When my sister was in college majoring in psychology, she did some research on guilt and shame. It was enlightening for both of us. It was like we both suddenly realized that we had been guilted and shamed our entire lives. Suddenly our feelings about ourselves and our parents made sense. I’ve heard the phrase “knowing is half the battle” quite a bit, probably because I watched GI Joe battle King Cobra nearly every day as a child. I’m not so sure that’s true. I know what is happening, yet I still struggle with my parents’ behaviors and experience the same negative feelings regularly.
Every night my parents call me, usually right when I’m trying to get Azita to go to bed. This means I don’t answer the phone very often when they call, and if I do I keep the calls short and quiet in an effort to avoid dealing with a cranky, wired baby at 11pm. That is the inevitable outcome when I do answer the phone, allowing them to disrupt my evenings. Then there is the fact that I can’t spend every weekend with my parents. These things are mentioned frequently in every conversation when I can answer the phone and in long emails from my mother several days a week.
The thing I don’t understand is why my parents found it acceptable to not talk to me for over a year, thus missing most of my pregnancy, Azita’s birth, and the first 7 months of her life, but they feel I am a bad daughter if I don’t talk to them every single day. I find myself only talking to them and seeing them because I feel guilty now rather than because I want to see them.
When I do have conversations with them, they really aren’t that great anyways. My parents have nothing good to say to me. Everything that comes out of their mouth is negative. I don’t do anything worthwhile in their eyes. I have no accomplishments to date. I don’t know how to take care of and rear my child. I don’t know how to live my life or work at my career — never mind that my parents don’t even know what I do for a living. They never talk to me without telling me what I need to change in order to do better. It’s tiring and disheartening. I end each call feeling small and useless. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a raging sinus and upper respiratory infection for a week, but I no longer have the energy to respond to them.
I’m not sure what they are thinking. Clearly this method of interacting with your children only produces the exact opposite of the intended result. But maybe it’s not so obvious. So many parents use guilt and shame as parenting tools. Maybe it’s something one just falls into without realizing they are doing it. For example, when I lightheartedly “scold” Azita in the morning, “Thanks for keeping me up all night, sweetpea” maybe I am taking the first steps toward parenting with guilt. Maybe this will end up with me at 70 telling her she’s a bad daughter because she never calls her mother. It’s hard for me to figure out where and how that starts.
Like so many other aspects of parenting, I only have bad behaviors on which to model my treatment of my daughter, and I don’t want that for her. So, I guess the only thing I can do is be vigilant and hyper aware of my actions and parenting methods, my interactions with Azita.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I just really, really don’t want to be like my mother. I mean, I want to be a mother to Azita while she is growing up. I want to make sure I teach her right from wrong and ensure that those lessons take. I want to make sure she sees me as an authority figure (one who loves her very much). But I do hope she one day counts me as one of her close friends. I hope when she is in her 30s she wants to call me and wants to visit me and share her life with me. In my eyes that ball is definitely in my court, and I just hope that I can get it across the net.
Don’t stress about it so much, momma. The past is the past, and you can only be made to feel guilty if you allow yourself to be. You didn’t have much choice in what was inflicted upon you as a kid, but you do now. Kids are really intuitive, and I think they feel stress in their environment and react to it in ways we can’t fully understand. At the end of the day, I think you’d be doing yourself and your family a favor to give yourself a break and only call your parents or see them if/when you feel like you genuinely want to. I’d say it’s worth a try, since the way it’s going now doesn’t seem to be a positive experience for anyone involved. Luv & Luck!
We learn about parenting from our parents (but not only them) in both their good choices but also their bad. I too have made decisions about my parenting to make sure I DON’T repeat their poor choices, but instead of simply saying I WON’T do this or that choose to put it into a positive context. Rather than “I won’t use guilt or negative statements to control my child” try perhaps “I will focus on using positive, encouraging statements to guide my child.” Even just having things rolling around in your own head in positive statements can make a difference in how you think and then speak to your child. It is not easy and takes consistent effort to turn around the negatives into positives. Instead of “ewwww, what HAVE you done in this diaper (a natural reaction to a spectacularly disgusting mess) try something silly and lighthearted that could sound like a commercial…”oh wow, time for fresh pants so you can get back out there and have fun.”
To me parenting is very much like chess. You are aware and enjoy the moment, but success requires planning ahead several moves and also being aware of the consequences of the consequences of your choices. From infancy when I was the one doing the talking to now when he is doing most of the talking, I gave my son choices. Do you want the red or the blue shirt today? Do you want peaches or pears with your lunch? Later it was also about behavior choices… do you want to play quietly here in the living room while our guest is here or do you want to go to your room and play? These simple choices in early childhood lay the foundation for realizing and making good choices later in life when we are not there to make the choices for them. Do I leave now to get home in time for curfew or keep having fun with my friends and be late causing my parents to worry if I am ok? Do I get in the car with the guy who has been drinking or do I call for a safe ride home risking getting yelled at for being at this kind of party in the first place?
Believe it or not, today it may be peaches or pears but all too soon it will be much bigger stakes and all the years of choices will pay off in a young person able to recognize and make good choices.
About late night calls, how would “hey, I’d love to talk with you but this time every night is Azita’s bedtime and I can’t do both at the same time. Why don’t we talk another time that I can really focus on talking with you?” When the negative talk does start, “Wow, that is something to consider, but I just realized I have to get off the phone and …wash laundry, watch paint dry or listen to birds chirp cheerfully.”
You get the idea…something ELSE besides listen to negative talk. When they are being supportive and pleasant, you have lots of time (as long as it is not bedtime or other truly busy times) and when it turns negative you are suddenly busy with the life of a mother of a young child.
It’s just my experience, but this has worked fairly well with my now 16 year old and his grandparents.
He sees me being positive but unwilling to submit to poor treatment and he has the same sense that he has the same rights and dignity. It gets tricky when you just want to say (and maybe even try) to a teen “Because I said so” when you don’t want to give them choices, but it is what you have trained them for all their lives…to make positive decisions.