One More Perspective

I keep reading about people in their 20s and 30s becoming estranged from one or more parent and that’s understandable, is their choice, and likely a very wise one.  Where I diverge from them is I am not convinced all of these parents getting left behind are toxic, gaslighting, or evil.  I think there is a whole lot of learned behaviors they took on when they were children, some for survival and some as a matter of cultural steeping.  Boomers and older Gen Xers were socialized in an era where survival meant compartmentalization, stoicism, and conformity.  No, I am not excusing them, me included, I am merely offering one more perspective around why these parents may be as they are, and I don’t believe their life-long behaviors stem from a cold-blooded, pre-calculated, intentional murder of their child’s mental health, even if to the child their parents seemed profoundly self-absorbed, defensive, or incapable of putting the child’s emotional safety above their own ego.  I understand this perspective, as paradoxically, it was also mine of my own mother, until I realized she was a sevetysomething-year-old woman trapped in the frightened mind of a four-year old whose father was hauled off by Soviet soldiers. 

A shocking amount of vocabulary around mental health and supportive parenting entered popular culture just in the last ten years alone!  People twenty years ago simply walked around fine and would rather disclose their herpes than their anxiety.

When we retrofit our brand-new emotional vocabulary onto a generation that grew up in a landscape of silence, we mistake systemic illiteracy for active malice.  If you don’t even possess the tools to name your own internal storm, you cannot possibly navigate your child’s. This isn’t about giving anyone a pass, including me.  It is entirely valid to walk away from a parent for your own peace of mind. 

…but let’s at least be precise about what we are shutting out:  not a calculating villain, but someone who simply lacked the vocabulary to survive their own childhood, let alone transcend it for their child’s sake.

“The parent who was never emotionally seen may not know how to validate their child. The parent who was shamed may not recognize shame when they are transmitting it. The parent who learned that emotions are dangerous may believe they are teaching strength when they are actually teaching emotional suppression.”

https://substack.com/@dianelucillemeyer/note/p-201879921?r=8q714h

The fact for most of us is, we are happy for our children; we want this younger generation to have the words we lacked.  We want them to build lives that are safer, more deliberare and self-aware than the ones we inherited.  …but it remains a quiet, heavy grief to be graded against a curriculum we were never given.  This is the devastating reality of the generational divide.  It is not a failure of love, but an agonizing mismatch of eras where one generation was forced to survive a landscape of silence, and the next was given the tools to finally speak.