The Loss That Is Forever by Maxine Harris

Author:Maxine Harris [Harris, Maxine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1996-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Parenting

PARENTING POSES PROBLEMS FOR SOME survivors of early loss for an obvious and quite practical reason. When the same-sexed parent dies, we lose our primary model for how to be a parent. As we parent our own children, it is not uncommon to hear the voices of our mothers and fathers echoing in the distance. Even when we try to do otherwise, we often find it difficult to parent differently than we were parented ourselves. When a fatherless man or a motherless woman listens for the echoes from the past, he or she hears only silence.

Many of the people I interviewed expressed bafflement and confusion at the role of parent. Even those who chose to have children did so with the knowledge that they were exploring uncharted territory. The closer their adult family resembled the family of childhood, the more uncertain they felt. For example, a fatherless man felt more lost in parenting a son than a daughter. Whenever one could ask, “How can I do what was not done for me?” parenting became more complex and more difficult.

For other survivors of early loss, the role of parent was troubling for a more subtle psychological reason. These individuals felt frozen in the parent-child relationship as perpetual children. Despite being chronological adults, many individuals felt that at some deep interior place they remained emotional children. When they heard the word parent, they could not help but think, not of themselves, but of some long-lost mother or father: “How can I be a parent when that is Dad’s job or Mom’s responsibility?” Even though many of these individuals did actually become parents, they often found the adult role of parent challenged by their own frozen-in-time memories of themselves as children.

Just as individuals who have not suffered early loss approach the task of parenting in a variety of ways, so too do those who have experienced early death. Some decide to remain childless; others proceed, continually asking themselves whether or not they can do what was not done for them. Can someone who was not parented well become a successful parent? Still others find that they have great difficulty responding to their children as separate and unique individuals. The memories of that earlier parent/child relationship haunt the new relationship in powerful ways. Sometimes a child appears to be a reincarnation of one’s own younger self. Sometimes the child seems to be a stand-in for the lost parent.

In other cases, individuals parent with a style and an intent informed by their own earlier experiences. These men and women learned lessons in their grief and early childhood experiences, lessons that have directed the way they now parent their own children. Finally, some individuals see parenting as the final repair in their own process of mourning and recovery from the loss experienced in childhood. Becoming a parent completes the cycle of human growth in a way that is not only healing but joyful. The birth of their own children becomes the ultimate triumph of life over death.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.