The most deadly kinds of disease and dysfunction are the ones that go unnoticed or undiagnosed. What might have been relatively easy to fix becomes infinitely more difficult over time, assuming it is salvageable at all.
Enter my family. Luckily, this blog is anonymous, so you don’t know my family and they have no reason to feel exposed should they come across this post.
As a teenager, my friends told me that I didn’t know how lucky I was. I had two parents who loved me, and neither of them were violent or pushy. My two best friends had obvious external conflicts with their parents, and so I was deemed the ungrateful, fortunate one of the group.
I won’t deny that I was ungrateful. What teenager rebelling against authority isn’t? But I was much more sincere in my anger than most could understand. From the outside, we appeared to have a very peaceful, polite family. What more could you want, right?
The answer is “more.” A lot more. I wanted to connect emotionally with both of my parents, but both were unavailable. My dad had been so shocked and burned in the first few years of marriage that he allowed himself to develop a permanent limp. He assumed that his wife could not handle conflict and guilted his own children into carrying the burden of responsbility of being more grownup than their own mother.
I was indignant. My mother and I would argue and my dad put the burden of adult behavior on my shoulders. I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. He told me she couldn’t handle the conflict. She was too sensitive. Too easily hurt. What the fuck was I?
My dad told me then that in a given conflict, he would side with my mom, because he married her and was committed to her for the rest of his life. I was a second class citizen.
That hurt. That cut deep. You are NOT as important as your mother. Even if she’s wrong.
That is not just. That is not honorable. That is pathetic.
There’s a fine line we walk as people, sharing our wounds about our pasts. We are commanded to honor our parents by the Lord, and it is not a conditional command. So we must delve into our hurts and our issues while doing our best to honor the very ones who damaged us.
So how DO you heal a secretly dysfunctional family? When the father has convinced himself that he is doing the honorable thing, and the mother is emotionally absent, and the children are told to pick up the maturity slack? What do you do, when you’ve never been comforted by your mother? When she blames you for the emotional distance because you “rejected” her when you were a toddler? How do you live your life pining for a healed relationship with your family when they won’t take a single proactive step towards you?
Someone please tell me. Why the fuck is it the son’s responsibility to fix the parents? WHY CAN’T THE PARENTS ACTUALLY BE THE PARENTS?
If they read this, their first reaction will be one of feeling insulted, injured, and disrespected. Then they would feel outraged. But what they would NOT likely feel is responsible to actually do anything about it.
If you are a parent and are dealing with guilt over your failures and hardness of heart about your child’s rebelliousness, know this: until the parent makes every effort to win back the heart and trust of their child, THE PARENT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BROKENNESS. God will never hold the child accountable for the failure of the parent. Of course, the child eventually becomes an adult and then is accountable to make decisions for his or her own. Which brings me to the most uncomfortable reality:
How do I bridge this gap? I love my parents. But even more, I love myself. I love myself so much that I want to heal the wounds with my parents. Until we are restored, I believe that I am broken, and my life and family and future suffer for it. And I won’t stand for that. What can I do, Lord?
I have tried approaching them over and over, and the best I can muster is a bunch of accusations. I point out brokenness and failures and then I’m tired. At best, everyone acknowledges failures and then asks what we are to do. But I DON’T KNOW. I’m just a guy who’s never been parented. What do I know about how to fix things? I just know that I shouldn’t be the only one wanting them fixed!
This is the perfect example. Now that I have vented, I am tired emotionally. I will wrap this up and move on to enjoy the rest of the evening. In the meantime, nothing changes. My heart has never been pursued and captured by my mom, and my dad has never fought for me. I am abandoned. I am unwanted. Their words don’t matter. Actions speak louder than words. I feel their distaste. The lack of interest. The satisfaction with having no substance in our relationship.
A son knows when he is not wanted.
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Should my parents read that last statement, they will undoubtedly be outraged. “How dare you say that we didn’t want you?!?!”
The answer is simple. A child’s heart needs to be tended to. If you ignore the child’s heart, you fail. They failed. They still fail. They show no real signs of ever NOT failing.
“But we didn’t know any better!” Please. Didn’t care to ask or look. That is at least honest. Too preoccupied with sports or personal issues, maybe. But ignorance doesn’t cut it. You don’t ask yourself “how do I connect with my child?” and fail for the rest of child’s life.
If you ever stopped trying, you didn’t try long enough. I know this because it holds true with my wife. We have fought again and again and again and again. It NEVER ceases to be my responsibility to connect with her heart.
July 28th, 2008Add a comment