Parenting Blog

My Aha Parenting moment this week relates to the movie Coraline.  By now, you probably know that the movie is about a young girl who moves into a new house.  Her parents, both writers, work at home. They’re on deadline and too busy to pay attention to her, fill the fridge, or help her unpack and set up her room.  Bored and irritable, Coraline finds a door into a mirror world with an identical but more attentive Other Mother and Father who lavish affection on her, cook for her, and arrange dazzling entertainments. 

The only problem?  Eerily, they have buttons for eyes, and want to replace her eyes with buttons too.  In other words, be careful what you wish for, and the grass isn’t always greener.

I read the book years ago with my then eight year old and felt that it was a good, haunting, tale, but too scary for an 8 year old.  I thought the movie was brilliant, a bit less scary, although still much too frightening for preschoolers.  I appreciated that its depiction of the parents as neglectful seemed to be reminding parents not to take their children for granted.

My aha moment came when I started reading about the movie online.  One writer who works at home – and shall remain nameless -- wrote:

“While we were walking out to the car after the movie, I asked my son and daughter what they thought the movie’s message was. 'You should be thankful for what you’ve got,' my daughter said assuredly, slipping her arm around my waist.  My son agreed, saying that the Other so-called 'perfect' world was a trap, but then offered this observation: 'You’re like the first mother because you’re always working and can never play with us.' When his sister gave him a stern, chastising look, he acknowledged, 'You do nice things occasionally.'  Well, occasionally’s not too bad. When they inevitably start crabbing about me not playing with them when I’m working, or baking them cookies, I can always remind them of how things wouldn’t necessarily be better with an on-the-surface perfect Other Mother.”

I have to admit that I was stunned.  This depiction of neglectful parenting was being used to justify this mom’s being too busy for her kids?  Occasionally being nice to her kids was good enough for her?

Now, I work at home too.  I know it’s hard to juggle work with kids’ needs. I know parents have needs too, and there are no perfect parents.  And I certainly didn’t think that Coraline’s parents were the worst parents I’ve ever seen. But there’s no question that they weren’t meeting her needs. They’re too busy even to keep food in the fridge.  All of us have been there, but once you have kids, the priority you put on that changes. I know there’s no such thing as a perfect parent, but that doesn’t excuse giving our kids the message that they’re a burden to us, not worthy of our time or attention.

And yet this mom’s take on the movie, instead of seeing how she was impacting her kids and vowing to make some changes, was that her kids should be more appreciative.  In fact, her entire post was about how her kids bug her so much! She used the movie to justify her own perspective rather than understanding her kids’ needs.  

My aha?  It’s not about this mom.  She’s just expressing what our society takes for granted.  Our culture has completely twisted the parent-child relationship.  Instead of realizing that WE chose to bring our child into the world and it is our obligation to meet their physical and emotional needs, we give our kids the message that they’re too much trouble, that they get in the way of our real work.

Seems to me that if our kids have become bothersome speed bumps on the freeway of life, we need to wake up and pull off the road before we really hurt somebody.

Last weekend, I saw the Jonathan Demme film Rachel Getting Married, which by the way, I loved.

Kym, a recovering addict, leaves rehab where she’s spent the past 9 months, to go home for her sister’s wedding.  We soon find out that Kym has been unable to kick her addictions over the past ten years, despite being in and out of rehab.  Eventually the reason becomes clear.  Ten years ago when Kym was 16 and zonked on drugs, she drove the family car off a bridge.  Her little brother died in the accident.  

Kym can’t forgive herself.  She can’t even live with herself, and she’s spent the past ten years trying to do herself in with her addictions.

At the turning point of the movie, Kym goes to see her mother.  She needs her mom’s forgiveness, so that she can begin to forgive herself.  It’s almost like she needs permission to go on living.

When Kym says to her mother “You knew I was an addict.  Why did you leave him with me?” my visceral reaction, as a mother, was, “She’s right! The whole movie everyone’s been blaming her, but they knew she was an addict. I would be careful about letting my young child be driven by a 16 year old under the best of circumstances.  How on earth could this mother have been so irresponsible?”  

I’ve always loved Debra Winger, so I assumed that of course her character would step up to the plate, to reassure her daughter, “You’re right.  It was my fault.  I don’t know what I was thinking. I must have been in such in denial about your addiction. Yes, you screwed up, but I did too.  And you were only 16.  I was the grownup and I didn’t act like it. You shouldn’t have to bear this burden alone.”  And then, of course the mother would hug the daughter.

Instead, she snarls, “ I didn’t know you’d KILL him.  You weren’t supposed to KILL him!” and punches her daughter in the face. Kym punches her back and we see everything we need to know about where her venomous side comes from.

Kym stumbles out of the house and deliberately crashes the car, trying to kill herself but sustaining only bruises.  The deepest injuries, of course, are internal.

The next day at the wedding, her mother avoids her.  Kym desperately needs her mother’s love and forgiveness, some apology, some responsibility taken by her mother, some closure. If her mother still blames her, beats up on her for this – literally – forgiving herself becomes almost impossible for Kym.  Instead, she gets only the most perfunctory goodbye hug.

We could excuse this mother, saying that she hasn’t yet healed from the death of her son ten years ago.  But her attack on her daughter shows us why she hasn’t been able to heal, to forgive, to move on.  Every attack is a defense.  This mother attacks her daughter because Kym has come perilously close to the truth:  It was indeed the mother’s responsibility to insure that her young child was not left with an addict.  To avoid facing that truth, which is unbearable to her, she blames her daughter, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice her daughter to further addiction and early death.

You may be wondering:  If the mother takes responsibility for her son’s death, doesn’t that let the daughter off the hook for the fact that she drove a car when she was stoned?  No.  It is in these moments of parenthood, when we do the hard thing and take 100% responsibility for our own actions, that we shape our children’s character by modeling for them how to step up and be 100% accountable for THEIR actions.  

Like most tragedies, this one was over-determined.  If EITHER the mother OR daughter had acted responsibly, it could have been avoided.  And as long as this mother still refuses to shoulder her share of the responsibility, naturally her daughter will bristle as the idea that she should do so.  If this is too much for a grown woman to face, how much harder for a sixteen year old, or even a 26 year old?   

So this mother, unwilling to face the tough truth of her own accountability, foists all the blame onto her daughter’s shoulders.  Having lost her son, she now sacrifices her daughter.

This is the stuff of Greek tragedies.  But watching it, I had my own Ah HA! moment.  What about parents in more normal situations?

Do we ever do things that are bad for our kids rather than face the truth about our own behavior, our own mistakes, our own compromises with life?  What might those smaller actions look like?
*Letting our husband yell at our child rather than facing the truth about our marriage?
*Punishing our kids when they bring home a bad report card because we can’t face the truth that we haven’t been monitoring their progress at school on a daily basis?
*Blaming our child for not reminding us when we miss the deadline for something they needed, or just because we’re angry and out of sorts, and they get on our nerves?
*Pushing our kids to win the gold medal because it takes the sting out of feeling like a failure at our job?

Is it possible that all of our bad parenting actions stem from our inability to face something, which we then take out on our kids because they're less powerful?