Children begin by loving their parents; after a time, they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.
Peter Ustinov
Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviours designed to keep my parents joined to each other – the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.
Amity Gaige
My Dad and I have one thing in common: we would both swear that we have nothing in common with our respective fathers…
Ted Little, 1977
Recent events in my extended family have focussed my attention on the topic of parents, parenting, and „repair-enting“.
On the one hand, there was a wonderful gathering of siblings, in the beautiful West of Ireland, on the occasion of my older sister’s 70th birthday in May. This provided us – all nine of us – the opportunity to to spend several days under one roof, something that occurs less than once in a decade, on average. Some of our interactions are described in an essay, which was posted here several weeks ago, under the title „Boundaries“.
Today ‘s essay will focus on the multiple layers of parenting; on the role and influence upon us of our long-deceased parents, how we today view our childhood interactions with them, our own role as parents of children who are now – wait for it – themselves parents.
The second major stimulus for my reflections on parents and parenthood relates to the fact that my own adult children have, within the last year or so, become parents themselves for the first time. My daughter brought her first child into the world – a daughter – less than a month ago, and my son’s son celebrated his first birthday at a quiet gathering in the south German region of Franconia, just last week.
Compared to the stupendous joys of being in the presence of young children, it is difficult to describe the joys of observing my own children as parents.
Newborn children and toddlers tend to bring out the best in us. Remembering back to the late eighties, when my daughter and son were born – 21 months apart – I can remember the wave of tenderness and wonder that engulfed me and the shift in focus from my own nagging issues to the safety and needs of the children. I also remember the weight of responsibility, especially my perceived need to secure financial independence for our fledgling family, to avoid all the stress I witnessed in the lives of my parents as they tried to „make ends meet“.
While I have long been espousing the great gifts and opportunities presented by parenthood – especially the opportunits to re-encounter our own Inner Child – the prospect of witnessing my own children as parents had never really crossed my mind. That has now changed. When I see them in action, my heart gets a double filling of joy and gratitude. It is in this energy of warmth and appreciation that this essay is being written.
Mathematically, we all have eight biological great grandparents, four grandparents and two parents. How many of these we actually meet in the flesh varies widely from case to case, generation to generation, and culture to culture. While very few will have met all 14, some of us have more contact than others, and today we do have more access to information about where they grew up, how they lived, the language they spoke, and the values they passed down to the next generation.
In what would appear a touch of synchronicity, I am now the age my maternal grandpop was when I first became aware of his presence. Of all my grandparents, he is the one I got to know longest and best. His wife died suddenly when I was 7 years old and he was 67. He seemed to become increasingly rudderless after that setback.
Yet I remember him as a man of high standards and sharp intellect, a strong sense of justice, deep religious faith, and a sense of aesthetics I much admired. He also exuded an air of formidable strictness. From my vantage point today – that of a man cultivating emotional sobriety in the 21st century – I would venture that he was not emotionally available to his eleven children, of which my mother was the oldest. Apparently, one of his favourite sayings was that: „Little children should be seen but not heard“.
My paternal grandfather died long before I was born, when my father was a boy of 14. The fact that my dad died when I was a boy of 16 would appear to be the flip side of that coin of synchronicity. He was in his 52nd year and struck me, then, as being a very old man.
The luxury of the blessing of enjoying an adult-to-adult relationship with both my daughter and son is something I consciously cherish. Again, through stories and hearsay, I conclude that my paternal grandfather was not emotionally available to his eleven children, of which my father was the second youngest.
His wife, my paternal grandmother – known to us as „Mum“ – had had a tough upbringing, sent away to live with relations in Argentina at a very young age, for reasons that remain obscure to me. A polyglot, she had the mannerisms of a down-to-earth gentlewoman – something which was evident in all her daughters, my dad’s sisters – behind which lurked a sectarian bitterness and zero tolerance for any life lived in aberrance to her mores. This was probably the reason she absented herself from at least one of her children’s weddings.
There is little knowledge of the great grandparents on my dad’s mother’s side, but on his father’s side, there was a man of action about whom much has been written.
