The illusion of control.
Being a mother is one of the greatest joys of my life. My journey to motherhood started 26 years ago with the pregnancy of my oldest son. It still baffles me that I could sustain another life for a year and a half without anyone else’s help or intervention. Since I breast fed, he was completely dependent on me to feed him, both in the womb and once he arrived into this world. This was probably the beginning of me thinking I had control over my child.
I distinctly remember standing outside of the bathroom while my husband gave our son a bath by himself for the first time. I think Jeff was about a month old. I was certain that Dan was going to drop Jeff, do it incorrectly (how do you give a baby a bath incorrectly?!?!), and most definitely not do it the RIGHT way–which was, of course, my way. We joke about it now, but I remember not liking the feeling of being out of control of Jeff’s life, even though his father is a physician and quite capable of bathing his infant son.
Before you judge me too harshly for my ridiculous sense of self-importance or major control issues, I challenge you to take a step back and reflect on where you may struggle with similar things. I think that most parents, particularly mothers, believe we have control over our children, and not just when they are infants. We think we can pick their friends by engineering playdates in grade school, ensure they get good grades by checking homework in middle school, and help them with college applications in high school. None of these is inherently wrong. But these activities (and a myriad of others that I won’t delineate) quite possibly feed our internal belief that we are in control of our children.
“We need to stop judging parents for what their kids do or do not do; we should be supporting each other through the most difficult times of parenting…”
Don’t misunderstand what I am saying–as parents, we should be involved in our children’s lives. But many parents I have interviewed have told me the same thing I’ve realized only relatively recently–we really do not have control over our children. They, like us, are beautifully unique human beings with free will. Along with that free will comes the opportunity to make choices and decisions. Sometimes these are not at all what we as parents want for our children. Additionally, as fellow humans, our children are susceptible to injury and illness, just like we are. That includes mental illness. Mental illness can cause a lot of behaviors that we do not want for our children like self-harm, disordered eating, substance use and abuse, and even death by suicide.
We need to stop the ludicrous notion that we have control over our children, and, instead, realize that most parents are doing the very best they can at the time.
We need to stop judging parents for what their kids do or do not do; we should be supporting each other through the most difficult times of parenting. If we did this, maybe we could really affect change regarding the stigma surrounding mental illness and substance abuse. That’s exactly what I’m hoping to do with The Just A Mom podcast. I want to normalize the conversations about mental health, and encourage and equip parents to do just that. Together, we can remove the stigma surrounding mental health.
