I saw something that shocked me yesterday. Maddy was watching one of her favorite shows, Caillou. Caillou is four and has a sister Rosie who I’m guessing is two. In this episode, Rosie is teething and she is put in bed alone where she cries and whimpers until Caillou can’t stand it anymore and goes to help her get to sleep. The parents have disappeared completely in this scenario. Usually the parents are the picture of Gentle Discipline and Playful Parenting. But at night, they abandon the children to cry themselves to sleep. It just doesn’t add up. Thinking about this, I also realized that the children don’t even get the idea to go to Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom for comfort, like my children do every night.
When I was a child, the parent’s (Dad and stepmother) room was OFF LIMITS. The door was always closed, and one had to knock. I only knocked when I absolutely had to, like if I was vomiting and had a fever, and even then I would stand there for several minutes working up the courage to knock. Once the door opened, one could see the long trek between the door and the bed, and the air was as thick as knives in that space. The idea of crawling into my parent’s bed for comfort was akin to searching a dumpster for creme brulee.
Yet somehow it never occurred to me to exclude my children from my personal space. From the moment they were born, they tucked their vulnerable bodies up against my side. When they are sick or teething, I’m the one who insists they sleep next to me where I can hold them tenderly all night long while they slumber.
When I think about physical closeness when I was a child, I remember hearing, and echoing, the insistence that I didn’t like to be hugged. It was not true. It’s not true for anyone. One day in the second grade I broke down in tears and the substitute teacher, who had four children of her own, took me on her lap and held me close. I breathed in her sweet smell, felt her soft warm body embrace me, and felt more secure than I remembered ever feeling. I wanted to sit there all day, and I knew she wanted to hold me all day, but she had a job to do and it was just a fleeting moment. Soon after, our regular teacher came back from maternity leave and my hope for another hug like that one was shattered. Still, just thinking about that hug got me through some tough times.
My mother’s space was open to me only on visitation days, which were few and far between. I was so trained by my daily life that I kept my distance even when the barrier was not there. How it must have broken her heart to see her little daughter too afraid to openly reach out for comfort.
Like little Rosie, I had a caring older sibling who was there for me, but the house rules were strong and I didn’t get nearly the amount of time I needed to have with her. She remains my strongest link in the family of my childhood. She is the one my heart lurches for… my parents are kind of a toss-up.
My daughters get all the hugs they need and then some. I hope they never feel the insecurity I felt, and still feel, from that lack of closeness with a care provider. I want to be the one they can come to when their lives get complicated, and then eventually they will form bonds with other women that they can depend on like they depended on me. My space will always be their space. Feeling the mother-child bond from the other side has been healing for me, but it also makes the discrepancies with my own child-mother bond all the more glaring. Try as I might, that chance to bond is gone.
It was this post that inspired me to explore these ideas this morning. I hadn’t thought of it this way, but I share that inability to form strong and long-lasting friendship bonds. I don’t know what it is… I’m an excellent secret keeper, I am understanding and non-judgemental, I try to smile often. Sometimes I think that if I had a car and could deliver meals to a sick friend at a moment’s notice, I could be a better friend. If I had the time to knit a baby sweater for a pregnant woman, I’d be a better friend. I don’t know what it is, and secretly hope it will all get better when the kids are older and I have more personal time to devote to the problem of acquiring the kind of friend I could call at 3AM for some kind words when I can’t sleep. Meanwhile, I’ve got things to do, like make breakfast.