Philip Francis Little (1824–1897) was a lawyer and politician who served as the first Premier of Newfoundland (1855–1858). Born the 8th of 11 children to Irish emigrant parents on Prince Edward Island (Canada), he became Newfoundland’s first practicing Roman Catholic lawyer. Leading the Liberal Party, he successfully championed „responsible self-government“ for the colony, which was under the rule of the British Crown.
From the Newfoundland archives, the core values of responsible self-government are described as follows:
Democratic Consent: Laws and taxes required the approval of the people’s elected representatives.
Local Self-Determination: Local residents, not distant British officials, knew what was best for their colony.
Political Responsibility: Power came with accountability; leaders faced consequences at the ballot box.
Peaceful Reform: Autonomy was achieved through legal negotiation and political debate instead of violent revolution.
My interest in this responsible self-government is stirred by one of the central themes of my own work as a Transformation Coach today.
In the realm of Emotional Sobriety, we aspire to shifting from being reactive, i.e. reacting impulsively to whatever stimuli we encounter, to becoming „response-able women and men“ of the 21st century. In short, this is the shift from fear to love.
This approach is characterised by conscious awareness sufficient to identify and embrace the stimuli, practicing compassion for self, others, and the prevailing circumstances, regulating the autonomic nervous system, and the conscious application of the traits of Compassion, Exploration, Navigation, Innovation, and Activation (the so-called Sage Powers in the PQ Mental Fitness modality) to find the most loving, appropriate response to any given situation.
I can see the parallels between the contributions of my paternal great grandfather and the Inner Work in which I am engaged today. „With power comes responsibility“ is a central tenet of the family values to this day, and one which I embrace wholeheartedly. Sometimes the power derives from material wealth, or education, or both. Sometimes from mere privilege, for example the privilege of being a man in post-modern patriarchy, a white educated male who has spent most of his life living in the prosperous northern hemisphere of our beautiful planet.
The females weren’t so lucky. In a conversation with the last remaining paternal aunt before her passing, I expressed surprise that she hadn’t been supported in her wish to partake of a university education.
„Dear Evie,“ I remarked, „I thought education was held high in the pantheon of values in this family for many generations.“
„Oh yes,“ she replied, „but only for the boys.“
The women get less attention in our family annals. This will hopefully be redressed in the coming decades. We need more „Her-story“ to counter-balance the „His-story“.
One final point concerns trauma experienced in military combat. As in many European families, both grandfathers had been soldiers in their younger years and had witnessed combat at first hand. Whatever transpired during those intense troubled times was never the subject of family discussions. The approach was to „grin and bear“ whatever had been seen, felt, perhaps done.
Which brings me to my long-deceased parents. How they, too, would relish witnessing their grandchildren – my children – as parents. Alas, it was not to be! Perhaps, though, it is happening through me. I like to think that is the case.
My father and mother both struggled; they were not saints. They were loving souls who dedicated their lives to the welfare of their ten children, and both paid the high price of burning out in their early fifties, cancer being the cause of death. They became parents in the late fifties, at a time of huge cultural shifts, essentially spanning the Victorian Age and Punk.
Peter Fonda once noted: „It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents‘ generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents‘ generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks.“
Then came The Doors, Bowie, and The Sex Pistols… I was off to the races.
In the literature of the Twelve Step Fellowship (ACA) that caters to the needs of those in recovery from the experience of childhood trauma which most often manifests in dysfunctional families (families governed by the mantra: „Don’t feel, don’t talk, don’t trust“), we read the following mission statement: „Adult children (the moniker given those in this fellowship) are committed to halting the generational nature of family dysfunction for the greater good of the world.“
I now recognise my parents, and theirs in turn, as untreated „Adult Children“. They did the best they could with the limited resources at their disposal. Today we have ready access to an array of resources, therapy forms, and modalities which will allow us to begin to break those chains. The groundwork had already been laid by my parents and grandparents. Now it is up to us to follow through.
Our Inner Work in recovery is not only for us personally. The entire family system benefits. This is a modern-day miracle, wonderful to behold.
Let me end with the reflections of Khalil Gibran, a man who was, sadly, never to know the joys of parenthood himself. He had the uncanny gift of expressing in words things that might otherwise have remained obscure. These words are taken from his masterpiece, „The Prophet“, published in 1923.
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.
