She’s Not My Mom!
I’ve had a standing joke with my daughter since she’s been old enough to comprehend it and not rat me out. She was in her 20s and it was long after my mother had died. “You know that sweet, white haired old lady who took such good care of you, read you stories, played hours of Rummy with you, took you berry picking? Well, she wasn’t my mom! My mom had black hair, veins sticking out of her neck while screaming, and a metal spatula with my name on it.” I have variation on that theme with my brother. “I don’t know who your mother was, but she wasn’t mine. I was the one who had a metal spatula named after him, not you!”
With the exception of being the parent of an only child, parents of multiple children are not the same parents to each of them. Parents simply do not parent their children the same way, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s not even humanly possible to do so. We are almost completely different parents to each of our children. I’m not referring to biology here. This is not about chromosomes. There are different types of genetics: chromosomal, which we cannot control, and what most people call “genetic,” and family history, which we can modify because it’s learned. It’s called “familial” genetics and it encompasses generations. Or as my mother would say in moments of pique, which were often: “Wait till you have your own!” (Wouldn’t you know it, she was right about that too!)
Parents may democratically apply the same house “rules” to all of their kids; for example bedtime, homework, chores, buying things for them, etc.; but that doesn’t change the fact that they act and feel differently towards each child. There is really no way to quantify or qualify parental feelings, thoughts, or reactions etc., that originate in the parent’s own past. That past includes the entire cast of characters from the parent’s life, beginning with their own parents and family, and including siblings, extended family, teachers, parents of friends, friends, and anyone else who was influential in their early lives. All of these factors are embedded in parenting. While this natural process can sometimes be consciously recognized by the parent, most of it is unconscious.
I have a question I ask of all parents when they are concerned about one of their children: “What was going on, what can you remember from your own life when you were your child’s age?” The answers can be very revealing. Often, parents may be re-experiencing or remembering their own parent-child relationship by the way they parent their children and/or in the kinds of interactions they have with them. No parent escapes this; there is little choice involved. I firmly believe that every age one’s child is, we parents re-experience our own life at that age. For example, when my daughter was about three, she came running into our bedroom and excitedly exclaimed, “Look Daddy, I dresseded myself all by myself!” And indeed she had. A quick observation revealed that her shirt was inside out, her sneakers were on the wrong feet, and she was wearing two different colored socks. Initially, I was a really good, thoughtful father, saying, “Oh look at you! What a big girl you are!” She beamed with pleasure. Then in a flash, I somehow morphed into something or someone else. Next thing I knew I was correcting her grammar. “You mean, you dressed, not dresseded yourself.” Then I attempted to fix her sneakers, her shirt, and find matching socks. I say attempted because my beaming child was now whimpering, frowning, and definitely not happy or cooperative. I had managed to ruin what should have been a wonderful father-daughter moment, not to mention turning a delicious act of autonomy and pride into an unpleasant if not rejecting experience. Fortunately for both of us, my wife came to the rescue saying, “Ok, I’ll take over now.” Me, a therapist and loving father, bailed out! What just happened? As I walked away, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and to my chagrin, I actually looked like my mother, her face superimposed on my own, like an episode from the Twilight Zone. It occurred to me later, too late in this case, that I was remembering my own mother’s anxious preoccupation with grammar, propriety, and sartorial correctness. What would the neighbors say if they saw me dressed that way?
I had internalized my mother’s personality and parenting style and recreated it with my own child. Often, we turn different children into important people from our own past and parent them based on that earlier relationship. For example, a mother’s second child looked physically different from her other two children, both of whom looked more like their father. This child looked like and reminded her of her “side” of the family, specifically her own middle brother, who was a fragile and neglected sibling growing up. She then transferred that experience to her second child by being overprotective and overly preoccupied with him. She essentially turned him into her brother in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another very common parent-child interaction occurs when we project qualities of ourselves onto a particular child and then react according to whether those qualities are acceptable to us. I actually believe that all parents, without exception, do this, that it’s normal behavior and part of all family life. An example might be when a parent projects his own passivity and lack of motivation onto his son. The father is unable to deal with those issues in his own life, projects them onto his son, and then becomes angry when his teenager exhibits any behavior that remotely resembles passivity. For example, when his teen sleeps late and/or sits around playing video games his father goes ballistic and pontificates about “wasted talent.” Both behaviors are age appropriate but they unfortunately arouse anxiety in the father who then gets into contentious, critical episodes with his son.
This dynamic is at its most problematic and most dramatic when it involves child abuse, where severe parental punishment is meted out for behavior the parent hates about him/herself or because he/she is reenacting a similar relationship he/she had with his/her own parents. In fact one of the tip offs that this interaction is occurring is when parents overreact, when they’re too worried, too angry, too upset, even too happy. That generally indicates a situation in which the past is glued to the present. It‘s not that the parent shouldn’t be irritated or angry over something the kid did or didn’t do, but when that irritation becomes a nuclear reaction, an over the top rage for example, that usually means something from the parent’s past has been “added” or “glued” to the present interaction. The parent is not dealing in the moment but in the past. As noted, most of these parental dilemmas occur at an unconscious level.
The marital vows don’t exist between parents. The divorce rate is way too high for that to be true. They do, however, apply to children and their parents: “My parents for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, etc. And there is no choice in the matter. We internalize the good, the bad, and the ugly qualities of our parents like sponges. Some of us try to do the opposite of how we were parented as a way of avoiding the mistakes we think our parents made. That doesn’t change my point; it’s still the result of how we were parented. Needless to say, our own parents didn’t get the way they were by accident either. They had parents too. And there you have it. The chicken and the egg conundrum is solved! Family relationships and experiences are passed down generationally via learning and repetition. It’s no accident that we humans are on the top of the food chain. We spend practically our entire lifetimes being dependent upon, advised, and taught by our parents. That allows us to learn more.
Parenting is on the job training for the rest of one’s life, and there’s no manual. Sure, there are hundreds of self-help books about parenting and lots of experts out there. But few of them address this idea that children remind us of ourselves and other important people from our own childhoods. What someone might offer as parental advice is based on his/her own, personal experiences, and rarely takes into consideration how a parent’s own childhood interacts with her/his parenting decisions. Ideally, what matters most is that we parents are basically well grounded with a solid base of security and confidence ourselves. My mother was right: nothing changes the course of one’s life than having your own.