Man in the Mirror

As parents we unconsciously lead our children based on our own insecurities.    I obsessively hover over my girls’ to make sure they get plenty of daily exercise and eat as healthy as possible because I was a chunky kid and have struggled with my weight most of my life.  I don’t want my girls to go through that.  A neighboring mom with underdeveloped social skills constantly tries to further her girls’ popularity by trying to align them with kids that are associated with the ‘in’ crowd, so they don’t face the exclusion she suffered as a child and currently feels as an adult.  Yet another example is the father who inundates his children with material things so they never have to experience the wave of self-consciousness he carried with him growing up in a poor family.  Common sense tells us that this overcompensation with our children has the potential to backfire, and we sometimes adjust our parenting style if we are lucky enough to make the connection.  We don’t, however, always address the bigger problem, which is accepting our lack of self-confidence.

We all carry baggage around from past experiences:  successes, failures, memories, and learned and unlearned lessons.  While I’d like to think of myself and my fellow parents as mentally healthy adults who carry their baggage effortlessly slung over one shoulder without a second thought to it, the reality is many folks are bogged down by the staggering weight of the negativity they drag around with them on a daily basis.  The heavy shackle of unresolved issues from previous time periods often keeps us from effectively guiding our children. 

The bully who never effectively learned the art of conflict management encourages his son to “man up” and throw the first punch when teased on the playground by other kids as a way to address the problem.  The mother who never shed her childhood angst of being ignored by a group, now leads her children by example of cutting down other children in front of others, as she knows she will secure an audience.  The parent who used drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism during high school to dull the pain of his parents’ divorce today chooses not to notice as his own daughter slowly starves herself to death as a means of dealing with her own sorrow over the death of a family member. 

It can really go either way.  Our past can either help us or hinder us in our endeavor as parents.  It’s not a crap shoot, though.  We can actually choose to be positive examples for our kids by acknowledging the fragmented pieces of our core and choosing to fix them.  Michael Jackson lays it out so eloquently when he sang, “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change.”  Self-awareness is powerful.  While it’s sometimes difficult to swallow the reality of who we are or who we’ve become, the simple recognition of such can be life altering, as it opens the door to change.

We all know people that bitch, moan, and complain about stuff incessantly.  Kid stuff, school stuff, money stuff, parent stuff, health stuff, religious stuff, political stuff….anything that has a negative angle they glom onto.   At times in my life, I’ve gone through periods of complaint as well.  It’s always an indicator to me, though, that I’m trying really hard (and failing) to avoid some problem in my life or persona.  Case in point:  I’ve been complaining about going to church with my family for the past few years.  I’m not Catholilc, don’t understand Catholocism, even though both my daughters were baptized as such, and don’t enjoy the masses.  Additionally, I tried to convert to Catholocism a few years ago and was essentially denied entrance into the church.  I’ve developed a habit of skipping church altogether for the past year and instead use the time my family normally worships as a chance to have some time to myself at home.  While this works in practice, I still kept complaining about it as I not only want to be part of my family’s worship, I want to quit sitting on the sidelines.   After repeating my gripes for the umpteenth time to a very pragmatic friend, she suggested I go talk to the priest at our church.  I made the appointment, sat down with him and discussed my issues, and developed a plan on how to move forward.  The plan will be tough and may or may not work, but the point is that after years of suffering and complaining needlessly, as the song says“I’m starting with the man in the mirror.  I’m asking him to change his ways.”

By “fixing” me, I will reduce the risk of me “breaking” my kids moving forward.  You “fixing” you can help you do the same.  Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?  If not, I encourage you to do so.  You may be surprised what you see when you really focus on your reflection on your kids.  It’s never too late to make a change.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

My 8-year-old daughter injured her foot in a head-on-collision with the pavement a few days ago.  Even though the scabs have mostly healed and her pride has since recovered, she thinks it necessary to walk with a limp, to remind us of her unfortunate mishap.  She only does the limp when she’s bored, is in no rush to get anywhere, or when she has a captive audience.  Today was the latter.  With my mother and my best friend in town staying with us, my daughter really played up the gimpy routine.  As we all watched her shuffle down the hall to her room, taking one regular step with her good leg and then dragging the bad leg behind her, we were amused to see my 3-year-old daughter following her lead and limping with the same foot.  We stifled our giggles so as not to promote it, and returned to our conversation.

A few hours later, I walked into the living room and asked my older daughter to close her eyes in an attempt to hide the red velvet batter for her birthday cake that I was carrying in my bowl, and open her mouth for taste.  I gave her a bite and turned to offer my littlest girl a sample as well.  I found her sitting on the other end of the couch with her eyes closed and her mouth wide open waiting for a bite herself.  Monkey See, Monkey Do.

