Living Through Your Children, And Why It Hurts You As Much As Them

How realistic are the hopes you carry for your kids? Spend any time watching the parents around you and you'll spot the pattern quickly: mothers and fathers trying to finish their own unlived dreams inside their children. It happens so often, and so close to my own door, that I can't point at tidy outside examples. I did it myself. My husband was a farmer who also ran a dairy, and he wasn't around for the usual father-son activities, so I decided I would fill the gap. I was terrible at nearly all of it. It felt almost as though the universe had figured out my plan and set itself against me. These days the stories get laughs; they weren't funny while they were happening. A sitcom writer could have mined them for a whole season.

I wrote a piece here a while back called "Weeds Versus Flowers," and it sets up why all of this becomes a problem. My view is that each of us arrives with a purpose, and no two purposes line up exactly. You can admire someone deeply and want to walk their path, and still find you can't, because your experiences and the abilities you were born with aren't theirs.

Take Joyce Meyer, the Christian author and speaker. I think highly of her, and yet I doubt I'd be content doing the exact work she's done to get where she is. Psychology taught me that about myself. There were professors I looked up to and assumed I wanted to become, until I sat with some of their work and found it dull, or found certain theories pretty narrow. (And yes, I've always had a competitive streak.)

Later, when I got to know a few of the truly gifted therapists, I felt like a lost cause. No amount of reading or study let me absorb whatever "it" was that they carried. The whole time I was partly overlooking what I actually had to offer, the work I enjoyed, the particular experiences that had taught me something nobody else could teach me quite the same way. That is the ground I'm standing on now. I once got a little boy toilet trained by shooting miniature basketball with him during play therapy.

So back to raising children to grow into their own purpose, to treat what happens to them as something to learn from, and to lean on the talents they came with. A lot of parents never got that chance for themselves, and they try to recover it through their kids. Sometimes that means pushing experiences onto a child that simply don't fit who that child is. Other times a parent notices a genuine knack in the child and sets about cultivating it, less for the child's sake than for the warm glow the parent gets to stand in once the child succeeds.

Tend your child the way you'd tend one specific, unusual flower. Different plants want different amounts of water, different soil, different hours of sun, different feeding. Even a child who looks like a small copy of you, who seems to share your gifts, is still nobody's duplicate. Go check the DNA. And keep tending yourself too, as the grown adult you are, making sure you're getting what you need to flourish and stay you. What do the empty nesters do once the kids have moved out? (Right, I know: they start caring for their aging parents. That one's a whole other post.)

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