As any parent other than the hopelessly myopic eventually discovers, trying to raise children is a tortuous process of re-navigating through his/her own childhood. It's perhaps the only way, finally, to develop any real empathy for your own parents.
Lacking this experience of replicating the parental role, we may be doomed to harbor an extremely harmful illusion all of our adult lives -- that our mother or father somehow "did" something to us, that they "screwed us up."
Certainly, there are extreme cases of abuse, neglect, incest, exploitation, violence, and unimaginable horrors -- human history is littered with these. But most of us, I dare say, suffered a far subtler fate -- feeling overlooked, ignored, overwhelmed, abandoned, undervalued, and heartbroken.
All very real feelings, and valid at the time. What is so hard to grasp is how our own immature stages of growth dictated how we internalized these feelings at different "tipping points" in our youth.
It takes being a "grown-up," never a desirable state to achieve in this youth-focused culture, to begin to appreciate or even imagine what our parents might have been going through when they "did" these things to us.
As I write this, my own heart is breaking, because I know that no matter how hard I may have tried, I have repeated too many mistakes with my own children to ever deserve any kind of reprieve from what I will call the child's revenge.
You see, I have reached an age where I finally grasp that indeed there is, for every experience, its own season; for every leaf, the breeze that brings it spiraling down to earth.
Tonight, in the skies over San Francisco, was one of those weird spring storms that dump rain in buckets, flashing lightning with only the most distant rolls of thunder. There were predictions of hail and snow at low altitudes.
You know the kind of night -- a weird night -- though for me, a nice one, as I had dinner with old friends in Noe Valley and then drove through familiar streets back here to the Mission, enjoying the light show overhead, listening to music that helped my mind roam far, far away from this place and this time.
But, earlier, I watched my dear little boy-man, at the tender age of 12, play in his team's basketball game. His team won against an inferior team, 38-14, including a 15-0 fourth quarter run.
But my guy, who hadn't played in a month, due to schedule quirks and an ill-timed illness, had what he considered to be a bad game. He scored no points, missing two jumpers and two free throws, plus he committed five painful turnovers. But, he is so self-critical that he did not apparently remember that he had two rebounds, two blocks, an assist, and eight steals, all in less than half a game's playing time.
In other words, he played an astonishingly brilliant defensive game but he did kind of suck on offense. When I hugged him after the game, he was close to tears, even though the win meant his little team gets to go to the playoffs next month.
And, trust me, this is not a kid who focuses on his own accomplishments to the exclusion of his teammates'. The opposite is true of him; he is a true team player. But he just was down on himself, in a way I suspect only males can truly understand.
As we were hugging, the kid who was the true star tonight, probably scoring half the team's points, came running over to congratulate my son. "Amazing, I just saw the stats! You had eight steals! Awesome!"
I saw my son's eyes brighten as he joined his teammates in the general celebratory mood sweeping the gym. As I waved goodbye, I took his mood swings with me to my car.
Back home, I downloaded some photos from last night, including one above of my 8-year-old daughter, brushing her hair after a bath and pretending to talk on the phone.
Sometimes, she complains to me,” Daddy I am fat." Or,” I’m having some troubles with my friends." Or, "the boys always leave me out." She is a fierce little girl, and when she gets mad, the three of us males in my house all shudder, because we know from experience what will follow. She either kicks or hits someone hard where it hurts, or she stamps her feet, races away, slamming doors, and burying herself under covers, crying hard and loud.
Slowly, one or all of us coax her back out to the kitchen, so we can eat, or to the living room, so we can unpause the movie or change the TV channel.
I'm not sure there is any wisdom whatsoever contained in this post but after all, this is meant only as a contemporaneous life journal, sharing life as it happens. I do not know what it all means or whether it means anything at all.
But I'll say this much. I'm glad for the privilege to be around children. It's allowed me to forgive my parents for all the wrongs I'd imagined they'd done to me. After all, how can I blame them when I've done the same, in my own way, only trying to live my life, witnessed all along, by these sensitive little creatures yearning and preparing for their run at adulthood.
May theirs be more successful than mine has been! For time waits on none of us, nor does time suffer fools.
-30-
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