Notes from a Parent Realizing a Child is Addicted and Wishing her own Mother was Alive / Circa 2001

This book is not about my mother, who has been the sole subject of my musings for more than five years; it is about raising children and being human.

I am engaging in magical thinking.  After my mother died I had enormous feelings of inadequacy regarding my own motherhood.  I keep thinking that if I just say the right thing my children will do the right thing.  My therapist says indeed, that IS magical thinking.  So what was the indefinable secret that I thought I could share?  I don’t know.  I do know that the way to get to it is through writing.

When you first cradle your child in your arms there is no remote thought that “Gee, I’m going to mess with your self esteem by being so busy, I can never see you.”  Nor do we, as parents, say to ourselves “I want my kid to believe that life is hard and it is impossible to get what you want.”  Nor do we ever say to ourselves “What a worthless infant! I bet she’ll grow up and get pregnant at sixteen” or “he’s lazy, he’ll drop out of school.”  As parents we never say those things to ourselves, and if we say them to our children it is because we are inept at communication, not because we believe those things.  Oh we may actually have fears – – I got down on my knees and thanked God the day after my youngest daughter turned sixteen and wasn’t pregnant.  So while the fears may be real, we should give great consideration to how we express them.

Before I ever even had my first child, I committed to a lifetime of communicating with my children.  I was certain that via discussion I would have more influence on their outcomes.  Rebellion looks so dangerous to me.  I mean, I was the quintessential rebel, a child / woman with a cause every step of the way.  To be a rebel means to NOT listen to words of wisdom from any other.  So my commitment to communication required a means of making those critical discussions non – adversarial.    I have been successful, I mean, it is clear to me that I have marvelous communication with my children.  With them I have ventured out into and included the confrontational mode.  With my children I have somehow traversed the road of communication reality, they understand that I will respond, sometimes strongly, to whatever issues we share, so adversarial has become okay. 

To be continued – Written 2001