Link to Part 8

(cw: child abuse)

Once my daughter switched districts, I couldn’t discern my purpose. I didn’t even know who I was, really. Maybe I should have spent some of my stay-at-home Dad years figuring it out because obviously that era was destined to end eventually. My daughter was nine years old; though I had been taking her to school in the mornings and picking her up in the afternoons right up until the switch and would have continued to do so had she remained where she was, the fact is that she was less dependent on me than she was when she was five. So it was inevitable that there would come a time when stay-at-home parenthood ended for me and I segued into some other phase of life. It was necessary for my daughter’s independence.

In other words, I had to put my own needs aside for the sake of her well-being. And I hate to keep beating the “my parents didn’t know what they were doing” dead horse and I hate to suggest that the reason my daughter is so well adjusted is because I learned from my parents’ mistakes and vowed to do better than they did*, but I really wish my parents had the same foresight and the same consideration for what was best for me and for my independence.

*Okay, no. I don’t actually hate this. I’m proud of it, and I bring it up in therapy as well as in casual conversation as often as I possibly can. Keep an eye out; I’m sure to mention it again.

My mother lives to be useful. My father too, to an extent, though in a more misanthropic way than my mother does. I don’t believe I cooked a meal for myself until I was a legal adult, or at least until I was in my late teens. This is either because my mother needed to have purpose more than she needed to know I possessed basic life skills, or because she thought I was too stupid to figure out how to microwave a TV dinner according to the package instructions, and she figured it would be easier to do it for me than to try and teach me to do it myself.

If it’s the latter, I realize it speaks more to the nature of my upbringing, or at least to their inability to guide me, than it does to my actual intelligence or capability. Either way, it’s a moot point; I was never as helpless as they assumed – or perhaps hoped – I was. But I can admit that I’d be a lot more well-adjusted at age forty-eight had they assumed instead that I was capable of doing the things they insisted on doing for me, and perhaps of doing even more than that.

`When I was a child and a teenager, my parents were overly protective and somewhat controlling. They raised me with an unhealthy amount of fear – not only of them, but to an extent of the world at large – which conditioned me to be dependent and compelled me to pass up many of the opportunities I was given, but also led me to take risks and make bad choices in order to prevent them from finding out when I rebelled, or to evade the consequences if they did. It took me years to purge myself of as much of that fear as I’ve been able to; I know I haven’t gotten all of it.

I don’t know their motives. Maybe they weren’t deliberately trying to raise me to be dependent in order to further their sense of purpose. Maybe they did what they thought was best but fell short because what they thought was best was based on antiquated and unhelpful advice handed down by similarly uninformed, wrong-headed relatives and friends. I’m talking about an era when it was considered perfectly sensible to throw a child into deep water in order to teach them to swim. (No, this never happened to me.)

Moreover, my father – and perhaps my mother as well, but definitely my father – was raised in an abusive household by a man who terrorized his wife and his children to an extent that one day my grandmother gathered up all five kids and, in the words of Raekwon, bounced on old man. She raised five kids on her own in the 1960s when unmarried women had significantly fewer rights than they do today. Until 1974, women in the United States could not open a bank account or apply for loans or credit cards without a husband or other man to co-sign for them. Until the same year, landlords could refuse to rent to single women. To suggest that my grandmother had a difficult time once she and her kids left would be a colossal understatement, but she had to either find a way to make it work, or continue living in the same house as the violent and manipulative man she married, and my grandmother had no time for that bullshit. She worked her ass off to support herself and her kids, all of whom turned out far less screwed-up than they would have been if they’d stayed. Twenty-five years after her passing, I still miss her, but not my grandfather. Fuck that guy.

The point I’m trying to make with all of this is that in childhood my parents – my father especially – suffered the kind of trauma that makes me hesitant if not ashamed to use the word “trauma” to describe my experiences. While they may not have been the most effective or efficient parents in the world, they’re considerably better than the parents who raised them. I believe it is the job of every parent to improve upon their own upbringing, which leads me to the obligatory reminder that I learned from my parents’ mistakes and ultimately raised my child better than they raised me. Look, I warned you that I was going to mention that again.

Up next: The Do-Over Childhood, wherein I impart to you my sure-fire method of completely undoing every mistake that was made by your less-than-qualified parents as they were raising you! You do not want to miss this!