Most of my adulthood, I’ve had a hard time understanding people for whom guilt is a driving force of day-to-day life. I’m getting it much more now.
It took parenting almost-adults for me. It’s like a long-dormant virus awakening to give me emotional shingles. Now, if I get sideways with one of my kids and it can be reasonably said that I’ve at all misstepped to aid in the construction of the situation, the guilt is a threat to sit on my chest. I have to check the tendency actively. If I don’t, then I’ll rapidly, if not eagerly, start reliving every mistake I’ve ever made as a father, looking for insight into the circumstances that led me to screw up today.
That’s unpleasant. It’s also potentially debilitating, if I don’t stay in front of it. I’m thankful for self-awareness sufficient to do so most of the time.
Worse, it’s useless. As I type my kids are 19 and 17. They’ve still got some things to pick up from their folks, and they will. But—most expert thought is consistent on this—the major burn-ins are done. If we’ve raised parasites, assholes, or parasitic assholes, there’s no throwing them into reverse now. Not completely. Not usefully.
(I really don’t think we have. But that just underscores why I ought to stay away from this mental landscape, doesn’t it?)
If there’s a positive in all of this, it’s that my father is coming in for a lot of midlife exoneration in the eyes of his son. I’ve had a bit of dialogue over the past decade or two—mostly internal, but some shared with Lea—about perceived mistakes my parents made that I wasn’t going to. Yeah, I know. Cliché much?
A couple of those things have stuck, and I suspect are permanent. But a good bit of that list has fallen away as I’ve gotten older and wiser. And now, that falling-away is accelerating.
I used to think my father didn’t consider a lot of his parenting mistakes as such. Probably we’d still differ on some of the list, but are those disconnections interesting? I doubt it. I suspect the chestnuts are mistakes he knows he made, but from which he gleaned whatever lesson(s) there was/were, and then forgave himself.
Sometimes we do the very best we can, and it’s not enough. At those moments, the grace we must find and extend is to ourselves.
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Interesting post, Bo. I’m a few years in front of you on this road, and I’m not sure the landscape has changed that much since I saw my daughter off to college. I’m not sure I grapple with guilt so much as wondering if her particular quirks are because of my un-nuanced hand in raising her. We can’t know that, I think…to fully understand where nurture meets nature. But I do know I tried by best, and the rest has to be on her to be decent. She’s not perfect, but she’s not too bad either, and I’ll take that gladly.