It's Not Your Fault

Issue 102
By Peggy O'Mara 

Early this morning I was awakened by the squawking of ravens. After tossing and turning for a while and trying to fall back to sleep, I decided to just get up and have a bath. Maybe a hot, lavender bath would help me to relax, I thought. It worked. I fell asleep for several hours after the bath, even though the ravens continued to serenade.

I was having trouble falling back to sleep this morning because I was reworking in my mind disagreements and hurt feelings from the night before. I had had an argument with one of my daughters and a misunderstanding with another. Both incidents had caused withdrawal, and we had not as yet rebounded from our anger.

Although I thought that I was the one with the hurt feelings, I still blamed myself. Causing pain to those we love is in such contrast to what we want that when it happens we can be overcome with self-recrimination regardless of the circumstances.

Self-recrimination implies that we have control over interpersonal relationships, but we do not. It may seem that when everything is running smoothly in the family it is because of something that we did. When things go poorly, however, we realize that this is not always so. While the will and actions of our own personal lives must certainly be directed toward our own perfectibility, the larger life of society in which we participate is inherently out of our control. This is because we are part of a larger pattern, one that we cannot easily orchestrate. Even so, once there has been conflict with a loved one it is normal to blame ourselves. When we do this, we review our own behavior and that of our child, and eventually we get perspective and recover. For a while, though, it's as if we have had the rug pulled out from under us.

If we're lucky, as we recover from conflict we also begin to reconcile with our child. This morning--after the bath and the nap--my daughter came into my room on her knees carrying a flower. She apologized for yesterday.

With my other daughter, it was a more reluctant reconciliation at first, and then fast and easy. We just couldn't stay mad at each other.

Such reconciliations after anger help us to fully recover from the experience and often, if not always, cause us to go deeper with one another. In fact, a child's crisis of need often results in going deeper with ourselves and thus with each other and in that way is a corrective to our relationship.

Marriage is another example of a relationship in which this type of correction is common. Marriages have crises of intimacy that allow the marriage to mature. Recently a friend called to tell me that she and her husband had gotten very angry with one another. To her surprise, after their anger had dissipated, they were physically and emotionally more intimate. They went deeper.

Sometimes our children signal their need to go deeper with us in confusing ways. Another friend has two young boys close in age. Her son's teacher called her recently to ask if anything was wrong at home because he'd been acting sad. After spending more time with her son and reviewing her behavior with him, my friend wondered if he got as much attention as her oldest son did. She was also concerned that perhaps his older brother dominated him. And she blamed herself. She wondered if her son's sad feelings were because of something she was--or was not--doing.

These are healthy questions to ask because perhaps there is something different that her son needs now. Maybe his behavior is his way of communicating to her since his verbal skills and self-reflection are not as well developed. My friend will review her personal dynamic with her son and his dynamic with the family, and together they will make a correction. Sometimes our relationship with our children grows nice and easy like a summer day; other times it changes as dramatically as a winter blizzard and can blow us away.

Regardless of the temperature, however, disturbances in the emotional climate of our home often facilitate increased closeness. To sail through them, we go deeper. While guilt and self-recrimination may sometimes be by-products of these conflicts, increased intimacy is almost always the result. Even with people we don't particularly like, conflict can increase intimacy.

Often it's our own selves with whom we need to increase intimacy. And our children sometimes act needy because they recognize that we are off balance. Like all overworked, overtired, worried parents, when we saturate our capacity we can be more reactive to our children's behavior than we might be at other times. In fact, it is usually a combination of a child's legitimate need and our own legitimate personal limitations that leads to conflict. Such is life.

When we are emotionally out of balance, our children sometimes become needy because they can sense that something is wrong but don't understand what it is. Their desire for a correction in behavior comes not only from their own needs but is also related to our level of responsiveness. When our level of responsiveness changes or their needs change, our children often let us know through their behavior. Behavior is, in fact, their language.

But what language or rebounding can there be with older children, especially when things are more difficult--when, for example, our children's behavior does not meet our expectations? Perhaps we love sports, and our children are not interested. We love to read, and they love to watch TV. We know they have a gift for music, but they're not interested in lessons. In other words, they just do not always want what we want for them or even what we think they need, and coercing them can create problems.

