Parenting Triggers Me
What I've learned about the way I was parented since becoming a parent myself
I pitched this personal essay around last year to several publications, but wasn't able to place it, so I'm sharing it here. For a long time, I’ve been considering working on a larger project related to the unique way I and my peers grew up, so I’d love to hear any feedback you have on this essay. Is it interesting to you? Is it something you want to know more about? And of course, please share it with anyone who you think might like it.
My nine-year-old often wakes up spicy and oppositional in the morning, saying things I associate with a teenager. Pushing back or showing him I’m upset usually only worsens the spiral. He feeds off my reactivity and it becomes an unwinnable power struggle. He lashes out at me more than anyone else, and it’s so triggering that I sometimes wonder if I’m not cut out to be a mother. I’ve become more emotionally volatile since becoming a parent.
One day last summer, I picked him up from camp to go to soccer practice, and he flatly refused to go, saying he was too tired. Neither coaxing nor vague threats persuaded him. It sent me into an angry tailspin. I had asked him multiple times about committing to soccer, explaining that it would be expensive and he had to follow through. And there he was, refusing to go to practice. I unleashed on him, calling him entitled and asking how he was ever going to get good at anything if he could never follow through on his commitments. My son has ADHD, and loses interest in things fairly quickly—and even though I understand this intellectually, I was so angry I could barely see straight. For as long as I can remember, I can’t force him to do things against his will, and find this loss of control over my own child very scary. Later that evening, I realized I was catastrophizing about my son’s future because he wanted to skip soccer practice, which was a disproportionate reaction. But I also noticed that his behavior wouldn’t be so unacceptable to me if I hadn’t been given so little control in my own childhood.
Roughly six months after I was born in 1976, my parents joined a socialist party in San Francisco. I spent my first nine years in a childcare collective with the kids of their comrades—I was a red-diaper baby. To people who identify as socialists now, this may conjure idyllic images of a non-hierarchical family structure and a collaborative, it-takes-a-village mentality toward child-rearing. I understand the appeal, now more than ever: the pandemic has exposed how toxic American individualism is, how little this country supports parents and kids despite its “family values” rhetoric, how we’re just expected to go it alone with no help, and how quickly our entire society fell back on the unpaid labor of moms to pick up the slack—their careers an afterthought—when schools and daycares closed.
In contrast, I was part of a collective child care group where one or two adults would take care of a handful or two of kids every evening, freeing up the other members of the party to focus on political organizing. As an only child, I was provided with a group of surrogate siblings—almost all girls, as it turns out—and I still love these women like sisters. But not all aspects of my childhood were great. As a group of adults, our parents had unrealistic expectations of us that were in no way developmentally appropriate—they expected us to be model little socialists, absorbing the ideology they were consumed with about sacrificing their lives for the greater good. We were expected to fall in line and behave, and individuality wasn’t encouraged.
I remember a lot of discussion during my childhood about how bad it was to be selfish—and have a feeling that label was applied to me fairly often. I wasn’t allowed to have individual needs. It was all about cooperating, sharing, not making a fuss, despite the fact that people other than my parents took care of me most nights. Members of the party were assigned different roles and my highly educated parents were deemed too important for childcare. At a certain point the party’s leaders actively discouraged members from having kids—parenting was considered “a distraction” from their more important political activism. It seems unlikely my parents would have had another child anyway, but this dictate reveals how little the party valued children.
The only memories I have of being indulged as a child were at my grandmother Tutu’s apartment. She was a surrogate parent to me, particularly in an emotional sense. We had certain ritual activities, like going to feed the ducks—Tutu would buy fresh breadcrumbs when she went grocery shopping just for this purpose. We would go watch the hang-gliders jump off the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Fort Funston, and walk through the eucalyptus groves, picking up the nuts to smell them. Tutu’s apartment was also a refuge: I would listen to my favorite Disney songs (on a record player!), and play with the Barbies, paper dolls and My Little Pony’s that only she would buy me; unsurprisingly, my parents felt Barbies were the epitome of sexist consumerism.
I would likely have acted out in more destructive ways if I hadn’t had such an involved, loving grandmother. I excelled in school and never got into real trouble as a teenager, but I was expected to be very self-sufficient at a young age. By the time I was 9 or 10, I had a complex living arrangement due to my parents’ divorce that eventually involved switching homes every few days—this was because my mom commuted a few hours to her workplace and stayed there overnight during the week. I still remember my intricate schedule: Monday evenings at my mom’s, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at my dad’s, Thursdays at my mom’s and Fridays/weekends alternating. There were many days that I schlepped along a bag of clothes in addition to my school stuff as I traveled on two city buses to get to middle and high school.
I didn’t have much room to mess up in my childhood, and I internalized this early, becoming a very critical person, both of myself and others. Now as a parent, it seems almost impossible to turn off the unrealistic expectations that were imposed on me as a child—including the idea that you must always follow through with your commitments. I can’t remember, but perhaps this was the justification my parents gave me for why they couldn’t spend more time with me—they had committed their lives to making the world a more equitable place. I learned that “being a good person” meant sacrificing your own needs and those of your children. So to have a “selfish” kid, a neuro-diverse kid who struggles with impulse control and isn’t able to sublimate his own needs—and for whom I am the one person he feels he can say or do anything to without losing my love—tests my emotional limits like nothing else has.
