- What we model to our children is what they will do.
- Communicate communicate communicate!
- Honor and value your children as unique individuals placed in our care to guide
How does each apply to developing & nurturing our relationship with parents & other older loved ones? Read on...
#1 - What we model to the older people in our lives is what they will believe.
Okay, Denny said, "...is what they will do" - forgive the tweak to make it apply to oldsters. Because it doesn't matter what we say to them, but what we DO. It's easy & feels personally reassuring to tell parents & other older loved ones how much they mean to us, how their happiness looms large in our life. But if we consistently don't follow through with action, then what we say is meaningless. And showing up with eyes & body language that yell, "How long does this have to be?" or frequently checking the clock on the wall can be even worse than not being there in the first place. Parents & other older loved ones want to hear how much we care for them, but they want to see it, feel it even more. What we say might sound reassuring to our own ears, but the elderly tend to spot insincerity & empty appeasement much better than we like to think.
#2 - Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
Denny says it all - "I know you hear this all the time from every parenting expert out there but the truth is most parents don’t understand healthy communication." As a result, most adult children are clueless about effectively communicating with their parents & other older loved ones.
Talking is not the same thing as communicating. My mother prized communication, had quotes about it posted around our home, but she was woefully lacking in actual communication skills. It took a sister-in-law confronteding her - "Mama, for someone who praises communication, you do darn little of it!" for me to realize, in my own late teens, that talking can be used to avoid communicating. In our family, what passed for open communication was anything but.
Adult children need to step away from holding onto how parents or other older loved ones did or didn't - in our experience - communicate effectively. We need to plant ourselves in the here & now. If we feel they messed up, we can set out to help set right what we feel they mangled. That takes a lot of work on a shocking number of levels, but it is WORTH the effort & energies.
Denny says that if we're not taught communication skills as a child, we are not able to pass them onto our own children. Personal experience has shown me that we CAN learn them as adults & not only pass them down to our children, but also up to our parents! I learned baseline communication skills through & because of John. Mom saw us interacting in forthright yet healthy ways & thought, "Hmmmm..."
Mom - raised in an era that gave no thought let alone value to women having dreams, let alone thoughts, of their own - set out to mimic what she was us doing. She got counseling, did a lot of reading & listening to audio tapes. Most of all, she accepted that better was possible. All of this started when she was 87.
#3 - Value your parents as unique individuals you are called to honor.
In addition to experiencing Mom as a parent, I always was aware of her as a human being. It's strange to me, but a lot of people are never able to see their parents in any context other than Mom & Dad, with all the blessings & baggage that brings.
If it's hard to honor & value children as unique individuals, it's waaaay harder to do the same for our parents. Yet, that is what we are called to do. Before we can honor our mother & our father, we need to see them as individuals with their own parents, their own blessings & baggage, as having their own stories that reach back into their own childhoods.
Not everyone has the advantage of a mother who was unusually open about sharing some of her most jaw-dropping life stories - although Mom's were usually wrapped in the guise of an interesting family tale, what she & we referred to her as her "war stories." War stories, indeed. Without being apparently so, many were remarkably self revealing. But always told through a gauzy, diffusing lens. Heartbreak was tempered with humor, but it was on display if you cared to see.
Not everyone has the advantage of a mother like mine, who raised us on such stories. But everyone's parents & older loved ones have such stories. Everyone of them.
As we grow older. we should be better able to see our parents as unique individuals, not just Mom & Dad, in the same way we hope our own children, nieces & nephews, see us as more than just a family label. Everyone is well served when we can step past seeing them as we remember experiencing them & start looking at them in a fresh, non-judging way. Not easy, but important.
Denny writes about children, "Our job is not to ... mold them into what we want them to be." There are people - a lot of them - who point to Mom & Dad as molding their messed up qualities, who see their deficiencies as extensions of their parents'. It's so easy to impose parental flaws over our own - "How can we help doing this - it's how I was raised." A flawed parent can be such a handy scapegoat.
We cannot value & honor parents we don't first see as individuals. And it is possible to value & honor people who were simply ghastly parents. We don't need to love them. Some parents do things that stomp out the possibility of loving them & being safe. Valuing & honoring them doesn't meant that they have to be present in our lives when having them there puts our self or others we love in harm's way.
To me, honoring & valuing our parents can be as basic as not laying our adult faults & flaws at their door. It means not speaking ill of them in front of others, especially their grandchildren. It means wishing them well, no matter how badly they treated us. It means doing what we can to help meet their needs, to the best that we are able. It means realizing that they have their own stories, their own parents, their own disappointments disruptions upheavals. It means seeing them as clearly as we can, flaws & all, then experiencing even the worst of them with a compassionate heart.
A call to action
Denny Hagel issues a call to action, a shout-out to parents to raise "well rounded, emotionally healthy children..." My own call to action is to youngers to take a similar approach with their parents & other older loved ones, beginning with the three steps, to develop & nurture as well-rounded, emotionally healthy relationship with the oldsters in their life. It means setting aside the hurts & harms experienced over the years to grow something new, something more... adult.
My thanks to Denny for her three basic steps for examining the unacknowledged thoughts, the messed up ideas & flawed beliefs about our parents that can clutter our subconscious mind. By facing them, we can stop them from seeping out, from limiting our own lives.
It's not easy, not even for the few blessed with awesome parents who had their own heads on straight & only helped, never harmed, their children find their own path forward. But it is essential. The one best served by following the steps is the one taking them.
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