On forgiving the adults in our lives for not protecting us when we couldn’t protect ourselves, translated…
As I wrote down the title of this week, I was, hesitant, should I use a word that has such strong emotions attached, “hate”. But, I thought about it thoroughly, because this word is, especially hard, for the offspring to say to their parents, that’s why it needed to be emphasized. Other than in counseling, this sort of describing our relationships to our parents is normally unaccepted by the society, plus, a lot of the sorting through of the relationship enmeshments still aimed at “Finding closure with the person” as the highest attainable goal.
Naturally, not everybody’s relationships with their parents are that bad. I just wanted to say, that this, was not what I’d discussed in this particular article. What I want to say was, there were parents’ mistakes: sometimes they may abuse, neglect, abandon, or have some awful habits, that deprived their own young of the love the offspring needed to thrive on, even not provided for their children’s most basic of all needs.
As bystanders, it would be easy for us to say, that parents have their fair share of hardships too, they may have been damaged in the course of their lives, that they couldn’t possibly, take care of others, but no matter what, their children became, the most direct kinds of victims, and if the children are asked to forgive their own parents without valid reasons, it would bring the children immense pain, and the children would normally, fall into the mud and the muck of the entanglement of love and hate, and this would become, the greatest source of pain for the children. If we keep on stressing how those who SHOULD love us the most in our lives never had, then, it would be most painful for the individuals. And, another case scenario may not be as awful, from the outsiders’ points of view, it’s, a “normal” family, but, in the child’s coming-of-age, the ways the parents treated their young, or those careless words blurted out, and when the systems of values collided, this will cause the children to work for a lifetime, to resolve.
Every time someone asks me, “What is the biggest influence your mother had on you?” I’d answered without any hesitations, “how I’d needed to guard my own virginity, and how sex is something that’s negative.” Plus, I was actually very close to my mother, I’d cared a whole lot about what she thought of me, which caused me to never see my own body in a positive light. Body meant trouble, sex is disgusting, and, being sexually harassed or raped, it’s all my fault. Even if for many years, I’d become baptized by the theories of feminism, inside of my mind, I’m still, extremely, highly aware, that these negative feelings of the body had, entered deep, into my bones, and my body doesn’t feel comfortable at all.
This was something I couldn’t discuss with my own mother. It’s not a conversation topic she was used to, I’d wanted to ask her, “Why did you teach me like this?”, but what scared me more was if she’d rebutted, “why can’t you just, manage it?”, it seemed, everything got stuck here, I know that for mom, being a “good girl”, I’d needed to be conservative, restrained, with that “legs together, with my hands on my knees, smiling” kind of an image, and I’d wanted to break free from this most of all. The two of us who cared very much about one another had, gone opposite directions in this most important value, but that sorrow from “not being understood by the ones we love’, I guess, has the strongest of all impacts.
Until I’d started working in education of genders, started discussing all of these experiences with my audience, hoping, that none of my students would be, repeating what happened to me, one day it’d dawned on me, I’d, forgiven this feeling of incongruity in me, and blamed myself, “Mom had even accepted the fact, that I had my daughter out of wedlock, why couldn’t you forgive her for her belief about chastity from her own values?”, I’m not forgiving my mother, but forgiving myself, for blaming her; I’d accepted all the emotions I’d felt over her, forgiven myself.
A child who was raised with love, may have been injured like this. I’d often wondered, can we be more tolerant, of the “unfitting children” who were treated wrong by their own parents when they were growing up, to demand less of them, to not get restricted, and held back by, the responsibilities, assigned to us?
So, this woman had, finally come to, forgive her own mother, as well as herself, for her childhood traumas, and, she’d blamed her mother, for not protecting her from being physically assaulted, and, because she felt ashamed of what happened to her (as most victims of assault would), she’d not told her own mother about the incident, just allowed that bad part of her younger years take over her life, until she’s much older, and she can, take care of her own child (the lost inner child???), and love her and protect her, the way she never felt protected growing up, and by being her own parents, she’d found closure, and forgave her mother for not being able to protect her.