I sat down to write a Thanksgiving message to the parents participating in my mentoring practice, and what came out instead was a letter to my own parents. I have shared this with my Mom and Dad, and we had a very loving, healing exchange about what I had written. They have approved my taking this letter public. I share this now with you as a reminder to those of us still struggling to move beyond our own childhoods, that we might raise our children with more nourishment than we ever had: may we forgive ourselves any shortcomings we perceive in our parenting as we make our way through this holiday season; our good enough love is so much more than good enough.
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They say that you don’t feel grateful to your parents until you have your own child. Not really grateful. People who know my parents would be surprised to know that this didn’t happen to me. Not for roughly the first decade of my child’s life, anyway.
I didn’t feel grateful. I felt lots of things about my parents, but aside from fleeting moments of acknowledgment--mostly about the substantial amount they were currently doing to help me raise my daughter as a single mom--I didn’t really feel grateful to them for what they did back then when I was a tender little person in their care. No, about that, I mostly felt angry. And filled with grief.
I don’t feel proud of this, but it’s true.
When my daughter was born, I was seized with the unimaginable love that a new parent can have for a child, and like every new parent, I wanted things for her that I never had. I felt the enormous gap between who I was as a person and what it seemed I needed to be able to do and give and be as Leah’s mother.
It was a horrible sensation, to feel so ill equipped to parent the most precious, fierce and tender little human that had ever graced the planet (as, of course, I felt was true about her, while also knowing every other mother felt similarly about their children). To know that I was her nurturer, her protector and the one who would one day be charged with delivering her to our totally broken up world... A world which I could barely stand to be present for, and it would only get worse. It was horrifying.
So, I did what I needed to do, as best I could ascertain it, to grow into my bet approximation of the mother this little person was demanding I become each developmental step of the way. And I am still at it. Learning, healing, growing, to keep up. And this process has, of course, brought me right smack dab running into my own childhood, re-encountering my own determined and tender young self: she who didn’t get everything she needed and struggled mightily to try and figure out how to be a person, a good person, in this world, feeling much to much alone in this process…. As a result, now having to struggle to keep showing up for my own kid’s journey.
Through parenting, it became impossible to not take personally, all over again, the human limitations of my parents. Because my experience of my daughter was that she seized my attention and drew out of me the quality of care she needed, each step of the way, to remain true to her bright self, more or less. I felt and feel that she is raising me, as I raise her… and I seem to be becoming stronger, more authentic, more confident, and more loving as I accompany her on her human journey.
So, that first decade of parenting, I thought: if only they had loved me this much. If only loving me could have been a force strong enough to make them really see me, respond to me, prioritize my life like this… everything would have been different for me. And I would have had what it takes to not have to struggle this hard to keep showing up to parent my own child. And she would have benefited, oh yes, she would have been the ultimate recipient . Had they only parented me as I parent her.
Of course I knew intellectually that they were bringing the best of what they could make available to the job of raising me, and pouring more into me than ever had been given to them…. But I still felt hurt, rejected that they didn’t manage to do this quality of parenting… why hadn’t they been able to learn and heal and grow this much? I felt slightly superior to my parents as a parent, quite honestly. Not that I ever said this explicitly to myself, or them, heavens no.
My daughter is now a precocious 11 year old, and she is increasingly certain that I am not cool, or particularly bright, or as sophisticated as she is. But she does commend me on my capacity to learn and become a better a parent as we get further into her tweener-hood, as in “I am proud of you, Mom, you are really learning to be less hyperly overprotective. You are doing a good a job.”
I tell her, “My sweet girl, you have no idea. But that’s okay, that’s your job. You just keep being you.”
Maybe it’s the phase of parenting I am now in…. Maybe I see myself in her: even loveable in all her unknowing of the depths of her unknowing.
It has been dawning on me, maybe this is how my parents have come to feel about me in my now decades-long stage as a ‘tweener, of sorts, hovering on the brink of a significant developmental leap forward? Still thinking I know better, see more, have more sophistication? Loveable in my sheer unawareness of all I do not yet know about what I don’t know?
Over the past couple of years, I am finally making that developmental shift, the one people talk about. I am late bloomer in this regard, I guess.
I am starting to get it, feel it even! With everything my parents had to each overcome in their own lives in order to raise me, and the obstacles were considerable for them, it was just right. Because I see now that in my childhood were all the right ingredients, delivered to me in perfect timing and dose.
Because things in our world have gotten even more difficult to face, and yet now, I actually feel equipped to be here, approximately well enough, and do what matters most. Not without struggle, not without lots of help from my partner, my friends, but I can be here with an increasingly sturdy yet gentle self, without spiraling into oblivion in reaction to our world.
And it’s because, in how they were with me… and in everything I ever witnessed them say or do, in every choice they ever made... their quality of care was fueled by, informed by, and pointed to a love more vast and limitless, forgiving, responsive, and *just* than human understanding can ever claim to possess. Because of the bar they themselves set, I have known what direction to move in, even as I, perhaps, surpass them.
My parents have never stopped introducing me to the experience and practice of unconditional love, as lived through their human lives, as best they can from moment to moment, year to year, decade to decade, with everything they have.
And any way that I think I see how they didn’t get it quite get right, or failed to offer enough…? That note is now my mine to sing.
And even for that, I now say thank you. For helping me know what song to sing, and what note and pitch is mine to carry forward.
So Mom and Dad, this Thanksgiving 2018, with the whole world seeming to burn all around us… I say thank you. Whatever happens next, may my song be in harmony with what you have poured into me and through me with your human incarnation of unconditional love.
I am honored to sing forth our song.
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