On Parenting
I’ve thought a lot over the years about how I ended up with three kids.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids, and I’m not saying I don’t enjoy being their parent, but I sometimes wonder if I had kids because I wanted to have kids or because it was just what was expected as an item on the “being an adult” checklist.
Janie didn’t think she’d be a good mother; the years 2008-2022 suggest she might have been on to something with that. I walked into being a parent with an idea that I still cling to today: My goal is to give my kids something different to talk about in therapy as adults than what I talk to my therapist about. Feel like I’m doing a decent job at that.
The thing that’s been most surprising to me over the course of the last 17 years as a parent has been that for all the time and energy spent worrying about the kids, the person I parent the most is myself.
I feel like I have a weird relationship with my family, one that’s only going to get weirder as they get to know the actual me and not the child they thought they raised. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure neither of them actually wanted to have a kid when I was born, and to describe them as largely hands-off parents would be a polite euphemism.
Sure, I always had clean clothes and a place to sleep, and a decent batting average at food I actually was willing to eat without a fight. (My lifelong love-hate relationship with frozen pizza stems from being forced to finish a truly disgusting frozen pizza I asked for at the grocery, as Dad was entirely unwilling to allow the wasting of food.)
Beyond that, though… there wasn’t a whole lot of engagement. Bedtime stories kind of dried up once my sister was born until she got old enough for a chapter book for the both of us, and even then I feel like it fell on me to do the actual reading a lot. I played alone, read books alone, sat in my assigned spot on the floor alone and watched TV until Dad got home and I was no longer allowed to have access to the remote.
Yes, they were both working. Yes, they both came from families where the expression of any kind of positive emotion is a crime on par with armed robbery. But I always felt like that wasn’t supposed to matter, that they were supposed to move beyond that once they had kids, and they didn’t.
After they separated and reconciled, it got even worse, as I existed in a kind of liminal space where I lived in my bedroom unless summoned into the rest of the house, either for meals, church or farm labor. Being allowed to sit on the furniture then meant I at least had a more comfortable experience when required to spend “quality time” watching whatever Dad wanted on the TV before enough time had passed to ask permission to go back to my room.
Heading off to college, and then being an adult after that, has been a long and confusing process of unpacking all of that and realizing that my inner voice, my monologue, is constantly doing the job of parenting myself. I deliberate decisions with myself not to consider the pros and cons, but from a place of knowing what the right course of action is and having to steer myself into being OK with it. There’s part of me that even in the midst of some of the strongest, most terrifying anxiety moments I’ve ever had is calmly talking myself down, being steady and reassuring in the same way I would handle one of the kids.
I still struggle with rewarding myself for a job well done, for overcoming something difficult or complicated or emotional, because I have to overcome the inertia of years of success being an expectation and not something that warrants praise. I live in a battle where I feel uncomfortable receiving praise and am compelled to deflect, and then thunder at myself for mistakes or unexpected failures.
Parenting a grown woman while also raising three kids isn’t easy. I try to be the parent I wish I’d had as a kid: attentive, responsive, encouraging, affirming and accepting of my kids as their own people, with their own thoughts and feelings and opinions and ideas. I just don’t always do so well at that for myself.
I think in the grand scheme of things, that also kept me from discovering the real me for quite some time. When you spend a lot of years trying to force yourself into the box of existing as how other people relate to you, the end result is that you don’t really know yourself that well at all. I was supposed to be the quiet, respectful son; the diligent, hard-working star student who never got a bad grade; the next generation on the family farm. Instead I’m a burnt-out gifted & talented trans woman who is prone to bouts of anxiety and depression from years of perfectionism who just wants unconditional love.
So here’s my challenge to all of you: if you’ve got kids, ask yourself if you’re passing down the same generational traumas.
(Editor's note: If you didn't already know, I design and sell T-shirts on the side! You can find my work at my new store: https://wondershout.printify.me/. My old store, at https://www.teepublic.com/user/wondershout, will remain open as I transition designs over to the new place, so feel free to shop both places.)
