Issues......we all have them......some of us are toting more baggage than others and some people just keep leaving their baggage on the side of the road for everyone to trip over.
Full Disclosure: I have never had children so my vision of childrearing would likely have been quite different had I been a mom myself. But......I was a child. So my comments on childrearing are from a child's perspective many years later.
My parents never set out to "ruin" me as a child. In fact, quite the opposite - they parented with the hopes and dreams of every parent. It's just that what they truly wanted for me and how they went about "achieving" that resulted in huge self-esteem issues for me. This lack of self-esteem would later prove to be the subtle and silent invitation to a predator. Abusers seek out and prey on the weakest link. Self esteem can be destroyed with words or the lack of words; actions or reactions.
My father was a very intelligent man and he expected nothing but the best from his children. His idea of praise was " You can do better than that". That was his idea of encouragement. Drive the will of the child to excel. Both my sister and I did very well in school but her marks were always higher than mine. I came to hate report cards and parent/teacher interviews. If I brought home an A in a subject my father would not praise me for that - he would look down at me and tell me that I could do better and I could get an A+. The result was actually two fold - I hated my sister and her honor roll marks and I felt like a failure because I did not achieve what my father expected.
My mother's challenge with me was my weight. I was a chubby child. Actually I was probably more than just chubby. This was a constant battle for my mother and I. It seemed that every discussion about my weight was in front of a group. We never had those lovely delicate mother/daughter moments of close conversations. Nope. In front of a group of visitors one summer afternoon my mother announced to everyone in the room that she had offered me $2 for every pound I lost before school started in the fall. I can still picture that event - in the kitchen, the ladies of our family friends sitting around the table while their children swam in our pool, and I, standing on the top stair of the landing feeling utterly mortified. There were many of these moments. My favourite drama over my weight occurred in Grade 8. I was singing in the chorus of the school operetta ( Gilbert O'Sullivan I think) and all of the girls were asked to wear maxi dresses - which were all the rage that year. I had asked my mother to make me one and the answer I rec'd was " if you lose 20 pounds I will make you a dress". Well, the day that I took home the paper with the instructions as to costuming was priceless. I was getting my maxi dress. Case closed. I win.
Food became an obsession for both my mother and myself. She was constantly telling me what I could not eat and I worked around that by sneaking food and hiding it under my bed. Of course when she missed the food in the freezer ( ice cream) or in the cupboard ( potato chips) she would look at me and I would look back at her and boldly lie right to her face. I did not eat it. To this day, at the age of 52 I have a very hard time eating in front of other people. The graduation dress/weight loss on-going battle was the bane of my Grade 12 year. My mother paid for me to go to Weight Watchers. Coming home with no loss to report was not fun. There were no arguments - just that LOOK. I failed again.
I was a failure at the weight loss and a failure in the eyes of my father with my grades. Might I mention that I always brought home A's and B's. I grew up trying hard to please my parents, I wanted to be the best, I wanted them to love me and I wanted them to be proud of me. Perhaps they were in some way, I don't know. They both died before I could reach the maturity to have these hard discussions.
What I know for sure is this: I was a child who was dying to be loved, to have attention paid to me, to be held and hugged and told "I love you just the way you are", to not be a failure. Living in a tornado of an alcoholic father and a retreative mother who had her hands full just living life herself - I was the perfect victim.
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