You have raised your children. You have sacrificed gladly. You have endured sleepless nights when they started school, when they have made you a confidant to their fears, you have fought back the assault of outside influences and you have cheered them on to the adolescent finish line. Your heart has been in the right place and yet you have not been perfect. Now they are grown with lives and families of their own and they no longer talk to you.
Or perhaps they talk to you as if you are a pariah. The grit teeth, the snide comments, the overly sensitive “skin”, the invectives, the blame game, the derisively sarcastic laugh and the purposeful distancing quickly becomes a wildfire. First you feel the virtual slam across the back of your head. You are stunned beyond belief. You are angry and issue invectives of your own. You desperately reach out to understand, to make things better and/or set a different course for your relationship. Sometimes you even think you’ve made progress and the white flag is seemingly raised on both sides. Later, some other incident comes along and you find yourself back on the battlefield with your adult child. Apparently the substance of your relationship had not changed at the organic level. You are stunned by the realization that your infinite bond with your grown child is not reciprocated. Rather it is nullified, vilified and trivialized. Your rationality is being challenged by your child’s entitlement, projection and rage. You are now trying to review what the tipping point was and where you were responsible. In other words, you are trying to go back in history to see where all of you went off track. It only serves as historical record. You cannot change your history. It will be remembered differently by all those present anyway.
Perhaps the statute of limitations is actually over after 18 years of age! Most of us have not had the parents we wanted and/or needed but somehow we learn to hold ourselves accountable. We learn to struggle through our own issues and forgive our parents the transgressions that perhaps if they had a do-over, they‘d do things differently. They were human……..It should be freeing to stop blaming your parent and/or parents because then you have control to change things for yourself. Blaming makes you hostage to your parents mistakes and not in control of your own free will. But then there is the punitive value in blaming. Adult children who are at war with their parent and/or parents know instinctively how retaliatory behavior hurts. It cuts to the quick and the parent suffers a wound more damaging than any bullet.
There are no easy solutions. There is only a process. I am working on it and will chronicle its progress along the way.
