For most of my life, I was very ambivalent about having children. I was not certain I wanted to have children, or that I did not want to have children, although at certain points I was quite certain I did not want to have children with the person I was with at the time. I knew I always wanted to have children in my life. To some extent, I satisfied that desire by staying in touch with friends as they had children, and I also befriended some of their children as separate people. I am grateful for the opportunities these friends, my age and very young, have given me to learn about being part of a healthy family. I knew I did not want to use my own experience growing up as a model, and I also knew that without an alternative model, I would find myself doing very bad things.
The massive reading and writing project which started during my pregnancy and will likely continue for some months, years or decades, represents another effort to learn how to be part of a healthy family. Many friends and partners over the years before getting married and having a baby also helped me take steps towards being able to be part of a healthy family. My previous writing project was a part of that effort. But being married again is different from living with someone with no particular commitment, and having a baby with someone is very different still. While autonomy is all well and good, and being able to meet one's own needs and define and enforce one's boundaries are extremely useful and important, they are not a complete preparation for the interdependency of keeping a very small baby alive and thriving.
A long standing, gut wrenching (in many senses) tradition in America revolves about Thanksgiving Dinner, in which the scattered members of a family return to revisit the pathologies of their younger years, possibly with new families in tow to witness them doing their worst. As hard as I struggle against my own childhood, and against the parents who inflicted it on me, the feelings of that child are continually revived by the very present day's events. Consensus decision making is particularly difficult for me. My husband and I negotiated an hour or so for me in the morning without being primary parent with the baby so I can get breakfast, work the kinks out of my back, maybe take a shower, read email or whatever I choose to do. One morning, he was very tired, and wanted me to take the baby so he could get another half hour of sleep. This is not unreasonable. He wasn't even trying to take my hour away from me (although it felt that way); he just wanted another half hour of sleep and he asked nicely, expressing a need. But I really wanted my hour right now, and I really felt like I was not going to get it, and I panicked. I said I wanted it, and he was willing to give it to me, but over the next fifteen minutes, the baby got louder and louder and complained more and more, which made me feel like he was deliberately letting the baby get cranky so I would have to take him. That probably was not true, but even if it was, if I were able to just leave the baby with him under those circumstances, the tactic would not work, and my husband, being a sensible man who learns quickly, would not do that again. The trouble lies in my attachment to my child; I can't just let my baby be unhappy when I can do something about it. The next trouble lies in what I have been doing with attachments that put me in this kind of bind for the last ten years: I've been leaving. Now, I can't even think about leaving my baby, but I can think about leaving my husband, and I can, further, say all kinds of mean things in the heat of the moment about leaving him after accusing him of not making an effort with the baby. None of this gets me my hour in the morning, nor does any of it make the baby happy, so the whole exercise is pointless.
Except it wasn't. Solving the problem of getting me my hour was actually not useful in this situation. What I needed to learn was how I felt when I really needed something from someone I could not just walk away from, and that person did not help me meet that need, or pressured me not to acknowledge the need, or punished me for having that need. I had not been feeling those feelings since I was a very small child; I just knew I desperately needed to avoid being in that situation. Even as a small child I was quite good at evading notice (being a middle child can be good), going around people in authority, and distracting authorities who threatened to get in my way. My husband has similar skills. I'm not entirely certain how serious this is for him; for me, it means I find it almost impossible to say, no, I want my hour, and be at peace with that. I am, internally, overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom, which by turns makes me furious, and self-destructive and self-recriminating. In practice, that means I throw a fit which begins with me saying a lot of hateful things, and in the middle turns into me banging my head against a wall saying what a horrible person I am, that I should never have been born, and no one wants me around, and ends with me in bed wailing in despair.
Except my husband stuck with me throughout, and I actually felt those feelings, understood why I avoided those situations so desperately. That experience enabled me to realize I do not live in that family I grew up in any longer. Harville Hendrix spends a lot of time describing how the marital relationship can be therapeutic in just this way, an idea which I find troublesome. Marriage is enough, without weighing it down further with addressing all the problems of its members. On the other hand, when the family provides a sheltered, interdependent, consensual environment for helping all of its members do the best they can do and be the best they can be, that is, presumably, therapeutic. Whatever I ultimately conclude this experience means, what this experience did was make it a lot more possible for me to stay calm in a challenging (for me) situation, without having to fight my own internal self, or put on a mask of calmness. Best of all, it means I might now be able to engage in the give-and-take of coming to a consensus decision, without panicking in the middle of it. In other words, I trust my husband a lot more than I did, and a lot more than I have trusted any one in as long as I can remember, and this trust enables me to deal more honestly with him.
I know that the particular problem I had (and still have, albeit in an increasingly attenuated form) is quite common. The way it manifests varies, of course, from person to person. And there are many, many other fears, bad relationship habits and other problems I have left over from the way I was raised and the intimate relationships I have had as an adult. They cannot all be addressed as an individual, because many of them can only occur within an intimate, interdependent relationship. These fears, bad habits and problems are elusive and secretive; they hide themselves from ourselves, because we know they cause us problems and we have tried to annihilate them. Yet we must have them until the need they are attempting to meet can actually be met, or progress is made towards meeting that need, consistently.
