Today I made the mistake (for the 1,597th time) of being emotionally vulnerable with my dad. For some reason, my silly little heart keeps hoping THIS time he’ll really try to understand me. THIS time he’ll care more about my pain than his own discomfort with my expression of it. THIS time he’ll actually validate my life experience and perspective instead of making everything about him.
Spoiler alert: he doesn’t have any of those skills, and he never will. Instead, he implied that I was whining, gave me the always helpful reminder that life is hard, and asked—apparently in all seriousness—why I need his approval. “You’re forty years old,” he pointed out with an emotional obliviousness that never fails to stun me no matter how many times I run up against it.
My husband heard the entire painful conversation from another level of our house, and later observed, “Talking to him about that stuff is like putting your heart in a blender.” Or, as a therapist once put it to me: “Don’t go shopping for oranges at the hardware store.” Her point (and my husband’s)? There are a lot of people—parental figures included—who are uncomfortable with others’ distress, especially if there’s no quick fix. They feel inconvenienced and even threatened by emotional vulnerability, so they try to shut it down. These are people we shouldn’t go to when we need empathy and validation.
They’re right. I was already well aware of my father’s inability to provide oranges. If it were the first time I had ever tried to have an emotionally honest conversation with him and this were the result, it would still be painful, but at least I wouldn’t feel so fucking stupid. As Maya Angelou said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” He’s shown me over and over and over and over. It’s time to really believe him, Katie! BELIEVE HIM, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!
True: as a child, I didn’t have that luxury. Children are at the mercy of their caregivers’ toxic traits. Psychologist and parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy explains in her New York Times Bestseller Good Inside, “[Children are] utterly dependent on [caregivers] for survival and they know this, deep in their bones, so they collect data on their environment and then wire themselves accordingly to maximize attachment and keep their parents as close as possible.” So if, for example, a little girl is raised by the emotional equivalent of a robot who is programmed to view any expression of “negative” feelings as an extreme inconvenience, “she will learn early on that her feelings are ‘wrong’ and […] will associate vulnerability with rejection.”
The good news is, I’m an adult now. I finally understand—even if I sometimes still have a hard time truly believing—that there’s nothing wrong with me for not being or pretending to be happy all the time. So I don’t actually need his approval. I want it, but since continuing to chase secure attachment with him has proven harmful for my mental health, I can give adult me a gift child me wasn’t allowed to have: the gift of distance from someone who causes me pain.
I’ve gotten much better at this in recent years, but every once in a while, I accidentally let my guard down, and that naïve little girl inside seizes control of my interactions with him (and other people who proved long ago they don’t deserve all or maybe any of me). It always ends badly. This is not because there is anything wrong with the little girl; she is sweet and pure and chaotic and magical. It’s because my job as an adult is to protect that little girl just like I protect my own children, which means not allowing her to make decisions above her pay grade. What I should and shouldn’t trust my dad with is one of those decisions. (The list of shoulds is pretty short at this point, and includes the following: borrowing a tool, asking for advice on yard maintenance, and discussing tomorrow’s forecasted rain.)
Despite my frustration with myself for wasting several hours of my life feeling shitty because of today’s interaction, it’s a good reminder of why I work so hard to parent in diametrical opposition to the way I was raised. The first reason is that I want my kids to feel like they can come to me for oranges, now and forever. I don’t ever want them to feel like they have to perform OKness for me. The second reason is that I want to truly know them, in all their complicated glory. And the only way to ensure that is to let them know every single day that they can trust me with their tenderest, messiest parts. That is my number one job as a parent, and it never ends. Not even when they’re 40. Because this is one thing I’ve learned in my 40 years: if you only ever see someone with their eyes dry and their chin up, you don’t really know them at all.
Finally, to anyone who’s thinking it’s not right to “air dirty family laundry”—which is clearly something a part of me is worried about, or I wouldn’t be saying it--I’d like to end with a favorite quote by writer Anne Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
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