And so, last winter, I opened my door to a total stranger in ion of more power over my life and my children’s than anyone I’d ever met: the man who would recommend whether my children should continue living with me or not.
If there’s one thing I feel sure of, it’s that I’m doing a good job as a mother, and that our children are ha and well in the home we’ve made here. (That they love and need their father too was never a question in my mind.) Still, when I faced the guardian on my front doorstep what I felt was the terror of a woman whose house is on fire.
The texture of a person’s days with her children and the quality of her love are not easily conveyed in an interview. But I had given a lot of thought to the things I’d tell the guardian. What I wasn’t expecting was a question about events of more than 30 years ago, and two people both dead: my parents.
“I understand,” said the guardian, uneasily, “that you come from an alcoholic family.”
Evidently my former husband had told him this fact, out of a sense that it had some relevance in the mans assessment of my abilities to parent successfully. Like a history of drug abuse or an old DWI conviction, there it was, on my record-not a black mark, maybe, but a question mark at least. And the question it raised was whether a person who grew up in what we now know to call “a dysfunctional family” can ever succeed in being an emotionally stable parent herself.
Today’s literature of popular psychology and self-help is filled with examinations of the relationship between a person’s family of origin and the family each of us may go on to forge in adult life. We know that almost invariably, child abusers were themselves abused as children, and that children of alcoholics carry a far greater risk of substance abuse in adulthood. We read that children of divorce have a harder time forming lasting relationships.
No question, even for those of us who manage to avoid the trap of re-creating our parents’ particular forms of pathology, the legacy remains. However much I would like to believe that I am in control of my destiny, I cant ignore the inescapable fact that when I read a laundry fist of Adult Children of Alcoholics traits, I feel at times as though I’m reading an intimate description of myself.
But the same books and self-help groups that have done such a service to children of dysfunctional families have also produced the increasingly prevalent attitude implicit in the guardian ad litem’s question to me that, because of our own dysfunctional origins, we’re damaged people who will go on to damage our own children.
I’d never argue that I was immune to the frequently unhealthy patterns laid down by my parents. I wasn’t. Never much of a drinker myself, I have nevertheless found myself displaying what I call “alcoholic behavior.” There have been moments when I lost my temper with my children, and then realized part way into my tirade that-without a drop of liquor in me-I was behaving just the way my father used to after a few shots of vodka. Likewise, I have been my mother-going to excessive lengths to shield my kids from everyday disappointments in a futile attempt to protect them from the immutable pain of knowing that the two adults they love best do not get along. No small pain, that one.
But we talk about it. We get help when needed. And I try to provide my children with the model of a healthy and reasonably happy adult woman who wrestles with her demons, rather than a hapless pawn at the mercy of events and circumstances beyond her control.
Was I shaped by my dysfunctional origins? Absolutely. The kind of parent I am has everything to do with my experience of growing up in an atmosphere where no such openness existed, and I felt powerless. But as the product of every experience that’s come my way, I couldn’t change where I came from without changing where I find myself today. Which is a place I like, mostly. I would never go so far as to suggest it was a good thing to have grown up in a household as troubled as the one I lived in for the first 18 years of my life-although there’s no question that along with the scars, my parents gave my sister and me great gifts I draw upon every day of my life. But coming from a family where the problems were obvious, inescapable and severe encouraged me to work on becoming healthy-much as a person does when she has sustained a serious injury and enters into physical therapy. She may end up in better shape than she would have been in the first place.
I’ll always regret that my children’s father and I failed to provide them with the model of two parents raising them together and loving each other as well as them. I take comfort, though, in the knowledge that we did not do what my own parents did: stay in an unhealthy situation, tacitly conveying the message that pain is a fact of life and change impossible. Just as I reject the notion that I must be forever the victim of my parents’ shortcomings and failures, I reject the notion that at the ages of 14, 10 and 8, three children who are smart, funny, healthy and full of pleasure in the world, as well as extraordinarily well loved by both their parents, should be destined to an endless succession of short-term relationships and failed marriages. My parents launched me in life, as my former husband and I are launching our children. But they will each chart their own course, as I am charting mine.
