Monday 22 October 2007

Unwanted Pregnancy?? (cont.)


I spent my entire childhood trying to be "good enough" to be accepted & loved.

Of course, if my parents had realised this, they could have made a concerted effort to show me, by word & deed, that they did in fact love me, for even though my mother had not wanted to be pregnant with me so soon, somewhere along the line the anger became meaningless. In other words, there WAS a way to set things right.

HOWEVER, neither of my parents were liberal with hugs & kisses & I don't EVER remember being TOLD I was loved. They just EXPECTED me to KNOW!! When I finally plucked up enough courage (in my mid-forties!) to ask them, my mother, absolutely amazed, immediately threw her arms around me & said:" Why on earth would you think that we didn't LOVE you?" My response was, " Because you've never told me!"

That was an enormous step in my journey to freedom!

But what about the 2nd scenario? On the one hand, we have a child desperately trying to be "good enough" to be wanted & loved, on the other hand, the child who can see that that isn't working, may get sick & tired of trying & yet still crave attention & recognition. And so he rebels & does everything he can to ANNOY his parents, because negative attention is better than none at all. If they don't realise what is happening & why, & work to remedy the situation, it will only escalate as the child gets older & learns more sophisticated methods. This path could even lead to a life of crime .....................

Aren't we complex beings? And what a tremendous responsibility parenting entails!!

The answer is to thoroughly work through your own emotional issues as early as possible, so that the next generation will not be burdened by them.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey there Val,

I've just read all the posts on your blog up to now, December 7, 2007, and this is the one I most wanted to agree with: "take care of your own emotional baggage as soon as you can." I'll say from experience that it only makes life, eventually, better, always in the longterm, and sometimes even in the short term.
Congrats to you and to me for making it through those passages! It's so great to be alive!
And thanks for your blog.