Life, motherhood and broken hearts

I am sitting at my computer and looking out my window at a spring snow storm.  Things have improved and I can see the house a bit down the street that an hour ago was engulfed in white.  The blowing wet snow reminds me of storms when I was a girl.  It has me thinking about my parents and my extended family.  I am supremely grateful that even in the days when I could have been resentful and expressed that resentment to my parents I did not. It makes me wonder if most children feel resentful as I have occasionally done, and if most parents fall short of what their children wished they were. I decided when my father was still alive, that since I loved him, it was only self-defeating and negative to let his short-comings, which he had in abundance, overwhelm my good feelings. He was a bit of a riddle and I now think he had some definite mental health challenges that overwhelmed HIM in the last years of his life.  His advancing negativity had caused him to frame many things in a light I don't believe was true for him when the events really happened. I had been there for some of those times and the stories he told then made no sense. However, no one should be judged by what they are post-stroke, or in the last years of a long, successful life.  However I have seen this tendency to re-write the past in others, some much younger and I think it leads to unhappiness for everyone involved.  I wonder if the negativity and criticism of parents by their children has little to do with any real hardship, slight, abuse or neglect.  I have seen it come from children, who in my view, had very little to complain about.

One of my current projects for family history is to digitize the pictures we took when our children were growing up.  As I look at those pictures, my oldest child at his first birthday, our children hanging upside down from a jungle gym or climbing trees, I think of how I felt in those years.  We, my husband and I, were immersed in making our dreams for ourselves and our children come true.  We were both children of a different generation, one that believed that food on the table, a roof over their heads, and some moral instruction was all that was required of parents.  We, however, believed that supporting and encouraging our children in their activities, which our parents had shown little interest in doing, was also necessary.  I'm not sure now where this idea even came from.  Whatever its source, it made us provide lessons and drive them, attend their games, swim competitions and recitals, encourage and cheer them on in everything. WE even told them that we would try to give them everything they wanted that we could. We wanted them to know that the world would respond to them in a positive way. We thought this would ensure the self-esteem and confidence they would need to succeed in life.  Realistically, it should have been impossible to spoil them since we could not have given any of them everything they wanted.  That, too, mirrors life, in my view.

As an adult child I had a firm handle on what my responsibilities were toward my parents.  When my children were small, we visited their grand-parents up to six times per year each, when we could, and tried to teach them that their grandparents were important people in their lives, people deserving of love. As I look at my children's generation now grown-up, I have some real worry about the unintended consequences of our generation's choices as parents of these children.  I now see that it is possible to have a child bent on asking for things we could not give, who feels what seems to be an overwhelming resentment for things wanted and denied. From this perspective, anything done, any advantages given, can be minimized and the things missed resented. I also see children who seem to have no desire and feel no obligation to put anything into their relationship with their parents.  It is almost as if our generation, by trying to give our children as much as we could of our time and energy, not only raised their expectations to an unrealistic level that now results in criticism not love, but contributed to the attitude that our value as parents was to help them and to do things for them. Now that they no longer need our help they no longer need us. Once a friend asked me if I thought it was worth it to have six children.  I replied that it certainly increased the odds that you would have one who would care about you when you were old.  I did not know at the time how prophetic that was.  I feel very lucky and greatly blessed to have more than one. I try not to focus on the children who break my heart but instead count  my blessings.

 I see my children following our example in the degree of unselfish involvement they have in their children's activities and interests and I wonder what heartache is in store for them as parents of their own offspring.  It gives new personal meaning to the concept of irony.

Mental Health, Evil and Personal Choice

I have been extremely busy at work for the last three months, and haven't written a blog for awhile.  However, I have been thinking a lot about a number of issues, some of them quite philosophical.  One of them is the issue of evil.  What is evil and just how does it impinge on our lives?

Many philosophers have discussed the role of evil and I can't say that I am an expert on what other 'experts' have said. But I come from a philosophical tradition (Mormonism) that believes in evil and the influence of the Adversary, Satan, Lucifer, whatever you want to call him, in our lives.  He tempts us to make 'wrong' or evil choices and we have the agency to personally choose to resist that evil or to give in to it.

