I am an only child. I have had quite a relationship with my parents over the years. They are wonderful people, mind you. I know they love me and only want what is best for me. The problem is that neither one of them had good role models for parenting and their expression of what is best for their child wasn’t always healthy. I do know they did the best they can with what they had and what they knew.
As a child, I was born as an adult. I remember being worried about my dad driving home drunk before I was 8 years old. We had a family restaurant in a small, Southern town and everyone knew everything about everyone else. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The problem was that my mom was/is Muslim (I say that hesitantly because she really doesn’t practice any religion but self-proclaimed her own version of spirituality which includes but is not limited to a belief in God the Holy Spirit…not God the Father or Jesus, a deep hatred for Christians because she sees them as money-loving hate filled hypocrites, and a feeling of being “better than” anyone who is dumb enough to buy into organized religion as a true expression of one’s own spirituality). So not only did I grow up in a town that thought I was a devil-worshipping rich fat nerdy kid, I had a mom who loathed everything about what most of the residents of that town believed. My mom has always thought she was better than everyone around her and her circumstances. She definitely thought she was better than my dad, the poor Southern farm boy who was lucky enough to land her to get him out of his deeply Southern backward redneck ways (her words, definitely not mine). Our lives were filled with working at the restaurant, trying to look perfect to the world outside (which meant that when we went out to dinner on Saturday night–the only thing we ever did together as a family–we had to match as a family), and hard work on my mom’s part. My dad was not so much a hard worker. He liked to play and joke around. He was a flirt and we thought he had affairs on more than one occasion. My mom pretty much single-handedly ran that restaurant. My dad ran the kitchen and the back of the house staff and was good at that too. He just liked to play a lot, and would often feign sickness to get off from work. In fact, one time when I was about 10, he stayed home sick on a Sunday (my mom thought it was because he was being lazy and wanted to watch football) when he actually was having an attack of appendicitis that ended up giving him a staff infection and almost killing him. Fun times.
My dad was not entirely innocent in this though. He was living the “high life.” He was wearing designer clothes and buying fancy cars and getting attention from everyone in positive ways that he never got at home. One of 6 children born to a drunken Army dad and a sweet submissive mom, he had a rough childhood himself filled with watching his dad abuse his mom, monetary struggles, and a desire to “get the Hell out of dodge” as quickly as he possibly could. He was a class clown and did not take school seriously (although he is VERY intelligent and could have done so much better than he did). He was not ready to be a parent. he liked to party and smoke pot. Don’t get me wrong, he loves me. He always loved me. But parenting is about more than the emotion of love. It’s about being present, something neither one of my parents were good at. My dad always wanted a boy. He would take any teenage boy who worked at the restaurant under his wing, playing basketball with them in the parking lot, helping them with their life, etc. I didn’t get much attention from him. He would barely show up to my ballet recitals. I learned all about football so that I could be a part of his life (I unfortunately was not athletic and my mom would NOT let me play sports–it wasn’t girly enough–not that I could have played anyway since I did not have much raw talent or the physique to back it up).
I snuck to church as a preteen and ended up getting Baptized as a teenager behind my parents’ backs. Other than that, I was a good daughter. I didn’t lie, I was responsible, I made really good grades and never made waves. I worked hard. But I was lonely and desperate for attention. And I never quite measured up to my model-mom’s expectations. I remember her telling me that clothes would look better on me if I would just lose some weight around the age of 10. She always thought she was drop-dead gorgeous and I always felt like I was living in her shadow. Looks were and are everything to her. She judges people based on how they look not based on who they are. She readily admits this–this isn’t something I have projected onto her. I was always living in her shadow. I kept thinking that if I could just be good enough (as a student, with my looks, etc) then I would win my parents’ affection. I knew they loved me (have I already said that?!), but between trying to be my mom’s therapist/best friend and trying to be “enough” for my dad so that he would pay attention to ME rather than the boys in the restaurant, I quickly slid into a very unhealthy place of body image and self esteem. By the age of 10, I remember starting into eating disordered patterns of behaviors that very quickly turned into full blown anorexia by the age of 15 and have stayed with me worsening over the years to age 40.