The onset of the pandemic was a low point for our relationship. As the parent who worked from home, I was suddenly thrust into the role of my son’s teacher. We had just gotten his ADHD diagnosis and were trying out different meds. He was bucking against me daily. My impulse was to be punitive, taking away his screen time—but as time went on I realized the ubiquitous consequences-rewards system had never really worked for him.
I began reading “The Explosive Child,” which introduced the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) approach. Its mantra is “kids do well if they can,” and it rejects a punitive approach—which is focused on the child’s behavior instead of the underlying problem or lagging skill that is causing the “explosive” behavior and that parents need to investigate. I had always assumed my son’s triggering of me via disrespectful language and oppositional behavior was intentional and malicious. But CPS is more about parents shifting our lens than about changing kids’ behavior, as it is our unrealistic expectations that result in explosive behavior when kids can’t meet them. CPS requires an almost total lens change, and is neither a quick fix nor easy to implement.
Still, things have begun to come into focus for me: my son’s “defiant” behavior is really about the fact that he can’t meet certain expectations I have—which were, of course, inherited from my rigid childhood. I default to labeling him “selfish” because I was told I was selfish, when I was actually displaying normal development. My son’s strong emotions trigger me because I wasn’t allowed to have them as a child.
The circumstances of my life as a parent are very different from those of my parents, but difficult days with my son reveal how easy it is to unconsciously repeat the dynamics of my childhood. Even though I began therapy in my mid-20s, it wasn’t until recently that I fully reckoned with the grief of not being allowed to indulge my id; growing up in the party was all about super-ego. I still find my son’s bold individuality incredibly challenging, but I’m starting to apologize to him when I realize I’ve been too exacting. I hope it’s the first step in shedding the punishing culture of self-sacrifice masquerading as socialism in which I was raised.
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What I’ve been writing
I’d been wanting to write about gender violence in Cuba for over a year, and recently a few cases involving sexual assault allegations against musicians made it more timely.
Cuba’s music industry is having a #MeToo moment, Foreign Policy
Pop culture I’m enjoying
Beyoncé, Renaissance
I’ve always liked Beyoncé’s music, but I didn’t really count myself a real fan until Lemonade, which I still think is one of the most incredible albums ever made. I also really loved her next two projects: her Coachella performance, released as a live album, Homecoming, and her album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. Amazingly, she’s proven to be almost as good a rapper as she is a singer! Her new album was just released last Friday. It’s exquisitely produced of course—the song transitions in themselves are amazing, so seamless—but stylistically, it doesn’t speak to me in the same way her other recent projects have. It’s very house-heavy, and I’ve never been that drawn to house and club music that isn’t hip-hop based.
I like several of the songs, and I actually like “Break My Soul” more on the album than I did as a single, probably because the lead-in track sets it up so well. I think she’s really making a statement: the album still matters. We’ve been in the era of the single for a while now and the ubiquity of Spotify means we now listen to music in ways that remove songs from their album context. But when it comes to “concept” albums, Beyoncé is one of the best there is, and I appreciate that vision. I also think thematically, an escapist, horny, and very queer-friendly album (which is very much what this is) is important in our dark times. This is all to say I very much admire Renaissance, but musically it’s not for me as much as some of her other albums are.
If you’re interested in reading more about the album, I highly recommend this incredible piece of criticism by New York Times cultural critic Wesley Morris:
The Bear, Hulu
This 1/2-hour drama set in a chaotic restaurant kitchen has been one of the biggest hits of the summer. It’s highly bingeable, really well-written, and apparently one of the most accurate depictions of how stressful it is to work in a kitchen. It’s also a family drama, as the main character is dealing with the fallout of his brother’s suicide. Fantastic ensemble cast.
The Last Movie Stars, HBOMax
This six-part docuseries on the careers and marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, directed by Ethan Hawke, is a must-watch for any classic film fans. As a longtime Paul Newman fan (I don’t think the universe has ever created a more beautiful man!), my familiarity with Joanne Woodward films is shamefully lacking. In the late 1950s, early in their careers, she was considered the better actor and bigger star - she won her Oscar in 1958. I think highlighting her career, which hasn’t been remembered or considered part of the film canon the way Newman’s career has (because: kids), is one of the great things about this series. I was struck by her words at end of ep. 2, in which she suggests that she regretted having kids, and doesn’t think actors don't make good parents. But in the end, it’s also illuminating to be able to peek inside the marriage of such a legendary Hollywood couple, and learn about the demons Newman was dealing with.
Stranger Things, Netflix
I know, I know - I’m so so late to this hugely popular show, but I finally started watching it this summer with my son. It’s fun. I love how all the adults are so negligent (or to put it more positively, laissez-faire) with their parenting lol. Of course it’s Gen X’s thing to tell everyone about how we were latchkey kids and had to do everything on our own, but it’s amazing how far the other way the pendulum has swung with our own kids. I think we need a happy medium between the overprotectiveness of current parenting culture and the extreme hands-off-ness of the 80s.
Usher’s Tiny Desk concert
If you’re an Usher fan, make sure you catch the recent NPR Tiny Desk Concert he did. It’s just a great reminder of what a charismatic, talented performer he is. I always liked Usher but it was during his stint as a judge on The Voice that I really began to understand the depth of his musical knowledge. Anyway, this concert is just pure good vibes and great music.