Is This Right?

There are moments in parenting, where I feel like I must be on the show Punk’d, or that I’ve somehow wandered in to the live filming of an SNL skit. It’s like the events of what is taking place right before my very eyes would be absolutely hilarious were it happening to someone else on a sitcom, laugh-track bouncing about in the background of the silly scene. But this isn’t a show, and in real life, our actions have consequences that usually aren’t wrapped up in a tidy, 22-minute showcase.

Each human is a specific combination of learned behaviors, inherent personality traits, and a culmination of their experiences they’ve endured up to that very moment. This isn’t a total and complete formula of the complicated data surrounding the contents of one’s personality, of course. People are fluid, and they can change given the opportunity, patience, understanding, grace, and a myriad of other leading-with-kindness words. So, what happens, when as a parent, we see our child struggling with something specific? It’s not a daily struggle, or even a monthly struggle, but something that can become all-consuming when it crops up.

What is one to do, when this emotional tornado comes to our hometown, if you will, and stirs up a bunch of grit and grime very suddenly? Then we adults are left looking directly at the blinding aftermath of how our personal and parental processing styles and actions directly affected how that tornado was managed, guided, and given space for recovery from the tumultuous and unexpected journey that laid bare some big feelings; where do we begin processing? How long do we spend in the meeting room of our minds, evaluating each moment of what took place? How much space for rumination do we give for lashing ourselves about something we feel we could have done better in the moment? Why can it be soooooo much easier, to find mountains of understanding for others, and yet just little, scrappy morsels for ourselves? Does everyone hold themselves to the same standards of behavioral perfection, or is this a special flavor of our family’s own making?

It seems impossible to me to not run multiple tracks of program management at once. The program I speak of in this case is caregiving, and the tracks are the generational impacts of the routes that were laid before you took the lead. What I mean by this is, in a way, I guess, comparison of how we’re doing/what we’re doing, vs. what our parents, and our grandparents and back and back, were doing with their caregiving roles and life situations. I think of how I handle certain situations, and then how I believe my parents would have handled it. Then I add-in how it sounded like from stories I’ve been told, my grandparents would have handled it. I’m not using it so much as a guide per say, but more like a scorecard of how much improvement I’ve brought to the “game”.

One of the issues with this way of thinking, is that it breaks it in to a binary of right v. wrong, better v. worse, and I don’t have enough of the facts to do that NOR IS THAT A PARTICULARLY HELPFUL exercise. The things I’ve taken my parents to task over, both that I’ve verbalized to them, and the ones I keep so close to the vest they don’t see the light of day, are from my unique perspective. They are without true understanding of where they were really coming from in those moments. I can reflect on certain life events, you know the ones that went really sideways in my youth, and I can first let it play out from the way I remember it, and then as an adult and a caregiver. I can now zoom out a bit, and visualize additional imaginary color that you simply cannot have until your lived-experience includes being pushed to the emotional brink by someone you love SO deeply you’d literally jump in front a bullet to save them. This kind of love doesn’t equal permanent and almighty perfection in love. It can even, at times, mean you’ll see the dark and murky sides of this person who loves you so much, that they are feeling the ultimate frustration in figuring out how to say… aid in getting the fucking medicated eye-drops in to your body when said adored-child has developed a sudden fear of the drops basically being an acid that loving parents gleefully want to use to sear said adored-child’s precious eyes out with...

How can you talk someone down from an emotional ledge, when you feel so stirred up about what you have deemed is a feckless concern? It’s a fact of life, that telling someone to, “calm down”, or brushing aside their deeply-held fear of said tiny eye-dropper, is not helpful in any way. Minimizing someone else’s distress, because you feel it doesn’t appropriately match the situation as you see it, is helpful to approximately no one ever in the history of time and space. So, what is a caregiver to do when they’ve already spent 30 minutes trying to calmly convey that these drops are medication said parent worked very hard to procure through the oft-challenging United States medical system. That this tiny bottle is not available for “over the counter use”, and that half of the liquid gold has already been wasted by frantic movements of the child’s head, due to their very real fear of said medication actually entering the very eyeball it was intended to help? What do you do when you see the morning before-school clock creeping in to the zone of “you’re going to be fucking late, because this could-be two-second task, is now rounding 40 minutes of the entire family having a stand-off in this room”?

Do you walk away and take a beat? Do you raise your voice to a level that alarms even you, because you’re hoping the last-ditch 1985 approach of fear-based parenting has gripped your soul? Do you silently give up, and say to yourself that they’ll have to learn the hard way like the generations of parents before you have uttered to themselves? That the infection you have the tools in your actual fucking hands to mitigate, will have to get worse this time because you cannot simply tell someone to take your word for it when they’ve never experienced the feelings of their eyes crusting shut, and turning neon-pink from conjunctivitis? I am not here to tell you how we moved through our event. But, suffice it to say we did, and well, it’s spurred some challenging follow-up conversations on if it’s possible to avoid that entire nightmare of a early morning scenario again…

Throughout this post are pictures of drawings from yesterday created by said eye-drop despising child. It is truly a riddle how I can hold so many positive feelings for this kid in my body, and yet one, tiny, eye-dropper can set things so off-course. You think you know why your parents behaved in the ways they did, but in reality, you don’t have, and never will have, the entire story. Sometimes parents are just people who are trying their best. Sometimes, you are a kid who is inconveniently blocking the way to the previously scheduled day of adulting-tasks that lay before their busy feet. It’s of course not that simple, except sometimes it just is, and it’s not YOU, it’s EVERYTHING ELSE you’re “keeping” them from completing. It’s an unpopular opinion I’m sure, and one I can’t seem to impart on my own issues with how I was, and continue to be “raised” by with my own parents, but… sometimes you just gotta get it the fuck done, and move on.

What if, in this scenario, I kept my cool the entire time? What if, in this scenario, I managed to reach way down in to my empathy bin, scrounge around, and muster up enough scraps to hang in there until the eye-drops had reached their intended destination in our child’s eye? What if, this was a morning where I walked away with my caregiving chin-up, emotionally sitting aloft on my very comfy high-horse of patience, understanding, and wishing the entire thing had been caught on film so those after me could take notes on what to do when they also encounter a similar issue? What if, I surprised even myself, and showed up for the entire forty looooong minutes, in the ways I knew I was capable of before parenting a real, human child? What if, even though I knew my hot cup of coffee waiting for me on our kitchen counter would be ice-cold by the time I reached for it today, I managed to be the caregiver I know I can be when the conditions are perfect for me to shine? What if?