one time my dad said

One time, when I was in my early thirties, visiting my dad with my toddler daughter, a squall broke out between me and dad.  I don't remember what the quarrel was about. My recollection really is more like a sudden change in weather conditions, from sunny blue skies to dark thundering clouds and a sudden, windy burst of rain.

Katie was three or four. In our little family, her and me, we didn't have many sudden squalls, had few arguments. It was just the two of us and I had made a decision, probably a wrong one (I'm still working on letting go of all the mistakes I surely made with her), that when it was just her and me, when she wanted something different than what I wanted, if the thing in question didn't really matter to me, I would yield to her preference.  I actually gave that decision a lot of thought.


I have seen many parents get into many battles of will with little ones.  Not all parents do this but many parents seem to think that if they are really doing their parenting 'right', their kids will obey them on autopilot. Some parents seem to think that ordering their children and having their orders obeyed unquestioningly constitutes good parenting, seem to connect the child's autopilot responses as a measure of their parenting skill.  Or something.  I have seen a lot of interactions between adults and their children that I never understood.  I get that it is a 'good thing' to encourage children to eat unsweet breakfast cereal but I don't get why a parent might buy some crappola sweet cereal and then get into battles of wills with their kids about when they can have the sweet crap.  My point probably seems meaningless to anyone who might be reading. My point probably is meaningless. I am a meaningless speck of cosmic dust.  Right?

But let's pretend, what the heck, it's Christmas, let's pretend that I matter, that my thoughts matter.

I have seen many parents order their kids to do meaningless things and it has seemed to me that they order the kids just to see the kids obey. The parent seems to feel some validation in such an exchange.

Katie and I started living alone together when she was 1.5 years old. And our real lives were always just the two of us, but when we still lived with her dad, I did a lot of faking with him. In front of him, I tended to step into his idea of what a parent was. His ideas about what it was to be a parent were very similar to my family's ideas. He and I came from very similar family backgrounds:  blue collar, Catholic, lots of kids, never enough money.  My parents were college grads and his parents were h.s. drop outs.  His family was poorer when he grew up but his folks drove their kids to get good educations and they all did.  His parents weren't well educated but they were smart, esp. his mom.  I give my ex mother-in-law points for being smart and for being determined to give her kids the best start in life she possibly could. And I forgive her for her mistakes because the mistakes she made in choosing which values to emphasize with her children are standard middle class mistakes. She thought that status meant more than being.

My ex mother-in-law ran a tightly controlled household and so did my mom. And my mom got that from my grandmother, who very definitely believed that a central function of being a parent was to command blind obedience.  I adored my maternal grandma Joy but I remember a couple instances when I 'crossed' her, when I did something innocently childish with absolutely no conscious awareness of having crossed one of her arbitrary lines.  I remember those instances because I remember the pained shock I felt when I realized that in her anger, my grandmother, fleetingly, I admit, had withdrawn her love for me.  She had given me conditional love.

And my mom mothered me in that tradition. Conditional love. As long as I was blindly obedient, and, as I got older and became more physically able to help her, blindly servile to my mother, she loved me. But if I crossed her, if I dawdled on my way home after school to talk to friends instead of rushing home to take over babysitting the latest babies to give mom a break, mom would withhold her love.

I am learning so much about myself this week. Gosh, Marc, thank you for loving me conditionally and judgmentally. Thank you for downgrading me to acquaintance.  I'm burned out on all the jumping I've been doing to win your love. And let's be honest.  I gave up hoping to win your love a long time ago. Lately I've been settling for a cessation of meanness, defining your 'love' as times when you aren't being verbally abusive. Yuck.  Yuck.  Yuck.

Back to what my dad said one time. Back to me and my kid.

When we still lived with Katie's dad, until she was 1.5 years old, (so not so long), I did a lot of pretending. But privately, when Katie and I were alone, I loved her as much as I wanted.  He said there was something wrong with me when I talked to her in gooey love baby talk.  He said I was wrong to sing to her as much as I did.  He said it was wrong for me to adore her as much as I did.

And maybe I was wrong. Who knows? Who knows anything?!

But what I thought I was doing was trusting the love ray that I felt between her and me.  If she wanted one thing for lunch instead of what I might have suggested, I gave her she what she wanted.  What difference did such choices make?  I made lots of decisions as the adult.  I set limits and maintained them. But within those limits, I held a conscious intention, to the best of my ability, to be as flexible as humanly possible.