Today I try very hard to maintain healthy relationships with my own parents and not repeat those same behaviors with my kids. I encourage my kids to take chances and experience adventures (my mom did NOT do that for me and kept me very close under her wing). I’m not doing a very good job on either front. My mom’s health has quickly taken a turn for the worse with a very severe and quick onset of Rheumatoid Arthritis. She is negative and bitter about her life. She hates my life and will never think any man is good enough for me to the extent that she bad mouths my husband in front of my oldest child. She just cannot keep her mouth shut about things and it has really strained our relationship. I don’t let her say negative things about my family, so our conversations are often very short and superficial. I mostly call to check in on her health and try to keep her moving in a direction to find answers and relief for her RA. I talk to her everyday, either by phone or by text, trying to treat each interaction as a gift knowing that her time with me is shorter than I would like. Some days it is harder to do that than others. I’m not trying to save her but don’t want to look back with any regrets about not having a relationship with her.
My dad, on the other hand, I hardly speak to. He doesn’t call me unless something is wrong or text me. He doesn’t even respond if I text him. It is very sad really. He speaks to the rest of his extended family (his sisters and brother and nephews) quite often but not me. I’m back in the position at 40 years of age of wondering why I’m not good enough for him. Bleh.
I refuse to dwell in this. I had every material possession as I child I could have hoped for. Designer clothes, expensive jewelry, a fancy car. All I really wanted was a close family. I remember driving down this road in Asheville, Kimberly Avenue, lined with beautiful homes and huge trees. On our Saturday dinners out, we often ended up on this road, I would very longingly watch families eating dinner together in their dining rooms and really wanted to be a part of a family that actually interacted like that. I would have given up any or all of the “stuff” for a strong family unit. And at 40, I feel the same way but am trapped by the bills and lifestyle that will not allow me to be the only thing in this world that really matters to me: a mom who is present. I am distracted by my job and the full time duties awaiting on me when I get home in the afternoons. I have a doctorate and all I really want to do is be a stay at home mom and give my kids (and myself) the kind of life I have dreamed of since I was a child myself. I want to take care of myself and my kids in a way that will give us good memories and strong bonds for many, many years to come. That’s not going to happen–nice cars, huge house, and lots of debt will dictate how I spend my days.
This Lent is about trying to find focus in the midst of all of this. The stress in my life has caused me to withdraw even more than I need to. Instead of spending a few minutes with my kids at night I’m in the kitchen cleaning up, obsessing over eating disordered things, or trying to find my sense of style and the perfect purse. I do not want to care about any of that. I keep hoping that some miracle will happen and my husband will say “stay at home and we will make it work”. That isn’t going to happen. So instead of going all in to this materialistic superficial mode to numb the fact that I can’t have that in my life I need to find a better way to manage what time I could have with them in better ways. I’m hoping that through this writing I will open up some ways to make that happen.
As a child, I was born as an adult. I remember being worried about my dad driving home drunk before I was 8 years old. We had a family restaurant in a small, Southern town and everyone knew everything about everyone else. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The problem was that my mom was/is Muslim (I say that hesitantly because she really doesn’t practice any religion but self-proclaimed her own version of spirituality which includes but is not limited to a belief in God the Holy Spirit…not God the Father or Jesus, a deep hatred for Christians because she sees them as money-loving hate filled hypocrites, and a feeling of being “better than” anyone who is dumb enough to buy into organized religion as a true expression of one’s own spirituality). So not only did I grow up in a town that thought I was a devil-worshipping rich fat nerdy kid, I had a mom who loathed everything about what most of the residents of that town believed. My mom has always thought she was better than everyone around her and her circumstances. She definitely thought she was better than my dad, the poor Southern farm boy who was lucky enough to land her to get him out of his deeply Southern backward redneck ways (her words, definitely not mine). Our lives were filled with working at the restaurant, trying to look perfect to the world outside (which meant that when we went out to dinner on Saturday night–the only thing we ever did together as a family–we had to match as a family), and hard work on my mom’s part. My dad was not so much a hard worker. He liked to play and joke around. He was a flirt and we thought he had affairs on more than one occasion. My mom pretty much single-handedly ran that restaurant. My dad ran the kitchen and the back of the house staff and was good at that too. He just liked to play a lot, and would often feign sickness to get off from work. In fact, one time when I was about 10, he stayed home sick on a Sunday (my mom thought it was because he was being lazy and wanted to watch football) when he actually was having an attack of appendicitis that ended up giving him a staff infection and almost killing him. Fun times.