For some, it is more than simply having different interests. In many families, children follow different educational or vocational paths than their parents had hoped for them. This is one area we feel very serious about as parents, and it can be difficult to support our adult children when they make choices that we believe may not be in their own best interests. I believe that it takes young adults a lot longer to "find themselves" than we would like to believe--perhaps the entire decade of their 20s. They say that great talents blossom late, and yet we desperately want to be reassured that our grown-up children will be OK out in the world.

My own daughter decided at the end of her second year of high school that she just could not continue to go to the school she was attending. She had lost interest in learning and did not consider herself competent. Because of the confidence in learning that I had gained from homeschooling this child and my others, it was not too difficult for me to agree to her wishes, although she made it perfectly clear that it was not my decision. I insisted, though, that she do this only in conjunction with a larger plan for getting her GED and going to the community college. Still, I have trepidation about her path.

Most of us expect our children to follow our own paths to a large extent. If we went to college, we expect that our children will follow. I find, however, that it's a different world now. When I went to college, I could expect a certain kind of job and level of income if I went to college. This is less certain at this time in history. While college assuredly has great benefits, it is no longer a guarantee of success, and our children know this. Often they choose more experiential learning.

My daughter did go on to get her GED and to take courses at the community college. And now she is interested in college. The unique and individual choices that she has made will require that she find a unique and individual way to attend college, however. I sometimes blame myself for this because I have chosen to reside in a community that does not have good public junior and senior high schools. I live in a poor state that does not allocate sufficient resources to education. While I love where I live and where I have raised my children, I sometimes wonder if this choice has handicapped them. I blame myself.

Others suffer much more. My suffering over my unmet expectations for my children pales in comparison to those whose children have taken dangerous courses or been victimized. One wonderful family I know who has done "everything right" suffers because an adult child struggles with drug addiction. Another woman, pioneer of birth reform in the US, suffers with the same burden. Friends of my parents lost a son to suicide. Another mother, La Leche League Leader and international speaker, suffers the unspeakable. Her adult child was murdered. I bow to the burdens of these parents: "There, but for the grace of God go I." And, contrary to what we sometimes tell ourselves in moments of self-recrimination, bad things do happen to healthy families.

Could any of these healthy families have prevented the suffering and tragedy of their children's lives? Can any of us prevent our children from suffering? Could the parents who marched in the Million Mom March in memory of their slain children have prevented their deaths? I think not.

In our zealousness as new parents, we think that we can protect our children from all ills. Further, we believe that our children miraculously spring from us complete with our seasoned knowledge and thus will not have to repeat our mistakes. We don't realize that these "mistakes" are the necessary building blocks of human development.

One of the tenets of human development is that we cannot control the experiences of others, even our children. As they grow older this becomes increasingly so. And yet, in an esoteric way, we are always responsible for them because we created them. We brought them into the world. Therefore, while we are not always to blame for their behavior, we are correct to feel responsible. Herein lies our anguish.

In all situations of conflict involving our children, either conflict with them or conflict involving them, our anguish is our teacher. It teaches us to correct our behavior when appropriate and to surrender to the larger mystery when there is nothing we can do. Knowing the difference is our life's work as parents. We never get to the end of this work. It is the practice of a lifetime.

As parents who are self-reflective human beings, we will always seek to correct our behavior if necessary. And we hope to forgive ourselves when we have done all we can. Our children correct our course and that of the family better than anyone else does. They see us without filters. They are spontaneous. They adore us. Our children can level us like no one else. But when they do, they pick us up off the floor with the most gentle hands.

Peggy O’Mara is the mother of four grown children. She has gained international celebrity as publisher, editor and owner of Mothering Magazine. She is also the author of four books: Having a Baby Naturally: The Mothering Magazine Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, Natural Family Living: The Mothering Magazine Guide to Parenting, The Way Back Home: Essays on Life and Family, and A Quiet Place: Essays on Life and Family, all of which can be purchased in the Mothering Shop. A dynamic speaker, she has lectured and conducted workshops in conjunction with organizations such as the Omega Institute, Esalen, La Leche International, and Bioneers. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and has been featured in national publications including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Mother Earth News, and Utne Reader.

Read Peggy O’Mara’s editorials for philosophical information and practical advice about Natural Family Living

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