I would imagine no one reaches an age to reproduce without at least a few of these. I would imagine that no one actually becomes a parent having already addressed all of them. But to the extent possible, efforts towards identifying these and finding better ways to meet the needs will go some ways towards a healthier, happier family life, and towards raising children who have fewer of these problems, in turn, than we do.
A few weeks after writing the above, as I sat in traffic, I had a sudden, profound insight into one of my own personal major problems with getting my needs met. For most of my life, I've tended to ignore early signals of hunger, get very, very hungry, and then lose my temper and do lasting damage to my relationships as a result. I've worked hard to overcome this problem. I carry food around with me. In general, whenever I'm doing something I never did with my family of origin, I do not have this problem. For example, I've always brought plenty of food while hiking or camping, and even enough for the drive home. But once home, the problem returns. When I lived alone for a while, and when I am alone now, I have no trouble feeding myself. I've learned how to cook very small portions, and I know what freezes or stores well. Yet if there is someone else around, I'll tend to wait (far too long!) until they can say they want a meal before I eat. This was particularly bad with my husband, who would say he was not hungry, then graze his way through the kitchen eating more calories than I had intended to prepare in a meal. I did eventually learn not to insist that he eat when I eat, but I still tended to not eat as soon as I would have if I were alone. Fairly rigid, regular meal times were the best solution I had come up with, and it was deeply flawed -- I missed meals if I was busy, or wasn't hungry at meal time, and then tended to wait until the next meal time rather than eat "between" meals (clearly a stupid strategy).
The insight was simple: whether or not my mother believed in scheduled feedings (probably -- everyone else did at the time), she certainly believed in no snacking, and I was a picky eater who tended to skip meals even as a child. From birth or near birth, I've had to suppress all of my own hunger signals. No wonder it's a hard habit to break. But with this insight, and with the felt reality of the importance of feeding my own child immediately when he gives an early cue of hunger, I was able to start feeling these cues in myself.
An indication of the effectiveness of this insight happened shortly thereafter. The next weekend, we were running errands, one after another, while we had child care looking after Teddy. I missed lunch, and at four o'clock was waiting in a long line at the grocery store. I left my husband with the cart and went in search of a snack and found a beans and greens wrap. I ate about half, sharing the rest with my (also hungry) husband. Then we split a baked goodie on the way out to the car. As we drove away, I was ecstatic! I had noticed I was hungry. I had, without saying anything about it, come up with a solution, and along the way, shared a meal with my husband. It was even all healthy, with no allergens for me.
Several days after this incident, I had another insight. When I started cooking my breaskfast I knew (as in, thought, but did not feel) that I was hungry and that I had better eat soon. As I was cooking, I became really ravenously hungry. For those of you who are going, duh, I always find that cooking makes me hungry, even if I wasn't to start with, well, I have always stopped being hungry when I cooked, and had to wait a few minutes to eat what I cooked. It used to be I had to wait twenty minutes or so after cooking before I could eat. Today, though, very different, and I think I know why. My mother, always on a diet and very much an anti-snacker, used to get really upset if we bugged her while she was cooking because we wanted something to eat. Not the garden variety exasperated wait until dinner, it's almost ready, either. This backfired. I was a picky eater anyway, and I think the beatings maybe interfered with my inclination to eat. Sometimes I would want a sandwich after dinner (which I had refused to eat). Sometimes I just didn't eat at all. By the time I was six or seven, I'd fought mother to a draw (and if you knew her, you'd realize how unbelievable this is), whereby I could have dessert if I had a couple bites of everything, and I was allowed to disguise those bites in a piece of bread and as much mustard as I wanted. Alternatively, I could just make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for myself for dinner and eat that (but no dessert). After that arrangement, I started eating dinner again sometimes. While I do not recall, I sort of wonder if there might have been a weigh-in where I did not gain weight and that scared my mother.
Some years later, when I started to want to cook for myself more, my mother was also quite obnoxious about insisting that the kitchen be completely clean after I finished cooking (not wholly unreasonable, although discouraging, which is why two of my sisters never learned to cook until after they moved out of the house), and before I ate (I do not regard this as reasonable, although I have a nearly unbreakable compulsion to clean up before eating to this day. Fortunately, I've broken the habit of clearing the dinner dishes away before guests are done eating). This surely contributed to cooking suppressing appetite for me.
Whatever the reality was, I certainly had very suppressed hunger signals in general, and I had this weird cooking reaction as well. While in general, I'm advocating figuring out as much of this stuff out before reproducing, I'm beginning to believe that caring for a child is a crucial component of understanding my young self and how she became my older self. Each time I help Teddy at an early cue, I seem to get more of my own early cues back, as the felt reality of his needs validates the dissociated reality of my own needs and calls them home to me. How sad it would have been if I had adopted a different parenting style; I might never have recovered these lost pieces of me, and there would have been so much less to love with.
Again, we've all got these things, and they are a drag. I feel so buoyant and joyous when I've left another one behind. You might, too.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created February 1, 2006 Updated March 8, 2006