Recently I have run across a couple of people who seem to be making evil choices is the sense of doing things, whatever it takes, to advance their own self interest.  In one case, a friend of mine married a man with more severe 'mental health issues' than she understood before the marriage.  Recently he became quite abusive and violent, punching the wall, throwing furniture, etc, and finished by calling an ambulance "because he was having a heart attack."  That was the third time in just over a month for this kind of ambulance ride.His heart was normal.  It was all triggered because his new wife had tired of waiting on him, sympathizing with him, and devoting her whole attention to his tantrums.  Fortunately, because both his hands were in casts from punching the wall, and she suggested to the people in ER that he needed a psych evaluation, he was admitted to a psych ward.  There had been other recent problems with lying and gambling, in addition to the name-calling, threats, and shouting that I would call emotional abuse. The psychiatrist informed the wife that these were all symptoms of his mental condition.  He hoped that the medications would make these symptoms less severe, but told her that if she stayed married to him she could expect to be emotionally abused for the rest of her life. He also said that these problems get worse as aperson ages.

I tell this story because recently I had some experiences that were more personal with someone who lied to and manipulated me - quite successfully I might add - in order to get me to give her a substantial amount of money.  I am not sure what the money was to be used for, except that I found out for sure that it was not for the purpose she explained to me.  There were big promises of repayment "next week when we get a pay cheque."  If the reason given for the need being so desperate and temporary was a lie, it is more or less a given that the money would never be paid back.  I have tried to think of what that quantity of money would be spent on, and can only suspect, once the obvious things like rent, utilities, car, clothes and other forms of shopping, are eliminated, it is likely some form of gambling.  As I talked with my friend about her mental husband, I began to see a huge number of parallels in behaviour - lying, gambling, abuse, although at this point her abuse is veiled as 'joking'.  I began to see her as probably having the same mental health issues as my friend's husband.  In some ways it has been easier to view this behaviour, not as a huge issue of disrespect, or total lack of empathy for my very real needs, or as the sign of a totally corrupt person, but as the evidence of a mental health condition which may very well increase with age.

However, how does the concept of evil fit into all this?  The meds my friend's husband was prescribed have indeed made him more calm and less apt to break into violent outbursts of name calling or throwing furniture.  However, it is evident that his high level of self-interest is his greatest motivation, and his ability to show concern for his wife's needs is still obviously lacking.  In the beginning days of their marriage, he was kind and almost loving.  That was when he was having heart problems and she was devoting all her spare time to waiting on him.  He obviously liked that and wanted to keep their relationship on that basis, even when he was recovered.  When she asked for a more reasonable balance, he flipped out and faked heart problems. The meds helped but that balance didn't happen.  So where does brain chemistry as a cause end and personal choice take over?  It seemed like he was able to choose to be 'nice' when he was getting what he wanted and became nasty when he didn't. Was it true that, in the words of that sixties comic Flip Wilson, "the devil made me do it" ? AND does the person in my life have similar "mental health issues"? Or is she giving in to a high level of self-interest that cannot consider the valid and real needs of others, that is, did the 'devil make her do it', or does she have serious mental health issues?

I know that there probably is no firm answer for me to these questions.  I am likely to attribute personal choice to a number of the small sins that people commit.  However, when the offenses are serious, I am less able to make them responsible, since doing so may be admitting the presence of evil in their lives, and consequently thinking they are bad.  THAT makes me uncomfortable.  I am not a judgmental person and I have had a number of people tell me that I am the least judgmental of anyone they know.  It very often happens that when someone has 'wronged' or cheated you in the way she has, they then have to justify themselves by pointing the finger at you and criticizing you, even talking about you behind your back.  Then they can feel like you deserve their treatment of you.  I accept that.  I can at that point avoid contact with them since they have become incapable of being one of my friends, but can only pretend to like me while being compelled to criticize, discredit, and lie about me.  If they are a person who lies anyway this is easy for them.  That I can deal with.  But the larger issue of how to account for it remains.  Is it evil and the personal choice to embrace it, or a mental health issue that drives their behaviour and which they cannot be responsible for? If it is 'mental health' then it will probably not change much, and if it is an evil choice, then until the choices radically change, it will probably not change much. I was discussing the problem with a close friend recently, and she said that it doesn't matter - my response to it has to be the same in either case.  However, I have to think something.  For me personally, it is easier for me to choose mental health issues since that is the least judgmental way.   I just am not willing to judge.

Only God knows what personal responsibility either of these people, or anyone for that matter, bears. I am glad He actually knows and has the wisdom to make the judgment fairly. I am glad that I am not God.