“What is happening? What is wrong with me?” – me
My husband and I have two daughters and a son. Throughout their lives, I have told the girls they can do anything or be anything they want to be. I feel we prepared them well to go out into the world and not cave under pressure. They can drive in a Minnesota snowstorm. They can keep calm in a stressful situation. I always felt it was necessary for the girls to feel empowered. It may have been because subconsciously I wanted to feel empowered too. I believe I wanted for them what I didn’t have. I wanted them to be self-sufficient and strong young women. I wanted them to know they didn’t need a man in their lives, but to know they wanted a man in their lives.
There’s a big difference between those two words, need and want. One implies weakness, the other implies strength of self. The latter is exactly what I have always wanted for my girls.
Our son also grew up with the knowledge and skills to go out and do anything he wanted in life. He is an amazing person and, I believe, a good boyfriend to his girlfriend. We have instilled chivalry in him and he opens doors and pays for meals when they go out. I hope he shows kindness and empathy toward her. I have had many private talks with him about being a good significant other and also being a good friend. I hope to watch him grow into the husband and father I wish he had had role modeled for him. Only time will tell, but I have faith.
Looking back, I know I didn’t always keep in the forefront of my mind that our kids are constantly learning from us, their parents and their role models. They learn how a wife treats her husband and vice versa. They learn how to treat their friends and how to treat their rivals. They learn how to disagree with someone and still be their friend. They learn when to fight for something important and when to apologize. Conflict resolution. Affection. Sadness. Kindness. They are little sponges, soaking up how to “do” life with their parents as their prime examples. I think I failed at this part of parenting more often than not. I set a good example for them with our interpersonal relationships, but not in my relationship with my husband. In that respect, I set a terrible example. Maybe more realistically, we set a terrible example for our kids of what a marriage should look like.
I’m not sure when I let the responsibility of teaching my children right from wrong start to slip. I don’t remember when I started to become a role model to them in some ways that modeled weakness or the willingness to take abuse. I don’t remember the first instance I turned to them after an outburst or a tense moment with their dad and said, “Your dad’s just having a bad day. It’ll be ok.” Or telling them, “Dad’s really stressed now. Give him a break.” I don’t know when they first heard us yelling at each other. Or when they watched me, if they even noticed what was happening, go to my bedroom and lock myself in the bathroom to cry, not wanting them to see my tears. It all happened so slowly and so subtly that I hardly knew it began to change from a once in a while issue to a nearly every single day habit within our family. Very rarely did a day go by that we modeled a happy, or semi healthy marriage.
Over the years, I noticed a few ways I had changed. Two things in particular were how I viewed other people and what I said about them. These were habits that formed very slowly and subtly within our family. If we were sitting in the car or at a table at a restaurant, our family would inevitably watch people. Nothing unusual about that, right? What I noticed was that we would pick someone out and say something like, “Wow. She should not be wearing those pants!” Then we all would look and agree, with gleeful smiles on our faces that, yes, she certainly shouldn’t be wearing those pants because they looked terrible on her!
It was a strange way we bonded and solidified our little family group. We were all in agreement. We had begun to seek out others to put them down. Our kids picked up the trait from us, their parents. When I finally realized what we were doing one day, I was horrified. Since when was that behavior acceptable or funny? That was not how I was raised to treat others and I certainly didn’t want my kids to be raised like that. How had that habit started?
It started at the top. It started when my husband criticized others to inflate himself. Then it morphed into a way of siding with the bully to not get picked on ourselves. If we made fun of another person, the attention was focused off us and onto someone else. Those were strange and hurtful moments of reprieve from the constant scrutiny our family felt it was under from my husband.
This realization shocked me and I remember making a conscious effort, especially when I had the kids alone in the car, to instead find something to admire about the people we watched. “Isn’t her hair gorgeous?” “That’s a really cool pickup truck.” “Look at her nails! They are so pretty!” I still have to correct myself sometimes with my first thoughts of other people because that pattern of negativity is so easy to slip back into. Positivity, in my personal realm, takes work and constant dedication. Negativity is a very slippery slope.