The imitating and copying our kids do can be adorable, endearing and encouraging, as it means they’re picking things up without having to be actually taught how to do something.  The mimicking they do can also be a reality check for your own behavior.  When your 5^th grader drops the F-Bomb in your presence and your kindergartener smokes an imaginary cigarette with her imaginary tea, you realize as a parent, ‘you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.’

We’re going to pass bad habits down to our kids.  There’s really no way around it.  I challenge you, though, to take two minutes and think about the things you do and say to, and around, your children.  Model the future by imagining how it feels to you when your child duplicates that action, those words, or that belief on his own.  Will you be proud of him?  If the answer is no, get rid of it when you’re around your kids, at the minimum.

Imagine what it would feel like to take it out of rotation all together.  Would it be the end of the world?  If you can fathom existing, maybe even happily, without that behavior, belief, or language, just go for the gold and drop kick it out of your life. 

If you can’t envision your life without the drunk driving, name calling, heckling, obsessive cleaning, ambulance chasing, or whatever idiosyncrasies you own, then hold on to it; to each his own.  Just be prepared for your little monkeys to do what they see.

  

Recognize Your Impact

As parents, we are usually aware, in the moment, of those occasions that define us as good parents and those that render us bad parents.  Giving your child a shoulder to cry on when he faces his first disappointment, without weighing in your two cents on the matter = good parent.  Leaving your child sitting on a bench at the bus stop in town while you score some dope a few streets over = bad parent.  The extremes are no-brainers.  It’s the in-between occurrences, which make up the majority of interactions with our kids, we don’t always recognize as having the ability to mold our children’s perceptions.    Chastising your child because she doesn’t know how to decipher between the various tools in the toolbox = ambiguous. 

“Goddammit, Stacy, it’s the Phillips head I need, not the flat head,” my dad yelled at the 8-year–old version of me, from underneath the ’79 Buick, when I handed him the straight-edged tool. 

I was running in and out of the garage bringing tools to my dad, trying to help him with his task of getting the car back up and running.  A natural fixer of all things broken, he was trying to impart some fix-it knowledge onto me by letting me be his assistant for the job.  Unfortunately, what I took from that day was that I was a dumbass for not knowing the difference between the two screwdrivers.  Even as a kid, I knew I was smart, so I wasn’t concerned about not being bright enough to know the difference between the two tools. I was simply upset that I had disappointed my dad. 

Fast forward thirty-some years and I create the same scene with my own child.  I use my 8-year-old daughter’s previous attempt at dusting as an example of how not to dust the house.

“Do you seriously think this clean?” I ask her incredulous.   “If you’re going to do a half-assed job, I’d rather you not help at all.”

Same shit, different year. 

Before I even looked over to see the hurt look in her eyes, I knew the harm I had caused.  I had just hammered her with disapproval.  A super sensitive kid with a sincere want to always be helpful, as well as a need to please, she amazingly held it together for what I thought might be the rest of the evening.  I continued my sweeping, until I opened her bedroom door a few minutes later and found her curled up in my girlfriend’s arms, crying her heart out. 

All the kid was trying to do was help.  In fact, during family cleaning hour, her task was supposed to be mopping, as she loves to mop.  My youngest daughter couldn’t seem to wrap her head around her own dusting assignment and had sauntered off to play dollies, so my older daughter had offered to stand in for her, taking on the additional responsibility.  It was while performing this act of kindness that I spewed such harsh words at her. 

Once she calmed down, I apologized for my harsh words and asked for her forgiveness. 

“It’s OK, Mom,” she said in her sad little voice.  “It’s just not fair that I was just trying to help you and you yelled at me,” she said as her almost-swollen-shut eyes welled up with tears yet again.

No, it’s not OK and it’s not fair.  No amount of stress or craziness is an excuse for taking out your angst on your kids, especially over a dust job!  Enough of those types of interactions with a parent can cause not only problems in parent-child relationships, but also can crack away at the self-esteem of children. 

 

In trying to figure out how I got the breaking point where I would yell at my kid over something as unimportant as her dusting skills, I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how I got there.  I just needed to stay the hell away from that point in the future.  The truth of the matter is that no matter how many bits of useful knowledge and skill that my dad has passed down to me over the years, like bleeding the brakes on my car and taking apart my computer and replacing the parts before putting it back together again, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of his ability to fix things is the inadequacy I felt when he yelled at me over the freakin’ screwdriver thirty-some years ago.  I pray that I have not etched my daughter’s memory bank with the same feelings of deficiency over the dust rag.  

Odds are, the damage has already been done.  The good news is that if I’ve done my job right as a parent so far, like my parents did with me, my kids will grow up unscathed by my occasional lapses in parental judgment, and will be able to decipher between a bad parenting interaction and a bad parent.  Only time will tell.