When we fuck up our children by accident

When we lived in New Jersey, I did two semesters of Clinical Pastoral Education at a hospital in Camden. My son asked me about when I was a chaplain yesterday because somehow it came up that I had been the first co-chaplain of my college class, and he remembered some other context in which I had also done something chaplain-y. I told him, regarding the work at the hospital that I got to do all the parts of medicine that doctors love to do and usually don’t have time for...listening, being a supportive presence, spiritual care and witnessing their journey in a loving way. Since it was a training program and I was a student chaplain, we met once a week with our Supervisor to go over cases and do personal development work. Once, my supervisor quoted someone who said, “You’re going to fuck up your kids no matter what you do. Fuck them up in your own way.”

I didn’t like hearing that anymore than I liked hearing it when he told me I could either be whole or perfect, but not both.

I have a weird relationship with perfection and perfectionism. I’ve had multiple intuitives indicate that I’ve been places or even beings that were pretty close to perfect...and equally I’ve had multiple shamans tell me perfection is not available here, now, that it is in embracing the mess, the imperfection, the chaos, the yin and yang, the duality, that wholeness is really to be found in this human journey.

Perfectionism can take so many forms. And it can have roots in aspirational inklings of what is possible on some level, even if it isn’t possible here, now, as well as totally dysfunctional ones that need our love and self-embrace.

Okay. For example, I developed an eating disorder because I wanted to avoid being criticized because I had so much trauma around criticism being merged with the brutality of character assassination and presumed horrific motives that had its roots in my dad’s inability to love himself; he perceived rejection in my imperfection; his feeling of unlovability that had its roots in his own dad’s ptsd from seeing all his friends die at Normandy, on top of having the Jewish holocaust in his blood, plus his mother sharing that circle the wagons thing from that same trauma. Additionally, she lost her first child to medical error (they gave the baby saline water instead of sugar water) - traumatizing her in a way she never learned to grieve, that then impacted her ability to be present as a mother.

My mother’s side included her mother’s five marriages, including one twice to the same abusive man, plus alcoholism in the family. On top of that, she was sexually abused at a very young age, leaving her with issues around boundaries and a tendency to overgive and then harbor irrational resentment if it didn’t get her what she needed or wanted from another person. She also projected her giving style onto others – so that if I made tea for myself in the middle of the day at a time I just felt like being in my own space, I was a selfish, narcissistic, terrible, inconsiderate, thoughtless person for not offering her one. She also had weird memory issues where she would acknowledge something happened and then weeks or months later have amended her memory to not remember something that actually happened. Usually it would be things she would apologize for, then not remember having done, much less apologizing for them. She would drag emotional material out of me, promise to keep it secret, then tell others. Then she would simply say she was following her heart. Conflicts in our family went on for days. Sometimes my mother said she was maybe never coming back when she drove off. On occasion she locked my father and me out. But things didn’t get really bad until my brother was born and both my parents decided to blame me for all his challenges because they supported my figure skating, or because I wasn’t a good enough role model in their minds. My mother was the one who bit my brother because he wouldn’t leave her room and called me on the phone to mediate when I was an adult with young children of my own. The last time I saw my parents, I would curled in a ball crying because my brother had recently committed suicide and my father chose even after his death to stay codependent with him instead of taking my invitation to put his energy into trying to be the dad I really could use – someone to cheerlead for me and be there for me.

I worked incredibly hard to break the family patterns and cycles I inherited and by all accounts from anyone who knew what I survived, I did great. But it wasn’t good enough. Oddly, that was one of the core beliefs that came with me from my childhood – doing my darndest best and it not being good enough. Never good enough, whatever I do. My kids got that belief even though I always did all the things I thought were right – I noticed and supported their strengths, gave them honest feedback that was objective so they would take me seriously when I pointed out their strengths, affirmed their intrinsic worth and set healthy boundaries for myself when necessary. I encouraged them in the ways they were different from me, supported their interests, tried to learn their love languages, to value what was important to them even if it was different than what was important to me. There were ways I parentified them too much. But I waited until they were older than I was when I was parentified, so it was still a generational improvement.

