A Mother's Love Is Not Enough

I had two goals in life. To be the best wife I could be, and the best mother. I wanted nothing more than those two things.

For years I believed that staying held my family together. That my love could cover what their father could not give them. I was wrong. And the ones who finally showed me were my own children, now as adults.

This is a hard one to write. But if you stayed for your kids too, if you told yourself your love would be enough to shield them, you need to read it.

The Beginning

I married my college sweetheart. Two years later, my second dream was born. A beautiful baby boy. The first grandchild of the family. Loved and adored by everyone. And no one was prouder to be a dad than my husband.

Little did I know what his dad already saw when he looked at his newborn son. Not a new life with a destiny of his own. He saw a junior. A mini version of himself.

He saw a protégé. Something he could mold into living proof of HIS greatness. HIS success. HIS unrealized dream, lived out through our son.

His own basketball dream had been thwarted by an injury his senior year of college. In an instant his plans to play overseas and make it to the pros were gone. So a son became his second chance to vicariously live out his dream. And I was none the wiser.

Back Then

What I saw, at the time, was a dad who was involved in every part of his son’s life. Basketball, of course. He coached every team from the time his son could bounce a ball at 4 years old until the school coaches took over. And then he continued to coach from the sidelines.

We practically lived in the gym. And when two more sons came along, our gym time was multiplied by that much.

My three boys were predetermined by their dad to be basketball stars. Their success would be a direct reflection of the man who created them. (And I am not referring to God, as one may think.)

Fast forward to today. At the grown ages of 25, 27, and 30, not one of them wants anything to do with organized sports. The father who set out to recreate his glory through his children failed at the one thing he wanted most.

It was never just a game. It was a constant effort to earn his approval or absorb his disappointment.

Collectively, my sons resent being forced to play. They admitted, despite everything they were told, that it was never fun. It was work. A daily test to earn a love that was always tied to a scoreboard.

The Reckoning

Recently, a participant in my P2P Essentials program, I will call her Beth, sent me something that resonated with me deeply.

Her husband did the same thing, only with baseball. The details were different. But the pattern was word-for-word my own life. With her permission, here is part of what she finally came to see.

I read Beth’s words and I could not un-see it. I teach survivors about this very thing. How a narcissistic parent turns a child into an extension of himself. And still, in my own home, my denial hid it from me for years. It is one thing to name the pattern when you are helping someone else. It is another thing to find it sitting at your own kitchen table.

All those gyms. All that coaching. All those trophies. I had called it devotion. But it was never devotion. It was a man using his sons to chase a dream that was only ever his.

The Cost

My oldest carried the highest and harshest expectations. It did not help that he grew taller than 95% of kids his age, the walking image of his father who was equally above average in height. In his father’s eyes, destined to be the pro his father prayed for. Because of this, he has battled depression for most of his young adult life. And to this day he is still finding his way, partly because he has always felt like a disappointment to his dad.

While his teammates did what boys do in the locker room and on the bus, my son kept to himself, reading books. In fact, he carried a backpack full of his favorite books everywhere he went. One of his most impactful memories is of his dad “adopting” one of the other players and treating him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Because, unlike our son, this player demonstrated what his dad considered “real potential”.

Like Beth came to see about her own son, the real legacy of those years is not the games won or the skills built. It is about a young man who carried the crushing weight of his father’s expectations, and who had to fight for the right to just be himself. That kind of wound in a son runs deep.

At 18, my son changed his name. He was determined not to represent his father as a junior, so he chose a name all his own. It was one of many ways he strove to separate himself from his father. He chose to be nothing like him, instead of a younger version of him.

Later, he dropped out of college after his first year and worked as a barista for 10 years. He was passionate about coffee and even dreamed of opening his own coffee and bookshop.

To this day, his dad jokes, though he is not really joking, that our son wasted all that height and potential just to go make coffee. But we finally see who he was always meant to be. A kind-hearted, gentle giant who loves heavy metal music and wears his independence in the art of tattoos. And I have never been prouder.

My son trusted me with his truth. Not his father. Me. That tells you everything about who the safe parent really was.

The Lesson

Here is the part I have had to sit with. I thought I was the buffer. I thought if I stayed and countered every blow with empathy, my love would be enough to protect my children from their dad. But my love, as fierce as it was, could not undo what was happening to them every single day.

My denial would not let me see it until my children were old enough to tell me themselves. They were powerless then. And in a different way, so was I.

This is the hardest lesson I have learned. Staying for the children is not always the protection we think it is. Sometimes it is the very thing that keeps them in their own form of survival. One more day. One more season. One more game.

As a therapist, I know now that I could not shield a child from a man I, too, was trapped under. The guilt I carried for years was real. But it was never proof that I failed them. It was proof of how much I loved them. Those are two different things.

“You did then what you knew how to do. And when you knew better, you did better.”

Maya Angelou

If This Is You

Maybe you stayed too. Maybe you told yourself what I told myself. That keeping the family together was the right thing to do. That your presence would absorb the worst of it.

Maybe you are only now hearing your grown children say what really happened, and the guilt is trying to swallow you.

I need you to hear me. Seeing it now does not erase the love that kept you in the fight. You did the only thing you knew to do with what you knew at the time. The fact that you can see it today is not your failure. It is the beginning of your healing.

My sons are writing their own stories now. Free of the path that was picked for them before they could even talk. I am writing mine too. And all of us, finally, are becoming who we were always meant to be.