My thirteen-year old stood at the top of the stairs, face scarlet, eyes squeezed tight. "I hate you. I hate you." I looked up at my child. I hate you too. I hate you too. shrieked in my mind. Why won't you just do what I want you to. I forced back the words. Just then, one of the other kids slammed in through the front door. "You won't believe what just happened," she said. "Wait till you hear.." I turned. Her brother ran down the stairs. The far too long moment of our mutual white hot fury was over.
Later my furious child and his furious mom walked in the near-by city park. We were quiet for a long time. Then somebody said, "I'm sorry." and somebody else said, "Me too." We talked about the pressure that had been building in his life. We talked as my kids and I talked so often - imperfectly and honestly and not through texts or tweets or Facebook or email It was 1976 and talking face to face was all we had.
This morning I read Katherine Ellison's New York Times op ed, The Parent Trapped. The memory of my kid's and my near-shoot-out at the Not-O.K. Corral surfaced. Ellison, stunned by the report of a mother killing her two teen-age sons, takes a look at her own escalating fury. She asks a question that seems to me to be predicated on a myopia founded in the belief that Now is the only reality: "What strange evolutionary quirk makes adolescents evoke such powerful rage in their mothers?
Ellison admits to slapping her kid. (And now realizing that it was a red flag.) She cites statistics that 85% of teens in a study of 141 subjects had been slapped or spanked; and that 7 out of 10 Americans in a 2004 survey believe that sometimes a child needs "a good hard spanking."
She describes her 12-year-old son as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and something called "oppositional defiant disorder". She claims her own ADHD. She has sought help: owning her part in the dreadful battles between her and her son, using neurofeedback and medication. To her credit, she concludes that, "...one thing I'm sure of from my own lucky odyssey, is that all the {social network} poking and tagging in the world can't compete with a pair of real-time eyes when it comes to noticing that someone needs more help than she'd getting."
On the frightening morning when my teen-age child and I stood frozen in mutual fury, there were no social networks. There were no complex psychiatric diagnoses. There were no medications handed out too often like potentially toxic M&Ms. (This is not to say that there aren't justified diagnoses and medication use - or that Ellison and her family haven't been helped by them.)
There weren't video games or I-Phones or the constant mind-numbing nattering of information coming in to a child's mind - stimuli that some researchers believe are linked with depression, anxiety and anti-social behavior in a significant percentage of children and teens. There were far fewer parents working compulsively to control everything - in themselves and in their children. There were even fewer mothers who drove their kids from sports to classes, from play-dates to rehearsals, from structured obligation to obligation.
There were the hours my kids and I walked in the local park and the week we spent in a ramshackle cabin with no running water on a quiet lake in the Adirondacks. There was the rule that we all ate dinner together every evening - though I was a full-time student, part-time worker divorced mom. We sat the big dining room table and nobody looked down at the glowing screen held in their hands. Sometimes we fought; sometimes we howled with laughter. Sometimes each of us just wanted to get away from the table and get on with our individual lives.
And there was the promise I made to myself at 24 - as I looked down at my 3-year-old son who refused to be potty-trained. My hand was in the air about to come down and spank him. I suddenly imagined how I would feel if I was walking down the street and a giant so much bigger than myself hit me. Hit me. Hit - inflicted physical violence. In that second, I drew back my hand. "I'm sorry," I said. My son calmed. "I will never spank you or your sister and brother again." That promise was a commitment to talking through - and too often at - problems.
My children have told me that there were times when my yelling was like physical blows. They tell me every mistake they know I made. There were many. Not the least of which was not providing enough boundaries and direction. And I tell them that the first instant I knew I was pregnant with my oldest child, I remembered the words of the poet Kahlil Gibran:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
I recently finished an astonishing record of a family in which "no strange evolutionary quirk" produced rage in a mother toward her adolescent children. The book is How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn. It is the gorgeously written story of a family living in a Welsh coal mining town in the Victorian era. You might need an alternative to hyped Tiger Moms and trapped parents - this book is medicine.
Ellison's Op Ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12ellison.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1
photo: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1190260/Couple-refused-send-son-school-phobia-walk-free-court.html
