Not My Fault

It is so easy to blame.

Popular theory today explains that most of the behaviors, strengths and weaknesses in our adult relationships can be traced directly to the way we were treated as children. Unfairly simplified, an argument over the purchase of a new sofa can really be about not enough love a very long time ago.

We are taught to forgive because our parents did the best they could, given the tools they had to understand and cope with the problems they experienced in their own childhoods. My dad worked so hard and was a bit aloof because his father was 50 when mine was born, and had been working to support his family since the age of 11 when his father (my great grandfather) died.

We want to uncover some of this to better understand how we operate today in the world-at-large, and more specifically, in our own homes where we so greatly can affect our children and their tomorrows. I can recall the terrifying wish to run, to vanish, the night I stared at my soundly sleeping daughter, after I had read that a personality is completely shaped and unchangeable after the first three years of life.

We want to understand, but it so often comes out as blame.

Who am I to have such power over this little soul so helpless innocent and trusting? Newly launched into my own life and unclear about my own choices and answers, it is completely daunting to be responsible to provide for this tiny one. If she awakened and I sat with her and sang in the darkness, would I gift her the ability to be unafraid in her life? Or would I permanently scar her with the fear of facing problems on her own?

Now she can blame me for an inconsistent childhood of love and inattention. Instead, we drink a beer on the back porch and talk. I share my struggles to recognize and overcome my inadequacies, and she tells me about the contradictory loneliness and independence of life on a navy base while her husband is 10 months at sea in the Persian Gulf.

We acknowledge to ourselves and each other the depth of the pain we each experienced to live so much of her childhood 3000 miles apart. We celebrate how wonderful we made it feel on those relatively few nights when she slept in the room next door.

Likewise, with my mother no longer able to translate and interpret, I do little errands and repairs in my father’s apartment, and we talk. He hears me grapple with the concept of “friends with benefits” and “hook-ups” in high school, and confides that he respected my mother’s commitment to wait until they were married, even as he went off to war.

We do the best we can, one foot in front of the other. There is plenty of room to blame, but that keeps us standing still, immobilized, staring at the cradle. Love moves us forward.

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