I tried really hard to be perfect and that very drive, based on fear was the greatest impediment to the dance with my children. And yet the dance was the dance we agreed to do.

I bet my own mother would feel the same – that if she’d had the mother she became, she would have been thrilled. My own father tried to do for me what his didn’t do for him.

All of us in this mess. I don’t have currently relationships with my parents because they cannot function without being toxic to me and cannot honor my boundaries. My girls don’t talk to me because...they are on their healing journey and that is what they feel is right for them.

A woman was sharing on her blog about the idea of being friends with ones children, and I weighed in a note of caution, having taken that route and had my girls deeply hold it against me. The way I parented might have worked great for me, by and large, with some honest, huge mistakes here and there... and maybe it would have too for the children that someone else had, but it wasn’t what my own girls wished they had experienced. I shared how now I give more direct guidance with my son than I used to with any of my children, having received the feedback that they wanted more parent and less friend.

The woman very compassionately responded:

“If it hasn’t yet worked out, it isn’t yet the end.”

~ The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

My girls are on their journey and right now it doesn’t include me and it may never…but they are finding themselves even in the push against me…they have pushed away spirituality, and perhaps in some ways for their mission it is a detour, but I hope they enjoy the scenery. I can see what wonderful people they are, even if they have been cruel to me, and I can also see how that cruelty is the very invitation to love myself.

Each journey is unique. Each mother, father, child and how all of them blend together. We all carry so much within us from the lineages we step into and from our own personal journeys. My experience is not that children are blank slates but that they come in with quite a bit of imprinting from their other lives, as well as from pregnancy and what we’ve been through during that time gestating them, the energy of the overall space they are born into geographically and in the household, on top of whatever is in the genetic linage they step into…it’s complicated.

I was raised for my most formative early life in an ultra spiritual family.

A seer is said to have said about me when my parents took me for a reading as a baby, “She is a magnificent being but boy she has got her work cut out for her.”

None of us get out of here unscathed and yet there is a part of us that is innocent and invincible, even as the light shines through our cracks and our scars tell us stories that open us up to the suffering of others.

Our healing journey can become medicine. We take our stories and some of them we let dissolve like a clump of salt into water, others we cry out with our tears and others we form pearls around and string them upon a necklace of compassionate wisdom, including the wisdom that we don’t have all the answers, for ourselves or for anyone else. We can offer hints, but life will throw us on our butts if we try to do the right thing from a sense of wanting to control or, wanting to be perfect.

My son and I are close and if you were to watch us as an external observer, you would probably find a lot that overlaps with friendship - jokes, spontaneity, co-creation. It’s more just in the willingness to be directive when it is actually helpful rather than assuming they will take initiative and follow through simply by me believing in them and being a supportive cheerleader and asking good questions. We still struggle with each other sometimes because we are both energetically sensitive, but we have a very good trust of one another that has been grown over time. Every kid is unique and every parent and the chemistry of the overlap combined with the circumstances we find ourselves in along the way.

Every family story is unique and it spans generations.

Our whole world is a story of family stories. As we undo generational trauma by healing and forgiving ourselves and those closest to us - whether or not we are in conscious relationship, I believe we are healing more than just ourselves. We are adding to the wholeness of life.

May we each be a more healed path of the garden we share as a humanity that needs tending and healing, now more than ever.

May we be very kind to ourselves, and extend this kindness to others, without giving our power away to them when it rightly rests with us.

May we take feedback and learn from it without making the new feedback a new fundamentalism over and against the old, but a more mature, integrated version of ourself that has its own integrity and yet can adapt to what is needed in the places our life calls us to from the level of our True Soul.

And even if we fuck it up again, may we forgive ourselves yet again. And the same for others, until the spiral leads all the way home, to the Love that we all are, in Truth.