Facing your kids sucks. The reality of my situation, with my hands stained red, means I don’t have my kids in my life much…yet. It sucks and I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. What also sucks is trying to not think about it. It means trying not to think about my kids. I was good at not thinking about others. With my frantic and selfish spiral into alcoholism, not being able to face the guilt of what I had done, and been to my kids, meant thinking about them was painful. The shitty thing is that it was painful because I could only see my guilt – I couldn’t see my kids as humans. They were figures of my shame, reminders of my cowardice and incompetence.

“Children become mirrors reflecting our flaws, our fears, and the dreams we abandoned.”

We All See It, But Facing It In Yourself Sucks

I’ve seen this before. I think every human has. We’ve seen others, other parents, their kids, our parents, our friends, other church families, and so on. What isn’t fun is trying to see it in yourself. A lot of processing of my childhood has happened, a lot more than I had anticipated. I concretely know more needs to be done. I wasn’t expecting how an honest look at what has “happened to” me would become a challenging look at how I “happened to” others, especially my kids.

It took looking at more than just parents. I had to ask, “What’s my family like?” What was my family like I grew up with? What are they like now? What is it that they do that I picked up? What did I do that impacted them? How did that reverberate through everyone? It led to more of me seeing me, wondering how I missed it but also seeing how I couldn’t see it.

I like to think about how others have impacted my life: both negatively and positively. I consider my circumstances and conditions, things outside of my control, so much that I didn’t look at my actual self and what others were interacting with. I loved an image of myself instead of just being as I was. I had to protect it even from my kids. They were a part of “my” world but I didn’t give enough value to their worlds.

We’re All Part of a Story

When we’re all born and conceived even, we know nothing but the world we are being brought into. The world already existed. Your terrestrial experience began as a thing that was brought into the world of other humans. You are your parents’ child – it’s a fact you can never get away from. No matter what I say or think, the role of the parent in my life was the only connection I had in the world I was brought into. It is where your story starts. If you didn’t have a parent, had unhealthy ones, or had great ones – they all set the early chapters and the themes that would set the beginning courses of your story.

We like to cry out for understanding. I most of all. I want to be understood because I have this false-idea that if people just understood what “everything” was like for me (hear the victim in that?), they’d get it, and they’d be okay with me. It wasn’t so much about them being okay with my behavior – it was about me wanting to feel accepted and safe. It created a contradiction, a gap, I couldn’t reconcile, making it impossible for people to even know me. This transcended to my kids. There was nothing in me that thought my kids could understand me.

The Kids Didn’t Ask for This

The thing is that this is all true for my kids too: they were conceived and thrust into the world of their parents without choice. Their story began with mine but it isn’t mine. Their world, the entire way they see and feel things I can never know because I can never know what it is to be my own child. I know what is to be someone else’s child but not my own. And I’m sure it’s been a shitty thing for them. The things I refused to do or just say because it was a part of my world were short-sighted and insular. The things my children needed to hear, still need to hear, so they don’t have to go through some of the turmoil I did later in life, when they’re my age and trying to figure their childhood out…I could have told a better story for them but I didn’t.

Kids can often become symbols for us instead of humans. They embody our failures, our hidden flaws, and the missed dreams we live in. Sometimes we use them as an outlet for our projections. Sometimes we break them so we can feel strong (because we don’t). Sometimes we shower them with affection to overcome the screw-up we just made because there is no way we can say out loud that we were wrong to that small version of ourselves. Sometimes we are human and flawed.

Imperfect Parents Doing The Best We Can

I can be overly critical and pessimistic sometimes; as a youth pastor, it’s easy to see how we as parents deceive ourselves. As an addict, I see how ugly I could be as a parent..but not from my kids’ eyes. I can’t. We say things like “We’d do anything for our kids” and I get it. I do but we are not perfect. We are not always willing to do anything for our kids. We miss it sometimes. I wasn’t and I’m not unique. More of us than any of us want to think about saying these things to cover up what we aren’t willing to do.

Since last holidays, I’d been saying I was ready to burn the world down to get my kids but I didn’t know what that meant then. I do now. It meant those layers, those remaining walls I had constructed to protect myself from my kids, from everyone, had to burn down. It’s been tangible and visceral. I have no notion that this is done yet. How could it? I’ve had the entirety of a life learning how to be one way – the fire will at least need to smolder for a while.

At this moment, I at least feel like my face is in the right direction, looking in the right way with less of me in the way. What I hate is how good things look. Same stuff, same things, same people and their stuff. Some things even are uglier than I was willing to see. But I wasn’t willing to see things so I missed seeing all the good too…including the good in my kids.