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The first time my daughter told me she hated me, I wanted to bake her a cake. She wasn't afraid of me. She didn't bottle up her emotions, too afraid to let me see them. She was exploding in technicolor rage here, there and everywhere, and I couldn't have been more proud of her - or of myself as her mother.
My reaction is perhaps inexplicable to people who had happy childhoods. I know those childhoods exist, and I have friends who speak fondly of their upbringings and their mothers, but they are as mythical to me as the rainbow unicorns my daughters play with now. My childhood was good, I used to say, I just had a lot of bad things happen to me.
There was never a time when I wasn't intimately acquainted with my mother's pain. She stayed home with me, just the two of us while my dad was at work, but I spent most of my time alone. She wanted to be a writer back then, and I played quietly while the typewriter clacked away for hours in the other room. I must have been only 7 or 8 years old, but I read her story before she mailed it to publishers in thick manila envelopes. It was about a woman who spent her days caring for her baby, but she never realized her baby was dead. The baby she pushed in the swing at the park and tucked into bed in her footie pajamas was a doll.
I was my mother's doll. She always took good care of me, making sure I was bathed, fed and dressed, and she was ever-present. When I took ballet lessons, she took dance lessons. When I went to school, she became a teacher at the same school. As I got older and went to college, she enrolled at the same college. She was the furthest thing from neglectful that is imaginable, and I believed her when she told me that everything she did was for my own good.
It took me years to realize that my mother never saw me as my own person. I was allowed to exist as a reflection of her and her emotional caretaker, but her love and affection were always conditional on how well I fulfilled those roles. From the time I can remember, even as a very little girl, I subconsciously understood my role. There was no room for my feelings, but I didn't want there to be any. Emotions looked like my mother crouching by the record player in darkness, with curtains drawn, sobbing as she listened to Dolly Parton sing "I Will Always Love You" over and over. Emotions were toxic and manipulative, crushing and smothering, and I wanted nothing to do with them.
I went into motherhood with no idea how to mother my own children. All I knew was that I didn't want to be like her. Without a model for what good parenting could look like, I became the yin to my mother's yang, encouraging autonomy and independence where she controlled and overprotected. I created space for my children's feelings, and I encouraged them to explore them freely and without shame. I did my best to allow them to grow into their own people, and some of it worked.
My oldest children, now teenagers, talk to me about anything and everything. I know who did what, even when it's terrible, and even when they know they'll get in trouble for telling me. They ask me to talk to their friends about safe sex and alcohol abuse, and they've even asked me to take them to therapy when they decided they needed it. I could spin a tale of parenting success founded in communication and trust, and it would all be true, but there's a very large "but."
Imposing limits and boundaries with my kids was easy when they were young. Sure, sometimes my heart ached a little bit when they lost a privilege, but mostly I was able to remain firm. Somewhere along the way, as my children sprouted mustaches and began to smell like rotten onions, setting boundaries became more difficult. Instead of simply restricting screen time when they didn't do their chores, I was faced with a suicidal teenager who told me going to school made his depression worse and a teenager who screamed at me every time I asked her to do anything.
I interviewed a psychologist once for an article about spirited children. She told me that sometimes parents are proud of their children for pushing boundaries. These parents believe their children need extra freedom and nurturing because of their own overly strict upbringing. I told her that seems understandable, thinking about my parenting approaches, but I've never forgotten her response: "Parents need to figure that out on their own time. You don't get to do that to your children."
Parenting by opposite may be better than how my mother raised me, but it wasn't fair to my kids. I focused so much on nurturing their emotional needs that I didn't recognize that their emotional needs include appropriate limits and boundaries, too. My kids needed to know that anger is okay, but screaming at me that they hate me isn't. They needed to grow up learning to regulate their emotions, not denying their existence or letting them explode all over other people.
My mother raised me not to have emotions, but I raised my children to lose sight of how their emotional reactions impact others. One approach may be less damaging than the other, and I like to believe that being given too much emotional space is better than not enough, but neither one teaches kids how to regulate their emotions without shame. They are just two sides of the same dingy coin.
I'm not as proud of my daughter's words as I once was. Now I see them as disrespectful and inappropriate, and a missed opportunity to talk to her about how she can process her emotions without damaging relationships she cherishes. I could have suggested appropriate ways to work through her anger, such as screaming into a pillow or writing in a journal, instead of sending her the insidious message that it's okay to abuse the people you love.
I've spent months tearing down the shaky boundaries I used to call nurturing. It's been a slow and painful road, but piece by piece, brick by brick, I've erected new boundaries for my children that don't allow them to fling their emotional debris at me. My arms and my heart are always open, no matter how ugly things get, but somewhere along the way, as their feet grew three sizes in a month and they ate me out of house and home, I finally learned to respect and love myself enough not to take abuse from anyone --- even, and especially, my children.
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