Give’em A Break
Parents. Small word. Many meanings. It’s a raw deal when I think about it. Parents are supposed to be responsible compassionate, fair, loving, giving, always available, all-knowing, that list can go on ad infinitum.
Parents are supposed to have all the answers. No questions asked.
As a child my mother was everything to me. I never wanted for love or for affection, for a roof over my head or clothes on my back. I didn’t go hungry and mom made “breakfast for dinner” cool to me so eating Cheerios at night seemed like a privilege more than a necessity. I was shielded with love from our circumstances.
So, I built this unfair version of my mom with some additional support from the sitcoms of the 70’s and 80’s that showed me what moms were “supposed to be like” and that became my basis for judging her (quite unfairly) as I grew older.
By the time my teenage years came about my mother began wrestling with her own childhood. I can say for sure there were no sitcoms that matched our household dynamics from 1985-89. My mom began sharing dark stories from her past about her mother. From our conversations I can report that there weren’t many good stories about my Grandmother. My mom’s struggle to come to terms with her mother’s complete lack of parenting were hard to watch.
Lots of crying. Lots of drinking. Lots of confused conversations that mostly ended in “Why?” Unfortunately, those aren’t questions a 13-17-year-old is equipped to answer, and since I was usually the only person she talked to I got asked “Why?” more than I care to remember.
Fast forward now some 30+ years later and here I find myself with two boys. I 100% believe that I forgave my mother years ago. A short stint of sobriety from 19-20 gave me enough info to understand she was just trying to do the best she could. It wasn’t until a year sober that I really began to understand why the things in my life happened the way they did when I was a teenager.
My struggles as a parent mirrored my mothers in that I constantly sought escape. Escape from what? I’m not 100% sure of that just yet. I may never be. A big part of it was me, trying to escape from me and the person that I had become. The problem was now my two boys, 11 & 9 at that time, were starting to look at me with the same confusion I had looked at my mother with 35 years earlier. They didn’t come out and ask it, but the “Whys?” were there in those two sets of eyes looking back at me.
Thank God for sobriety! I didn’t realize when I started the path of recovery what my life would become. Sobriety is a gamechanger, it gave me a perspective I did not have before. Like I said earlier, I had forgiven my mother years ago, but now I believe I finally started to understand her.
The lives my wife and I were leading changed forever the instant our first child was brought across the threshold of our home. I found that giving love is easy, changing diapers…while consistently triggering my gag reflex…was easy. Hugs and kisses were given at no cost and without limit. But the life around that was hard. Work stress, marriage stress, all of which was compounded by a lifestyle I had solidified in college of being the first one at the party and the last one to leave. Those first 11 years of parenting flew by. There were many lost opportunities. Many times as a dad I wish I would’ve done better.
Then came the change, I put the bottle and the pipe down. This is going to be hard to explain. It may not make sense, because it didn’t make sense to me when it was happening. Subconsciously there was a part of me that knew I was going to lead my boys down the same path as the two generations before them walked.
That idea became more concrete as the days between my last drink and my sobriety grew in number. I wasn’t purposefully trying to hurt my boys while I was in active addiction. I had no malice towards them, but rest assured, they were feeling the brunt of my inability to handle the day-to-day stresses of life. The bi-polar reactions of a freakishly excited dad who was ready to do anything with them in one moment; was painfully matched by the angry, tired, hungover father with the patience of a hungry shark watching a wounded fish struggle, in the next moment. I was a mean guy, but I didn’t mean to be.
Once sober I recognized my boys for who they were. They were me. Innocent. They had done nothing to deserve the life they were living with their struggling father. My want to ensure that those boys would not have the same experiences as their dad became paramount. How could I, in good conscience, knowing what I know and having experienced what I had experienced, expose them to the same life I had never asked for as a child.
No. Not going to happen. Not on my watch. Through God’s grace I was gifted with an opportunity to change, and I was going to take it.
As lagniappe to God’s Grace, the idea I started this writing with of “Give’em a break” began crystallizing into what I thought it meant to be a parent. This is what I am finding…the truth is that I have now been a dad for 13 years. The bigger truth is that I have no idea what I am doing. The ultimate truth is being cool with the fact that I don’t know what I am doing.
WHAT A RELIEF!!! Seriously. For whatever reason, I assumed that the moment my wife and I had our kids it was understood that I now knew everything about being a parent. It was TOTAL BULLSHIT!! It created huge problems and my boys suffered for it. I spent a lot of time barreling down on every situation I faced as a dad thinking “My way!” is the only way. I’m now realizing that love is my best guide as a dad, and love for me now means that its ok to not have all the answers and to ask for Gods help when I don’t know what to do.
What’s cooler than that is admitting to my sons that I don’t have all the answers. Wait, What?!?!?! YOU ADMIT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING AS A DAD TO YOUR SONS?!?! HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?!?! WHY ARE YOU BREAKING THE “FOURTH WALL OF PARENTING”?
The answer is simple. If I can admit I don’t know everything then I give them the freedom to do the same. Plus, it’s a great equalizer in our conversations. Parenting for me doesn’t have to be this hierarchal thing where I talk down to them. At least not now. I am constantly finding that our conversations, when prefaced with “I don’t know” means we get to work together to find a solution that works for all of us. It has been hands down the best unintended-good-consequence of getting sober.
That’s how life works for us now, but pre-sobriety fatherhood was just rough. I have asked for God’s Grace for my missteps. A “break” if you will. I have also found that God has given it to me freely. So for me that means that if I get to be forgiven for my past then I must do the same for my parents. But this time that forgiveness has new meaning. I never understood my mom’s life until I walked in her shoes with my own children.
Life is hard. I get that now. It’s harder when you never get the tools you need to get through it. My mom never got them. From the stories she told me about her mother, she never got them either. It’s not their fault. They were innocents once too. How can I fault anyone who is trying to get through this life with a broken set of tools that continued to get worse as they were passed down from generation to generation? I can’t. At least not now that I understand it better.
The only thing I can do is work with these brand-new tools forged by God’s Grace that were given to me in this new life of recovery. I get to work with these new tools. I get to learn how to use them and take care of them so that when I pass them on to my boys they will get the benefit of a life led with His grace….and THAT is an amazing feeling.
So, to my mom I want to say that I love her. It was never her fault. She did the best with what she had and what she had wasn’t much. I want to give her a break. I need to give her a break. She deserves it.