Off the hook
I crammed my head full of self-help books this summer and Mad Men and file-sorting. I read about standing on your own feet, about hugging until relaxed, about the way children of trauma meet children of neglect in adulthood and fuse, bond, until the bond frays and rips and tears your heart out. I did this as I gave away old shoes and baby clothes and put aside an item or two to remember my son’s early childhood by, imagining the moment in ten or fifteen years when we open the box and compare the small garments against his long, almost-adult frame. What will he think of them then?
The last self-help book I read, inhaled, really, as I was exhilarated to recognize myself in some of it, helped me in unexpected ways. We can change, it reassured me. We can take these childhoods without foundation, or with foundations of broken brick, and still move forward. We are not permanently molded by them.
It made me feel hopeful, that these feelings of inadequacy, of evilness, of being wrong and responsible for every bad thing in my life and the lives of the people I love and take care of, are mutable. And then there is the boy, the child, the one I parent: even if we mess up (and who doesn’t mess up?), chances are that he will be ok, and if he isn’t (it won’t all be our fault, will it? though I tend to think parents should take responsibility for the bad stuff and give their amazing children credit for the good.), he will be responsible for creating his own change. No one gets through childhood unscathed.
We are not static. We flow. We can’t live as if every decision will mold us into something more brittle, will permanently scar us or our children. If we are already worrying about the effects of our actions on our children, chances are that our concern will be a buffer. Treating them as if they are delicate pieces of china, too fragile for the world, unable to stand out in it without our assistance, might only reinforce a feeling of helplessness, of can’t do, of not being able to be independent when the time comes.
A foundation of love and trust helps, with a gentle tug here, a push there, buttressed by the fact that we always have their back, that we trust them to do the right thing given that we know them and have kept them close when they needed it. For those of us who had very little of this in our early life -- love without trust, good conversation and debate without the surety of stability, sad nights crying alone in dark rooms -- we can still make it in the world. We have emotional texture. We have stories to tell, of quirkiness and (sometimes) adventure and survival.
I stand at the doorway to the world. I try not to let my isolated past generate my future. Change is possible. It is necessary. The people who raised me (or didn’t) are off the hook, struggling to move forward in their own lives and I hope to be off the hook myself someday, loose and free, a flawed human being who continues to do her best.
From the prompt "To be continued."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited a bit. Up before 4 a.m., anticipating the first day of school for the boy and my mother's arrival later this morning. Is this post any good? I have no idea and I'm not sure I care at the moment.
Image by D. Munoz-Santos.