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.
