There’s No Such Thing as a Perfect Childhood

My husband (number four and last) had a mother who hated him and his twin brother. There was no doubt about it; she told them many times. She’d wanted a daughter after the first two sons. She was abusive and cruel. My husband has one of the most loving hearts I’ve ever met. He’s even forgiven her; he says, “She is my mother. She gave me life.” She’s in her nineties now and in an assisted living home, and he’s not allowed to visit.

My second husband had a “smother.” She didn’t just mother him; he was the center of her universe. She knew what was right for him, so he was only allowed to play with approved children and was not allowed to date in high school. He rebelled every chance he got and hated her guts. But he would use her when he needed to, as a baby-sitter and as a banker. He ended up with a heart of ice that even his children couldn’t break through. Every woman who’s ever been in his life has paid the price for what his mother did to him.

I had two mothers; neither of them gave birth to me. Four days after I was born, my mother had her second nervous breakdown-the first had been in her senior year of college. She was in a mental hospital for the first nine months of my life. My grandmother and aunt, who lived in different apartments in the same house, shared me, and I will love both of them with all my heart until I join them again. I can still tell you today because I still remember that when I met my mother when I was nine months old, she smelled funny. Her skin didn’t feel like what I was used to. She and my father and I were not reunited until just before I was a year old, and for 35 years, I didn’t realize how being separated from those two women affected me. I realized that even at that young age, I thought I had done something wrong and was being given away to strangers. To this day, at the age of 68, I still blame myself for anything that goes wrong. I must have done something wrong.

There was a student in one of the schools where I taught whose parents loved him. They loved him so much, they gave him whatever he wanted. When he wrecked the first car they gave him, they gave him another car. He didn’t survive the second wreck.

I have a nephew who for years after he got married did not speak to my sister. He blamed his mother for his “terrible” childhood, where he was caught between his divorced parents, having to carry messages from one to the other and spend holidays with each one separately. There must have been many other kids in his school with divorced parents, but he had it the worst. His wife had studied child psychology and told him how awful his childhood was. Before he married her and found out how bad things had been, he was close to his mother (who treated him like a little prince) and his brother and sisters, and he and his cousin, my son, were like brothers. Once he realized how badly he had been treated as a child, he cut us all off. He has an excellent career and a son he loves and is proud of but who knows none of his father’s family.

My daughter is a social worker, and I’m sure she could tell stories of things she’s seen that could make the hair on all our heads stand straight up. There is child abuse out there that can kill, if not the body, then the soul. Luckily, most of us don’t have to go through that, and there are protective laws and protocols that find most of the worst cases. I don’t even want to think of all those children who have been separated from their parents or put in cages or taken away to wherever they’re taken. But for the majority of us, the choice of what we do with our lives is ours. We can use our terrible childhoods as excuses for the failures in our lives. We can harden our hearts. We can drink and use drugs to escape the pain. Or we can get help and decide we will not pass on what was given to us. Too little love, too much love, lack of tenderness, physical abuse-whatever we had then, we have what we have now, and we have choices. There is no such thing as a perfect person, so there is no such thing as a perfect parent. All we can do is our best. It’s what our parents did, whatever their problems were. We are not them. We are us. And we can live our lives.

Originally published at http://thefoxmaddoxhomeofhumor.wordpress.com on August 16, 2020.