How easy is it to feel you are smarter, prettier, skinnier or wealthier than someone else? Pretty easy when you are living in a comfortable upper middle class home. Very easy when you have all the toys, all the things that you can surround yourself with to feel insulated from the rest of the world. It’s also easy when your role models compare themselves to others.
Putting others down to raise yourself up is no way to live. Shifting the focus off yourself onto someone else only makes you an accomplice to bullying. These were not traits I wanted to see in myself or my kids. This was also the first thing I noticed and made an effort to change within myself and my children years and years go. When I look back at our lives over the years, I wish I had changed so many other things too.
The rigidity of my husband was another element that crept in slowly or maybe it was always there and I never noticed it early on. When we first started dating, any idea was a good one. I felt as though my opinions mattered and he’d actually listen to them. Heck, he even took some of my suggestions. Years into our marriage, though, it could only be his way. His coffee cup always had to be in the same place in the dishwasher. If it wasn’t, he’d let me know when it wasn’t there. “It’s a simple request,” he’d tell me as he placed it in the spot. “Just put it here.” I’d let things like that go, although they bugged me. Who cared where the stupid coffee cup went in the dishwasher? Pick your battles, I’d remind myself. Did it really matter in the grand scheme of things? No, it really didn’t. Let that go.
His rigidity showed in so many other ways too. He got up at the same time every morning. He went to bed at nearly the same time every night. He watched what he wanted to watch on tv. The kids needed to be quiet when he wanted the house quiet after work. He ate the same thing for breakfast every day. He lived by a schedule at work and it infiltrated his home life too. His opinion was always right. His way of fixing things was the only way to do it. If he was met with any other option or opinion, he immediately squashed it. “Why can’t you just do it the way I say? Why do you have to fight me on this?” Instead of having an open mind and welcoming other opinions, he met them with hostility and scorn. Ever so slowly, I was trained to keep my mouth shut, to not offer my ideas or give suggestions. What did it matter? It just ended in an argument anyway because he felt I was bossing him around. So I stopped.
Another aspect of his personality that crept in slowly was his hyper sensitivity to any, and I mean any, criticism. Nothing he did could be questioned, commented about or noted. If there was even so much as a look or a gasp, he would fly off the handle and get ridiculously upset. It got to the point that I purposely would leave the room or become hyper focused on something to seem busy and ignorant to anything he did wrong. If he hit something with the car, it was never mentioned. If something was broken, it was never mentioned. If he said something wrong to an employee, for instance quoting an incorrect benefit at the office, he could not be corrected. He viewed any criticism as a grave offense and he would remember it for months, sometimes years, after the fact. He was a master at playing the victim and being the injured party.
My driving was another thing always in question. “Make this light!” he’d cry as we approached a stoplight. If I didn’t make the light, he’d say with contempt, “Well, that’s 30 seconds of my life I’ll never get back.” It was a stoplight. I was being safe and not running through a red light. If I dared mention that fact, he’d get angry and sometimes accuse me of not understanding or, if he was really upset, accuse me of missing the light on purpose. He’d tell me I never understood what living a life on a schedule was like. Again, another one of the perils of living a privileged life with a husband that provided so well for me! The fun didn’t end there. He’d let me know when to pass someone on the road and be upset if I didn’t. He’d tell me when to go at a four way stop. I’d get instructions on where to park and he’d make a big show by pausing in the passenger seat for a few beats too long to remind me how slow I was to get out of the car.
I truly believe he thought the kids and I constantly needed direction from him to live our everyday lives. We couldn’t do anything on our own or figure out how to do things ourselves. He wanted things done a certain way and, if they weren’t done that way or if I’d question why, it never ended well. Again, we were being trained to stay quiet and to not question him.