"You're Perplexing," My 16-yo Daughter Said To Me

My daughter Anastasia finds most of her friends’ parents to be quite aggravating. They’re not very supportive of her friends. Or they don’t talk to them except for the occasional passing chat. Or they don’t spend much time with them. Or this or that or the other thing. She finds most other parents lacking in one way or another.

Usually, the grass is always greener, right? Your parents are always just the fucking worst, and your friends’ parents are so awesome and nice. But Anastasia has never looked at the other side of the fence and wished she could hop over. She tells us this frequently, mostly by complaining about other parents.

Anastasia regularly sits down and talks to us, sometimes for over an hour, about whatever it is that’s going through her head. Something that happened at school. A book she’s reading. Some drama with people she knows. Mrs. Ogre and I sit and listen, and we talk.

We also frequently do stuff with Anastasia. I’ll watch her play a video game for an afternoon. She and her mother used to go out on a cookie date regularly (less so as she got older). We’ll go to a museum (free!) or a convention (really expensive!) or take her to the bookstore when she needs something new to read (less expensive!).

So Anastasia has parents who are very involved with her life and are available pretty much whenever she needs them. I get why she compares us favorably to other parents.

What, exactly then, makes me as a father so perplexing?

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Well, according to Anastasia, by all rights, I should be a terrible parent. And it has occurred to me more than once that this is true. Everything in my life should have led me to be absolutely fucking awful at raising children.

Anastasia is aware of my past. I saw no reason to hide it from her. I grew up in an abusive family. Both physical and emotional abuse were the norm until I was sixteen and went to live with my mother. I was surrounded by drugs and alcohol from a very young age. Alcoholism and addiction run on both sides of my family, and not gently, either. I flirted with alcoholism in college. I struggled with deep anger issues and violence as a child, and I was large enough for that to be dangerous.

Like most men of my generation, I did not have good parental role models. Neither my father nor my mother excelled at child-rearing or modeling healthy relationships. And that is being generous.

I really should be a shitty father (and husband), if not downright abusive. My brother and several of my cousins are deeply trapped by the cycle of abuse. As they were mistreated as children, so have they gone on to be reflections of their upbringing.

But not me. In two more years, Anastasia will be 18. Lila and Jordan reached that milestone already. None of them suffered any kind of abuse from me, neither physical nor emotional. Lila, in particular, got the kind of love and affection she was starved for once we became family when she was nine years old. Anastasia and Jordan had it all along, so they’ve never known anything else. Anastasia only knows what mediocre and shitty parenting looks like from observing the kids in her life over the years.

What’s my big secret? What’s Mrs. Ogre’s big secret? Because she, too, grew up in an emotionally abusive home with a mother who only saw one way to do things and a similarly rigid, domineering stepfather who treated his wife’s children as intruders and afterthoughts.

I would say it was a combination of three things:

1. Jordan being autistic forced us to think outside the box and be flexible. Being rigid and traditional simply does not work with Jordan’s kind of autism.1

   Mrs. Ogre’s mother and stepfather do not grasp this very basic reality and have spent years trying to bend Jordan to their will. “This is how we do things at Grammy and Poppy’s” is a mantra we heard over and over as Jordan was growing up. That’s nice, but autism doesn’t care about your demands to eat French fries with a fork. French fries are finger foods, and all the huffing and puffing in the world will not make autism change its mind. It will, however, teach autism that you are not to be trusted.

   That’s not to say Jordan had no discipline. But it took the kind of time and patience Grammy and Poppy were unwilling to expend. We adapted to Jordan’s needs; they could not and would not. Thus exposing why they were failures as parents.2

2. I had the luxury, and it IS a luxury, of being a stay-at-home. This provided me the energy and space to be flexible with Jordan and, in turn, with Anastasia. By the time Lila came into the picture, I was able to be everything she needed when she needed it the most.3

1. The most key element, however, was remembering. I remembered (clearly enough, at least) what it was like to be a child and a teen. I remembered all of the things my parents did, how they hurt me, and the scars they left behind.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is a phrase meant to talk about the collective failure of a society to learn from its mistakes. But it also works on an individual level.

Slapping a child may get them to behave in the moment, but the fear it instills will worm its way into their soul. That damage is hard to undo.

Screaming at a child may feel good at the time, but the pain and confusion linger long after their ears stop ringing.

Ignoring a child when they want your attention may feel like no big deal, but the rejection accumulates like toxic waste.

Failing to express pride in their achievements, even modest ones or ones that mean nothing to you4, leaves them wondering why they should ever bother trying if no one cares.

These are all the lessons I learned in the worst ways possible. I did not have the instincts to be a natural-born parent. Everything I had ever learned, everything I understood, about parenting pointed me towards being really REALLY bad at it.

But while I did not have the instincts or modelled behavior to be good at raising children, I had spite. Sooooo much spite. I’ve mentioned this before, but I am the product of two family lines that have spite running through their veins. I am the distillation of spite. I am so spiteful, I became the parent I never had just to prove I could do it. I’ll fucking show YOU how it’s done, goddammit.

For the first four or five years of Jordan and Anastasia’s lives, my guiding principle was “What would my parents have done?” and then do the opposite. It was remarkably effective. By the time they got older, I didn’t have to think about it anymore. I just did it. It had, in fact, become instinct. That worked out really well for Lila, but it hasn’t been too bad for Jordan and Anastasia, either.

So, yeah, I can see why this would be perplexing for Anastasia. It’s like taking the ingredients for creating flesh-eating bacteria and somehow producing a batch of delicious chocolate chip cookies. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and my kids are living proof that the cycle of abuse can end with you. All of the pain and hurt and sadness can be put to work creating a world free of it for someone else.

Maybe that’s not so perplexing after all.

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