Call Your Mother

My sister, mother and I have a slightly co-dependent text relationship. I would like to say that I am the least co-dependent of the three of us, sometimes returning to my phone after being in the classroom to 35 back-and-forth texts from them. Most of them are banal - what’s the weather like where you are, what are you doing this weekend, etc. Some are asking for advice from the collective: how long do I cook this roast for, on the stove or in the oven? Or a classic piece of advice, as my mom wrote us a cookbook when we were young and on several recipes, it says, “cook till done.” We are often asking her what “done” looks like. At times, these texts are more meaningful - like the conversation we had last week about my sister’s in-laws' health, my kid’s challenging adolescence or my mom’s experience as a caregiver for my dad. But mostly, it’s about movies and food. 

Our co-dependent communication started when my sister moved to North Carolina 30 years ago and left us all to miss her in the North. I remember, as a teenager, calling and talking for hours about the most banal teenage problems. When I moved overseas to China, the weekly Skype calls started. Much of my Facebook history from that time involved my sister or mother posting on Facebook, “I’m on Skype now if you are around.” Circa 2012, when we all got smartphones, we moved from our weekly Skype sessions to our daily, incessant texting. 

My feeling, as I work with the sandwich generation of people who are both raising their children and caring for ageing parents, is that somewhere in the past 20 years, we’ve stopped asking our parents for advice on how to raise our kids. Generally, our parents are older than their parents were when our parents were raising us. Generally, we have all been “woke” to the fact that somewhere in our upbringing, we experienced trauma from our parents, and maybe a few of us are working that out in therapy (raising my own hand here) and so we’ve pushed the advice part of grandparenting away from us. Sure, we still ask our parents to pick up from school or have our kids for a sleepover, but how often are we calling and saying, “Raising this kid is hard! How did you do it with me??”

Maybe this is true of all generations as we attempt to lead our separate lives and push away the way our parents raised us. But it seems like we are looking to the internet to solve problems that we used to ask our parents about. I get it. At some point in our upbringing, we were deeply wounded by our parents and asking them to advise us on parenting may feel challenging. I’ve learned recently that my parents are humans just like me; when they were raising me, they were going through all the chaos that I am currently going through. I know it’s wild that I am saying I just realized that they are human, but I’m being quite serious; it took me into my adulthood to recognize my parents as more than just my parents. They were parents but also professionals, friends, lovers, baseball players, bakers, etc. They made mistakes and tried their best with me.  To negate their knowledge because of my experience or in my effort to not need them weighs on me these days.

Now, some relationships can’t nor should be fixed, some trauma is too big, and I’m not asking any of you to do harm to yourself or your family, so if that’s your situation, I respect you and support you. Take and keep the space you need. 

But for the rest of us, here is my question. What if we got comfortable asking for advice from the people closest to us? What if we changed the idea behind the ask - we aren’t looking for a problem to be solved. Instead, we are looking for a connection to those most closely related to us and for them to be involved in our struggle. Mostly, I think our parents want to know us. And sometimes, their advice will be helpful. 

My mom has a lot of opinions. I don’t ask for parenting advice that often because she can be intense in her response. But as I get older, I’m trying to see her intensity in two ways - she cares deeply, and she desperately wants to connect with me. And I’m trying not to take her intensity as an attack on the way I am or the way I live. Because I can see now that it’s not. I wonder what would happen if I just started asking her, often, what to do about a parenting problem. I wonder if it might change the way we relate to each other. I wonder if I might learn a bit more about her and myself in the process.

Maybe I’ll try it. I’ll use our daily texting for something a little different. Will you try it with me? Call or text your mother or your father or whoever raised you. Ask them how they raised you. Ask them if it was hard and how they coped with it. Ask them if they ever worried and why they worried. Ask them if they ever got tired or frustrated. Ask them when they loved to parent and what you did that amazed them. Ask them to tell you a story about life when you were little - see if you remember it. Ask them. See how it lands. Stop asking the internet - there is no history there. The history is in the people around you.

Big hugs,

Kate