Twenty years ago this month, I found out I'd received a $3000 grant from the Institute for Humane Studies to be applied toward my senior year of college.
Twenty years ago today, I picked up the phone and told my father that he needn't bother with me again.
Now, I don't advocate just simply, on a whim, telling your parent to take a hike for the rest of his life. But, let's face it, some people are crummy. It is sometimes clear that one's life will be objectively better if one eliminates the poisonous people from it, and that was the case for me. My family were just not the kind of people you'd want to know. They weren't rampantly destructive people, they weren't dramatically evil, no one beat me or anything. But all of them -- father, sister, mother -- were people who just sucked the joy out of life and the energy out of you.
When was just shy of 21, I figured that I had about 80 years left to create good stuff, to make the world a better place while I experience all of the wonderfulness that is possible here on earth. And then I'd die. I realized back then that a life spent bending to other people's negativity is precious, precious time and energy wasted. Did I want to sacrifice that to people who were just, you know, ICKY? Did I want to spend time with them instead of with people who were smart, warm, generous, productive and good? No. I'd had enough of that for the first 20 years.
Fortunately, we live in a free and mobile society where it's possible to have nothing to do with bad people. Nevertheless, it can be a very difficult thing to do if the people are your family. You can KNOW that you shouldn't have anything to do with a person, but lack the strength to unseat yourself.
It wasn't hard to do with my father, as he didn't have actual positive qualities to balance out the negative ones. It was a harder thing to give my sister The Choice 5 years later, to treat me well or not to treat me at all. (Mind you, it wasn't harder in one way: The actual experience of interacting with her was quite miserable. But it was very hard psychologically to accept that there was what Madeline L'Engle called a Might-Have-Been in A Swiftly Tilting Planet: There was a time before my sister got twisted as a result of the worst qualities of my parents and society, a time when she might have grown into a nice and smart person. I mourned that it hadn't happened, and I still do. I'd have liked to have had a sister as an adult.) But my sister chose "Not At All," and my mother did the same thing 5 years after that.
My parents and sister were hostile to the very idea of talking about our problems and the need for them to be addressed. (I really did try with my mother and my sister. My father was too far removed for engagement.) If instead they had been people dedicated to reason, it would have been a different story. Even if I disagreed with them (and goodness knows I disagreed with almost everything those people held near and dear), in that case shunning instead of engaging would have been the wrong move.
So it's an odd set of anniversaries this month, 20 years without my father, 10 years without my mother. It was important to make the breaks before anyone got old or sick -- it had to be a clear choice they were making when they were healthy and vigorous, because obviously I'm not going to abandon someone suddenly in an hour of need. But as a culture, we just don't have a blueprint for doing this. Almost no one does. It's not accepted. It's generated some odd looks when medical professionals have asked, "Are your parents still alive?" and I reply, "I assume so." (Of course, I don't do this with casual acquaintances because I don't want to put them in an awkward position. I just say "yes" because I expect I'd have heard through the family grapevine if my mother had died...one cousin is still in touch with her.)
Anyway, the important thing is that as hard as it was at the time, it was indubitably the RIGHT THING TO DO. I'm pretty good at imagining alternative universes; I can imagine, almost visually and certainly viscerally, the drag on my life and happiness if I were to have had to have these people in my life, and my kids' lives. UGH.
One of the greatest benefits of my having done this, I think, is that Madison and Ella will know, forever and ever in no uncertain terms, that what we do with crappy people is we TURN OUR BACK ON THEM and life gets better. I'm a living example of just how good life can be when we do this. There will be no ambiguity for them about the desirability of doing so, and they'll know they will always have my support when they do. Unfortunately, as we all know, there will be plenty of opportunities for them to practice this principle. We've got their backs.
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3 comments:
It's hard for me to imagine people who would willingly let you leave their lives, but it gives me great hope for humanity every time I hear about people who manage to transcend difficult beginnings and choose to pursue happiness. One of the many reasons I'm a librarian, that. I like to think that we're here for people to let them know they have choices and what those choices might be.
Thanks for that, Adrienne. I bet you DO have influence on people in just the way you said.
I tend to think that if there were some repercussions for bad parenting that directly affect the parent rather than the child, we'd have less of it. I was thinking more about societal implications rather than legal consequences, but probably if we had more people suing their parents for a poor upbringing, or if prospective parents had a sense that they'd become outcasts for doing a bad job, it might help more people THINK before having those kids in the first place.
For example, physical abuse of one's spouse used to be much more commonly accepted, and although I don't have any data on this, I bet we have a lot less of it now that it's so poorly regarded. But bad parenting is a much more subtle matter. Except for where reality shows are concerned, we Americans tend to keep our noses out of one another's business. Not that that's a bad thing as a matter of principle, but this is one of the consequences.
I puzzle over this a lot. I think, certainly, that the people who surround those people and see and recognize the bad parenting have a responsibility to respond in some way, not to just watch it go on and pretend that it's not, which is what I think happens quite frequently. How does that work in the real world, though? I don't know. I do actively try to spread good parenting information, so at least the well-meaning and engaged parents have more opporunities to find some real information rather than responding to the wealth of misinformation out there about child-rearing and child development.
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