shame in getting help from professionals
6. Know who you can count on
7. You can do wonderful things for your kids and sometimes fall short without even realizing it
8. Try to do your best and be ok it that is not good enough for others
9. Decide what you do and do not want to be as a person, as a parent, a spouse, a friend, or be remembered by
10. Work to break bad habits and celebrate incremental change towards what you want to embody as a human being

Breaking the Cycle - better late than never

I started in therapy for anger when I was 19 years old.  I probably should have been getting some sort of help earlier :)  While I learned coping skills and how to control crazy outbursts that made no sense to me, once I got that more under control, I thought I was done.  I was fixed.

What I did not learn until my thirties was that there was much more to my anger than what was simply surfacing and could be seen in my teens. I had to accept that I was not a victim and that we all have our own paths that we journey along.  the good and bad on these paths is completely relative to the individual.  My bad may not be your bad.

I learned to grab hold of the support that I needed through each phase of my life, to forgive myself, to see the world, my life and my past through the eyes of others, and appreciate all of the good stuff.  I learned that the good stuff really existed and I did not have to make it up for it to be believed by others. I also did not need to prove to anyone that the good stuff was there, part of my reality although that one was actually hard to learn.

I learned that I did not have to right the perceived wrongs of my past.  I did not need to relive that which did not serve me or my children simply because it would be seen as the right thing to do.  I did not have to ignore my boundaries but I could hold strong to them and follow through on what actually was healthy for me and my children. But to be honest, this is one where I oftentimes find that I can easily slide back and must fought to maintain- I do not have to try to fix the past or right the wrongs. 

In my forties and now my fifties, I learned how to be ok with asking for help yet again no matter how often or infrequently I need it.  How to be ok digging into the depths of the things that are no longer serving me. How to change the behaviors that make absolutely no sense.

And today I know that there is no such thing as perfect and fixed.  There are only moments in time where we do the best that we know.  And, if we are lucky, we are give then grace and the days to continue to grow, evolve, in the person we know that we are deep down inside.  Even if we had forgotten who that person could be.

I still have so much to learn in the life.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  But I know where I want my focus to be, what I want in a healthier rest of my days.

And my mom? My mom, in my youth, did the best that she was capable of at the time.  And while one can point fingers of blame or doubt, what does it matter in the end?  Why not point to the things that went well and change that patterns and behaviours that do not serve us? Why not find what serves us and hold true to the boundaries and healthy coping skills for our own sanity and for those that embrace what we need to be sane, to be happy, to try.

So ~ Why not break the cycle- for you, for your kids, and even for the person who never wanted to be part of the cycle at all? No blame. No guilt (mostly). No sympathy or reassurance asked. LOTS of people experience this life. But, we have a choice.  What will you choose?