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.