I have an abundance of unspoken words and deeply felt feelings about how hard it is to be a parent.
Looking back on my own childhood, I realized that my parents were primarily concerned with keeping me alive and preventing me from shaming them. My mother tirelessly worked to prevent me from dressing like a girl of ill repute (or befriending them), becoming an unwed child-mother, and denouncing Jesus as my personal savior. In the end, I kind of did all three. My first weekend away at college, I bought a little dress and went clubbing with girls that would have left me dead on the side of the road. Had my first baby shortly after college and right before we got married. Went through a period where I profoundly questioned my faith. Luckily for my mom, I was a “grown woman” when I did all these things.
Sings: I’m a GROWN WOMAN, I do whatever I want…
When I look at my children, I feel overwhelmed; keep in mind they are still very young and have an abundance of resources (of which I did not have a fraction of as a child). With alladis, I still find this parenting ish is hard. Hard in surprising and seemingly superficial ways. Hard in privately painful and deeply trying ways.
I think that my parents, many times, did the best they could with the resources they had and what they understood. I am a parent of a generation with so much more in terms of data and am burdened with knowledge, with studies and think pieces. With the internets and shady show-mothers online and on playdates.
Let me tell you something that no one told me before I became a parent: parenting is triggering. Like all of your insecurities, traumas and fears will likely be resurfaced and laid bare. It might be something as simple as your 6-year-old son testing the waters by talking back, and you snap because your cray military dad would never have stood for such back talk, and you feel deep shame, anger, and pain because your kid said, “NO!” when you asked them to pick up their toys. Thus causing you to overreact and possibly reenact the behavior that traumatized you as a child. Then you find yourself in a damn cycle of near-emotional abuse that you never wanted in your parenting. Or it could be as extreme as your child turning a random age, and you become fearful and overprotective in unhealthy ways and discover you have a repressed memory of childhood sexual trauma that occurred at the same tender age your lovely child is now. Then everyone in your life you once loved and trusted becomes a possible child predator, and the anxiety of even leaving your child with their Godparents becomes an unimaginable feat.
Many therapists will tell you that sometimes, what is bothering/worrying you about your child is really about you. Well, at least our therapists told us that, and we trust it to be true. So a huge part of parenting is literally getting your ish in order and getting to the bottom of your pain and your trauma, healing and releasing, changing and improving, becoming self-aware, and exercising self-control so you don’t create miniature broken versions of yourself.
So, if no one warned you, parenting is hard AF and triggering as hell, so invest in yourself if you want to be able to invest in your children.