My younger sister, as an adult, once made the comment that she wished we could go back to being a child with mom and dad still taking care of us. I viewed this statement with horror. To my sister’s point of view we were coddled and fed, watched over and guided in such a manner as to make her feel safe. To me, the constant rules and regulations, the tight controls, the mandate that we must not have our own ideas, opinions, likes and dislikes was a nightmare comparable to living in a prison.
N. Wilson, an English writer, in his book, God’s Funeral, said that “Freud, with a comparable optimism, believed that when humans could throw off its illusions, it would also destroy neurosis, the thing which made it unhappy. But his diagnosis of what made it unhappy was family life. He taught us that in order to become sane we must undermine and question what for most of us is the bedrock of our social and emotional security ─ our trust in and love for our parents. By teaching that neurosis can only be eliminated by overt hatred of our parents he re-drew the inner map of millions of Europeans and American human beings, making what had been a safe place into a battleground.”
You mean our parents weren’t all that parents are supposed to be? What a shock. In fact, in my travels so far throughout life I have yet to discover any parents who were all that we’d like parents to be. In varying degrees of wrongful thinking they all had something that their children had to learn to overcome once they became adults. I look back on my childhood with a discerning eye. I viewed the daily enemas enforced on four small children by my mom while my father was in the Marine Corps, the hero worship status allocated to my father, which we were strictly enjoined to adhere to, the philosophy that all opinions must be approved by the management as a draconian and Nazi-like regime. What part of all of that made us feel safe?
Even an inmate in prison can get to the point where it feels “safe” to him. He has three meals a day (maybe not square, who knows), a roof over his head to shelter him from rain and snow, someone to tell him where to go, what to do and how to do it. He doesn’t need to use any more than a tiny percentage of his brain cells. He never has to worry about getting a speeding ticket and a multitude of other miniscule and unimportant occurrences. No wonder we have so many repeat criminals. Sometimes life on the outside is nothing more than a desperate struggle.
When I ran away from home I was 18. I didn’t have a driver’s license, much less a car, only one friend, and worked at a job that paid minimal wages. I had barely enough money in my purse to pay for one month’s rent of an apartment. Was I worried? Nope! I was worried my Dad might come after me and force me to go back home. What I had left behind was an incestuous and physically violent father, a mother so subdued by her spouse’s behavior as to say that “even when he was wrong he was right”, was not allowed to have any friends, could not wear makeup, there would be no dating, I could not go to college, I must turn every penny of my money over to my parents and they would decide where it would be allocated, I could not listen to my taste in music, I could not go to the movies or shopping, I could not read my taste in books, unless they were the same as my father’s, and was farmed out to the neighbors on weekends to clean their houses with the wages going to my parents. Other than that it was a great life. The catalyst that had spurred my escape was a beating from my father that almost killed me.
My father came after me, found me at the house of my one friend (who he had forbidden me to see), opened the screen door, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me screaming hysterically and so terrified that I urinated all over myself out to his car, opened the door and threw me in. When he turned around to go back to his side of the car my friend’s 20 year old brother who heretofore had not spoken a word in years (by choice, not by any disease or mental disturbance – his home life was traumatic also) came running over to my father and told him he could not take me with him as I was over 18. My father slugged him, my friend’s father came running out along with all of the neighbors. The police were very quickly on the job and told my father that I could do whatever I wanted since I was over 18 (I produced a birth certificate I had had the good sense to send away for). He could not force me to go anywhere, but they could arrest him for hitting a minor. My friend’s father said, ‘Just get that son of a bitch out of here.” In front of a growing crowd my father asked for my birth certificate. I was still not used to my newly found freedom and handed it over. He tore it to bits, threw it in the gutter, asked for my house key and said coldly, “You are no longer my daughter. You are no longer a Leick (that was our family name). He sped off and I was so happy that I couldn’t stop hugging my friend and her family, especially her courageous brother.
For those of you who were fortunate to have had loving, stable and mature parents, I envy you but I am grateful that you had them. For the rest of the human race that weren’t that fortunate, you might want to REPAIR the damage before you begin your own parenting.
So in response to my sister’s statement about wishing we could go back to being children again with mom and dad taking care of us I can only say, “I have the phone number of a good psychologist if you’d like to get started.
