Sure, some people are assholes without being enabled. These are your "natural-born" assholes and come by it honestly. But there are lots of perfectly good people born out there every day who are allowed to turn into jerkwads by the people surrounding them. If your kid steals shit and you scream at the cops when they bring your kid in with proof he's guilty, you are telling your kid that it's ok to be a shitbag, as long as you don't get caught by people who can punish them.
My father was one of those natural-borns that married an enabler and got worse. If your spouse cheats on you and you tell them you're going to leave them, then let them give you puppy-dog eyes and talk you into making them dinner and rubbing their feet, you are telling them it's really ok to fuck you over, because you're still going to do all the things they want you to. If your drama-queen mama has a shit-fit until you do the holidays her way, and then you do the holidays her way, you are rewarding her for infantile behavior. And if your kids watch you enable other people, they will probably grow up to enable someone else. You are telling them it's ok to let people walk on you IF YOU LOVE THEM.
The truth is, when you love someone, it's ok to not cave at their ridiculousness that hurts you. If you're a parent, you're doing your child a disservice by enabling them right into a drug- and crime-riddled life wherein they live in your basement when they're not in jail and you hide their weed and stolen goods in your garage so the cops won't take your baby to jail.
Pull your heads out, folks. Most people who act like assholes do it because they are allowed to.
Yeah, but it's so much easier to blame everyone else than be responsible for your own choices. You be the "groan-up:" Please act like one. You set the tone and tenor for what your kids will see as acceptable in relationships: If you act like a doormat, you've just demonstrated to your kids that not having boundaries is acceptable.
ReplyDeleteSo when some "authority figure/adult" abuses your kid, don't be surprised. You taught them it's OK. Behavior trumps words any day.
TW
This is why I am probably more pissed at my dad these days than my mother. He didn't just enable her idiocy, he asked me to join in and sacrifice what little sense of integrity I managed to piece together for myself in a house of lies. She couldn't change, so he thought we all should accommodate. And they still couldn't understand why my sister had no self-esteem. They would cluck over it like she had a birth defect.
ReplyDeleteThese points of view echo my experience with my mother. Her mother was MN and her husband was MN. She moved directly from being her mother's golden child to being my father's clothes-washer-dinner-cooker-shit-put-er-upper. For years she wouldn't say shit if she had a mouthful. Everything her mother said was golden, even though her mother was a miserable bitch whose kindest act in life was death, and mother would never speak up for me or my sister when dad was being awful to us. It was always deference to him, even when he was clearly wrong. And, often, I think we took the brunt of blame for crap that she did. Then, after living with dad for about 30 years, she absorbed alot of his N-ness. Now that dad has passed away, I can see more clearly how much anger I have at mom. Before he died, he was harder for me to deal with than her, but now it's easier to see how she really is. It's quite appalling how much I let her get away with when dad was more badly behaved.
ReplyDeleteYa know Bess, as a child you were powerless. As an adult and living an adult life you have a whole bunch of stuff in your life that demands your attention.
ReplyDeleteIMO, reality is you couldn't have changed a thing even if you tried. It "worked" for the parents and that's all that mattered in their world. Kids are ancillary, mostly unfortunate "side-effects" of marriage. Preserving THEIR "relationshit" trumps the kids any day.
Yeah, sad, sad, sad. And we surely feel mad, mad, mad. Why wouldn't we? When you steal a childhood, you expropriate something that can NEVER be restored.
TW
Bess, yep to everything you said. My dad cheated on my N mom for their 22 years of marriage. I think she kinda liked it because it gave her an excuse to be the martyr/victim she was born to be.
ReplyDeleteMy older sister saw more of this than I did, so she married a narcissist, let her two sons commit crimes, and now is a slave to all of them plus grandkids.
I think you have great strength and intelligence to have pulled yourself out of that family quagmire. Give yourself A LOT of credit. It's hard to be awake, but as you know, it is so worth it.