Wounds

I spent the majority of Sunday getting the kids ready for their spring break vacation. They are visiting my sister for a little over a week and will be traveling by plane alone for the first time!

Ms. Doris and me on the first day of our new lives together

I was five when I started taking the plane by myself. My trips were never usually longer than two hours, but my parents started me early. I don't have any memory of feeling unsafe while traveling, though I'm sure some of their peers disapproved of such a decision. But it's what worked for us since they were separated and living in two different states by the time I was five.

The reality is, our memories are not always reliable sources of information. While I remember many parts of my childhood, as early as age three, it's possible I did feel scared while traveling though I have no recollection of that feeling now. If traveling alone at the early age of five wasn't scary, I'm sure my parents made decisions for me throughout my childhood that did make me scared. I know they didn't nail parenting every day, which brings me back to my results from the Saboteur Assessment that I wrote about last week.

The Original Survival Function from my highest saboteur, restless, got me a little sad. It said, "The Restless is a strategy to find constant new sources of excitement, pleasure, and self-nurturing. This could be associated with early life experiences with inadequate parental nurturing or painful circumstances. Restless indulgence not only provided substitute self-nurturing, but also an escape from having to deal with anxiety and pain." In my parents’ not-always-nailing-it parenting, I'm sure there were things that I experienced and have since blocked out that caused me pain.

A picture of the kids embracing after Ila had just come home from being away for the weekend. Welcome to our messy hallway. Maybe I’ll organize it better when they’re gone…maybe I won’t.

It's never easy thinking about your childhood from the space of inadequacy, especially if you've told yourself for so many years that it was fine! Or that it wasn't perfect but it was far from the worst. Looking down on aspects of your childhood feels like an attack on the parent(s) who raised you. And if you feel for your parents like I do about my mother, you never want to look down on anything they did because you know they were trying their best.

I have a friend who feels this way. She is reluctant to be critical about her mother's parenting because she wants to protect her from judgment even today at the big age of 42. It's no surprise that we were both raised by hardworking, single moms who would do anything for us. Children in these circumstances assume more of an adult role as they try to protect their only parent from anything that may cause them pain. But as you do this, you leave yourself exposed to your own pain. A child forced to take on the emotional burden of worrying about their parent(s) will experience pain that they may not recognize as pain until they're older.

Acknowledging that you have felt pain, no matter how minor or major, is the first step toward healing the wound. As I rationalize the hard parts of my childhood under the guise of my obstacles not being as bad as some of my peers, pain is pain.

A picture of our recently graduated SHMOM cohort at their last session. SHMOMS has held space for new moms to reflect on these kinds of parenting topics as they embark on the new job of parenting

As a parent, all I want to do is not be the source of pain to my children. I know I will never be able to protect them from feeling pain, but I never want to be the cause of it. I also know that this goal is aspirational at best. I will, at some point in their life, cause them pain. And that guts me.

But it's real. My actions will impact them in ways that may yield less than favorable results for their social emotional health. They may take an assessment in their fourth decade of life only to reflect back on their childhoods and begin to remember all the ways that their father and I wreaked havoc on them in some way or another.

At the end of the day, none of us are perfect. And even when we mess up causing some form of pain to our children, we get to try again. We get to do better next time and work on ourselves to resolve our own pain that may have caused them pain. The perfectionists among us may try to nail parenting every day and even that–perfection–will be a flaw that may bring pain to the child. As Brené Brown says, perfectionism is all about the fear of being vulnerable and seen for who we truly are. The child may absorb that approach to life making it hard to let themselves be loved fully with their flaws.

So, friends, let’s start the week with the knowing that all we have is us and all we can do in this life, whether we have children or not, is try our best and work on ourselves when we miss the mark.

It takes honesty, self-awareness, and courage but good news for us all, each one of those is free, and in this economy, there's no better news.

Yours in Imperfection,

Petrushka

Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach