Blue Days
I started reading Her Bad Mother. I'm not sure how I happened upon her, travel in the blogosphere is like following bread crumbs. Anyway, I found her ode to her child where she talks about the sensuousness of her feelings. She talks about other things, too, the things that numb those feelings and the parents who don’t get to feel them.
One of the mothers mentioned her first heartbreak for her child. I remember mine. My baby was not even 1 1/2. I took her to an Easter egg hunt sponsored by a local church for the entire community. It's a huge annual event here. I took her to a special section they had set aside for the little little ones and the special needs children to hunt for eggs. While she was picking up one egg at a time, meticulously studying each one, some boys, at least one of whom was the son of the man running the section, intentionally threw one of the eggs at her, hitting her in the head. I’ll never forget her face. The man did nothing. He half heartedly asked if anything was wrong, but he so clearly didn't want the answer. Not that it mattered. I couldn't give it. I was crying too hard to speak. I knew that it was the first of many times when I would be powerless to protect her.
I spend a great deal of effort hiding from that fact. I don't watch the news, I try not to read any violence on the internet. It's gotten so I can hardly even scan the NY Times and CNN is out. At least the NY Times doesn't scream the headlines at you. Before I ended up on Her Bad Mother, I was on Consumerist.com trying to see if anyone else was complaining about previously commercial free XM Radio's change to "less commercials than the other guys" - a change that occurred after purchasing about $500 worth of equipment. But I couldn't keep searching because of a headline about something that happened to a baby at Walmart popped up everywhere I went on the site. I didn't read the article - the headline was enough to give me nightmares.
I had planned not to have children. The firsthand knowledge of what people do to their kids decided me. I knew I couldn't bear any harm to my children and I was even more terrified that the harm could come from me - as if somehow what was done to me had rubbed off. I battle with the shades of those fears still, as if somehow, someday, I'll just turn and I'll become my father and I'll hurt my children. I suppose it's some variation on my realization as a little girl that parents can't be trusted, only now as an adult it's taken a whole new painful twist. But other fears, worse ones, have taken precedence.
I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if I’m just super sensitive. When my first child was born, I cried, sobbed really, for weeks about the abuses that children suffered at the hands of those they were utterly and totally dependent upon. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t read anything. Not the internet, not the paper in line at Starbucks. In September of 2004, just when I thought the sensitivity was lessening a bit and I could at least look at the NY Times and the political, business, and technology sections of CNN, 186 children were slaughtered in Russia. I cried for weeks. Now it’s the headlines about the children in Lebanon and I’m crying again.
I see children treated unkindly almost every time I leave my house. My heart breaks at every slight. It’s as if every child is my own. The urge to pick them up when they are crying, or stroke their cheeks when they are being ignored, is almost unbearable. I don’t mean to say that I see physical violence perpetrated on children. I would know what to do with that. I see other things. A child riding in a car filled with cigarette smoke. A child spoken to harshly for no reason at all, unjustly accused of being “bad” for just being 2, or 5, or 12. But the adult responsible has no time, no patience to let the child be a child.
Worst of all, I am as guilty as anyone else. I often find myself barking at my daughter, expecting more responsibility out of her than she could possibly have and expecting her to know things she couldn’t possibly know or understand. I don’t know if I got it from my parents or my society or both but the struggle for patience is appallingly difficult. I expect her to know about sharing and to calmly (robotically) accept the word no about whatever toy she desperately wants or action she feels the natural urge to take. I feed her too fast and rush her in and out of the car or down the street or into bed or out of bed – just absent mindedly rushing her, thinking about what I have to do or what I want to do. I don’t know where all this impatience to get nowhere and do nothing came from – this rush for her to grow up and urgency for her to “behave.” But, God help me, I so want it gone. For her. Because she’s perfect in every way. The problem is that I am so terribly terribly flawed. So scarred and scared; so imperfect. And the struggle to get past it, to make up for the lack of parenting skills I inherited from my own parents, is damnably hard.
One of the mothers mentioned her first heartbreak for her child. I remember mine. My baby was not even 1 1/2. I took her to an Easter egg hunt sponsored by a local church for the entire community. It's a huge annual event here. I took her to a special section they had set aside for the little little ones and the special needs children to hunt for eggs. While she was picking up one egg at a time, meticulously studying each one, some boys, at least one of whom was the son of the man running the section, intentionally threw one of the eggs at her, hitting her in the head. I’ll never forget her face. The man did nothing. He half heartedly asked if anything was wrong, but he so clearly didn't want the answer. Not that it mattered. I couldn't give it. I was crying too hard to speak. I knew that it was the first of many times when I would be powerless to protect her.
I spend a great deal of effort hiding from that fact. I don't watch the news, I try not to read any violence on the internet. It's gotten so I can hardly even scan the NY Times and CNN is out. At least the NY Times doesn't scream the headlines at you. Before I ended up on Her Bad Mother, I was on Consumerist.com trying to see if anyone else was complaining about previously commercial free XM Radio's change to "less commercials than the other guys" - a change that occurred after purchasing about $500 worth of equipment. But I couldn't keep searching because of a headline about something that happened to a baby at Walmart popped up everywhere I went on the site. I didn't read the article - the headline was enough to give me nightmares.
I had planned not to have children. The firsthand knowledge of what people do to their kids decided me. I knew I couldn't bear any harm to my children and I was even more terrified that the harm could come from me - as if somehow what was done to me had rubbed off. I battle with the shades of those fears still, as if somehow, someday, I'll just turn and I'll become my father and I'll hurt my children. I suppose it's some variation on my realization as a little girl that parents can't be trusted, only now as an adult it's taken a whole new painful twist. But other fears, worse ones, have taken precedence.
I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if I’m just super sensitive. When my first child was born, I cried, sobbed really, for weeks about the abuses that children suffered at the hands of those they were utterly and totally dependent upon. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t read anything. Not the internet, not the paper in line at Starbucks. In September of 2004, just when I thought the sensitivity was lessening a bit and I could at least look at the NY Times and the political, business, and technology sections of CNN, 186 children were slaughtered in Russia. I cried for weeks. Now it’s the headlines about the children in Lebanon and I’m crying again.
I see children treated unkindly almost every time I leave my house. My heart breaks at every slight. It’s as if every child is my own. The urge to pick them up when they are crying, or stroke their cheeks when they are being ignored, is almost unbearable. I don’t mean to say that I see physical violence perpetrated on children. I would know what to do with that. I see other things. A child riding in a car filled with cigarette smoke. A child spoken to harshly for no reason at all, unjustly accused of being “bad” for just being 2, or 5, or 12. But the adult responsible has no time, no patience to let the child be a child.
Worst of all, I am as guilty as anyone else. I often find myself barking at my daughter, expecting more responsibility out of her than she could possibly have and expecting her to know things she couldn’t possibly know or understand. I don’t know if I got it from my parents or my society or both but the struggle for patience is appallingly difficult. I expect her to know about sharing and to calmly (robotically) accept the word no about whatever toy she desperately wants or action she feels the natural urge to take. I feed her too fast and rush her in and out of the car or down the street or into bed or out of bed – just absent mindedly rushing her, thinking about what I have to do or what I want to do. I don’t know where all this impatience to get nowhere and do nothing came from – this rush for her to grow up and urgency for her to “behave.” But, God help me, I so want it gone. For her. Because she’s perfect in every way. The problem is that I am so terribly terribly flawed. So scarred and scared; so imperfect. And the struggle to get past it, to make up for the lack of parenting skills I inherited from my own parents, is damnably hard.
4 Comments:
Oh, dude, this brought tears to my eyes. I so hear you. With great love comes great fear. Hard to weather it sometimes...
Hugs, and many of them.
In 1994, when Josh was only a couple of months old, I ran across a teensy little paragraph, buried on something like page 14 of the paper, that was the first utterance of trouble in Rwanda. In those few short sentences, I was struck with such horror and such agony at what was described, that to this day, I still can't speak of it. And I was filled with a murderous fury that the story was buried and not blaring from the front page, though the entire world knew what was happening and turned away. To this day, I will never forgive the "civilized" world for permitting the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Rwanda (and everwhere else is is allowed to happen).
Being a parent awakens something in us that would lie dormant forever if we did not have children of our own. Not that we don't notice or care about the treatment of children before that, only that one doesn't feel a child's pain with the same acuity or take it as personally, having not experienced the awakening of that all-powerful maternal attachment and protectiveness.
But AFTER your children are born? Hoo doggy. God help the sorry piece of crap who trespasses against his child before you. And for real: God help any poor bastard who comes near one of my children with even a whispering thought of harm. I'd eat him for fucking dinner.
I read a story a couple of days ago about a twenty-something lawyer who crept through the bedroom window of his neighbor and stabbed him to death. It was learned that the man's wife had told him earlier that day that their two year old daughter had reported being molested by the neighbor. I'd be that lawyer, with one exception. I'd be more cunning and more brutal. I certainly don't blame the guy. And that shitbag next door bought and paid for every hole in his wretched gullet. Good for the lawyer. He's a fucking hero.
I, too, avoid reading stories of children who are victimized, but you can never get all the way away from it. I have, many times, cried myself to sleep over the terrible crimes people commit against the smallest and most vulnerable among us. I often say I hate people, and that's exactly why. In fact, today, I was birthday shopping for Grace and I overheard some redneck, toothless, trailer park queen tell her toddler to behave or she'd take him to the doctor and he'd give him a shot. And not three minutes later she told him the boogey man would be under his bed that night and would bite his feet. Jesus, I really hate people.
I have no idea where I'm going with this. I'd keep rambling on, but I really just want to say that I understand how you feel and have been there so many times myself. It gets better. Sort of.
Damn, that's long. Sorry.
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