My dad was not entirely innocent in this though. He was living the “high life.” He was wearing designer clothes and buying fancy cars and getting attention from everyone in positive ways that he never got at home. One of 6 children born to a drunken Army dad and a sweet submissive mom, he had a rough childhood himself filled with watching his dad abuse his mom, monetary struggles, and a desire to “get the Hell out of dodge” as quickly as he possibly could. He was a class clown and did not take school seriously (although he is VERY intelligent and could have done so much better than he did). He was not ready to be a parent. he liked to party and smoke pot. Don’t get me wrong, he loves me. He always loved me. But parenting is about more than the emotion of love. It’s about being present, something neither one of my parents were good at. My dad always wanted a boy. He would take any teenage boy who worked at the restaurant under his wing, playing basketball with them in the parking lot, helping them with their life, etc. I didn’t get much attention from him. He would barely show up to my ballet recitals. I learned all about football so that I could be a part of his life (I unfortunately was not athletic and my mom would NOT let me play sports–it wasn’t girly enough–not that I could have played anyway since I did not have much raw talent or the physique to back it up).
I snuck to church as a preteen and ended up getting Baptized as a teenager behind my parents’ backs. Other than that, I was a good daughter. I didn’t lie, I was responsible, I made really good grades and never made waves. I worked hard. But I was lonely and desperate for attention. And I never quite measured up to my model-mom’s expectations. I remember her telling me that clothes would look better on me if I would just lose some weight around the age of 10. She always thought she was drop-dead gorgeous and I always felt like I was living in her shadow. Looks were and are everything to her. She judges people based on how they look not based on who they are. She readily admits this–this isn’t something I have projected onto her. I was always living in her shadow. I kept thinking that if I could just be good enough (as a student, with my looks, etc) then I would win my parents’ affection. I knew they loved me (have I already said that?!), but between trying to be my mom’s therapist/best friend and trying to be “enough” for my dad so that he would pay attention to ME rather than the boys in the restaurant, I quickly slid into a very unhealthy place of body image and self esteem. By the age of 10, I remember starting into eating disordered patterns of behaviors that very quickly turned into full blown anorexia by the age of 15 and have stayed with me worsening over the years to age 40.
Today I try very hard to maintain healthy relationships with my own parents and not repeat those same behaviors with my kids. I encourage my kids to take chances and experience adventures (my mom did NOT do that for me and kept me very close under her wing). I’m not doing a very good job on either front. My mom’s health has quickly taken a turn for the worse with a very severe and quick onset of Rheumatoid Arthritis. She is negative and bitter about her life. She hates my life and will never think any man is good enough for me to the extent that she bad mouths my husband in front of my oldest child. She just cannot keep her mouth shut about things and it has really strained our relationship. I don’t let her say negative things about my family, so our conversations are often very short and superficial. I mostly call to check in on her health and try to keep her moving in a direction to find answers and relief for her RA. I talk to her everyday, either by phone or by text, trying to treat each interaction as a gift knowing that her time with me is shorter than I would like. Some days it is harder to do that than others. I’m not trying to save her but don’t want to look back with any regrets about not having a relationship with her.
My dad, on the other hand, I hardly speak to. He doesn’t call me unless something is wrong or text me. He doesn’t even respond if I text him. It is very sad really. He speaks to the rest of his extended family (his sisters and brother and nephews) quite often but not me. I’m back in the position at 40 years of age of wondering why I’m not good enough for him. Bleh.
I refuse to dwell in this. I had every material possession as I child I could have hoped for. Designer clothes, expensive jewelry, a fancy car. All I really wanted was a close family. I remember driving down this road in Asheville, Kimberly Avenue, lined with beautiful homes and huge trees. On our Saturday dinners out, we often ended up on this road, I would very longingly watch families eating dinner together in their dining rooms and really wanted to be a part of a family that actually interacted like that. I would have given up any or all of the “stuff” for a strong family unit. And at 40, I feel the same way but am trapped by the bills and lifestyle that will not allow me to be the only thing in this world that really matters to me: a mom who is present. I am distracted by my job and the full time duties awaiting on me when I get home in the afternoons. I have a doctorate and all I really want to do is be a stay at home mom and give my kids (and myself) the kind of life I have dreamed of since I was a child myself. I want to take care of myself and my kids in a way that will give us good memories and strong bonds for many, many years to come. That’s not going to happen–nice cars, huge house, and lots of debt will dictate how I spend my days.
This Lent is about trying to find focus in the midst of all of this. The stress in my life has caused me to withdraw even more than I need to. Instead of spending a few minutes with my kids at night I’m in the kitchen cleaning up, obsessing over eating disordered things, or trying to find my sense of style and the perfect purse. I do not want to care about any of that. I keep hoping that some miracle will happen and my husband will say “stay at home and we will make it work”. That isn’t going to happen. So instead of going all in to this materialistic superficial mode to numb the fact that I can’t have that in my life I need to find a better way to manage what time I could have with them in better ways. I’m hoping that through this writing I will open up some ways to make that happen.
