Anxious Parents

It’s rare that a book makes me cry. Besides Dobby’s death in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the end of the children’s books, On the Day You Were Born and Love You Forever, I can’t recall another time I teared up when reading a story. Enter the oddball characters and off-beat storyline of Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, the best-selling author of A Man Called Ove. Backman’s story about a would-be bank robber who “failed to rob a bank but instead managed to spark a hostage drama,” combines quirky characters and a seemingly disjointed storyline to deliver a surprisingly profound message about love, friendship, connection, forgiveness, and the commonality of pain, desperation, hope, the need to be rescued and the ability to be someone else’s saving grace.

Despite the humorous approach Backman takes as he unfolds the story’s plot about a bank robber with a toy gun who attempts to rob a cashless bank and then not-completely-on-purpose takes an apartment full of strangers hostage, he hits all the feels when he poignantly reflects on relationships, marriage, parenthood, life and death.

His reflections on parenthood were the “Someone-get-me-a-tissue-dammit!” moments for me.  When I read this book in April, I was nearing the 7-month mark in a complicated medical saga that included a two-month local hospital stay and 6 weeks of medical tests and procedures at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, followed by several more weeks of recovery. I spent all this time either in a bed or in a recliner, which provided me with plenty of opportunities to do a lot of nothing except watching tv, reading and thinking. A lot of those thoughts took me to the past – in the “life flashing before your eyes” kind of way that happens when you’re not sure if you’re going to live to have much, if any, of a future (although my prolonged recovery was more of a “life plodding before your eyes” situation). I remember feeling especially reflective at Christmas time, when I had a drain out my side and tube in my arm to accommodate a 12-hour-a-day nutritional IV, and I couldn’t do much of anything for myself. I was in no shape to take part in any of the typical pre-Christmas insanity I always vow to do better to control but never do because Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without decorating, shopping, baking, cooking, wrapping, sending out cards, going to parties, hosting family, overspending, overeating, overdrinking, and overdoing. Right?  Anyway, I spent a lot of time during the holiday season ruminating over what this year wasn’t going to be, remembering what the previous years had been, and wishing for the chance to re-do so much of what I decided I had done wrong in the past, not just at the holidays, but over the course of my kids’ entire childhoods. There were regrets. There was the obvious realization that there is no flux-capacitor-equipped DeLorean that can take me back in time to re-do anything. And because of that, there were also a lot of tears.

As my physical and emotional health improved, I found I was being less hard on and more forgiving of myself for a lot of things, but when I read the following passage from Anxious People a few months later, those regretful-mom emotions came right back: “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong, you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.” Ouch.

I can’t say for sure if this is how most children truly feel, but I suspect it’s pretty accurate for a good number of them. I know for sure it’s how I’ve sometimes felt about myself as a mom, and I have plenty of friends who’ve told me they’ve felt the same way. Parenthood comes with tremendous responsibility, and with that responsibility comes a tremendous amount of pressure that we get everything right. We know that screwing up anything means the possibility of screwing up everything for the small humans we promised to protect even before we saw them for the first time. Because, for a brief but crucial moment in their lives, we are their world. So, we walk around with this parental anxiety, worrying that maybe we haven’t done enough – or maybe we’ve done too much – and maybe what we’ve done (or haven’t done) has caused harm to those little people we love more than we imagined was possible. Then we end up focusing on our mistakes, on the moments we feel we were at our worst as parents, and we tend to beat ourselves up for them over and over in a way we never would do to someone else.

How many of us promised ourselves we’d never use the tv as a babysitter and promptly broke that promise when we realized it was either sitting our kids down in front of the tv or sitting ourselves down in front of a bottle of our favorite alcohol that was going to get us through the day? Sure, we ended up wishing Barney would become extinct, or Thomas would derail, or Dory would drown after hearing “just keep swimming” for the hundredth time, but our sanity ended up being more valuable than attaining some impossibly high standard of what a “good parent” was supposed to be.

We tended to break a lot of those “good parent” promises we made to ourselves over the years. You know, like the one where we were never going to feed our kids frozen waffles for dinner but then did pretty much every summer night because waffles were quick and delicious (by kid standards), and then we could go back to hanging out with our neighbors until it was way past our kids’ bedtime. Then we’d break another rule and hose the kids off in the driveway instead of giving them a proper bath before reading them the shortest story we could find and putting them to bed. That way we could get back to our neighbors, beer in one hand and baby monitor in another, because we had convinced ourselves that monitors worked across the street and two houses down, even as we talked and laughed and drunk-sang American Pie and Paradise by the Dashboard Light with each other.

To be fair, I can’t speak for all of us. Maybe that was just me. And really, moments like those weren’t awful for my kids. They liked watching tv and eating waffles and staying up past bedtime with their friends and not having to take a bath. But there were also moments when I lost patience instead of doing my best to keep it, when I yelled instead of demonstrated the control I should’ve been exemplifying, punished when I could’ve done a better job creating teachable moments, unintentionally knocked them down when I could’ve intentionally built them up, hurt them in ways I didn’t mean to when all I really meant to do was love them. And those are the moments I wish I could go back to and tell my younger self to be more patient, more calm, more merciful, more intentional, more like the kind of mom my kids needed and deserved.

It’s incredibly difficult to see with clarity the right way to handle a situation when we’re in thick of parental life, responsible for not only keeping alive the children we brought into the world (or adopted or became a stepparent to), but for keeping them safe, teaching them values, making sure they’re healthy and educated and socialized and given opportunities to discover who they are and what they love to do and how they can use their gifts to contribute to the world. And it’s almost impossible to consistently make thoughtful, rational decisions when we’re overwhelmed and exhausted by the responsibility of it all. But when enough years have passed, when young children have grown older and parents have grown wiser, the gift of time slowly unwraps itself and reveals the clarity we couldn’t see all those years ago.

Backman writes, “It’s hard to explain to (an older child) when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.”

There’s so much truth in that, the longing to return to the days when our kids helped us be the best version of ourselves, the time before they learned that the best version of us sometimes got lost in the crowd of different people parenthood required us to be – breadwinners, caregivers, teachers, chefs, doctors, nurses, chauffeurs, event planners, accountants, coaches, referees, spiritual guides, therapists, disciplinarians, and cheerleaders. It’s no wonder so many of us got stuck in this identity traffic jam and lost our way. Life would hand us a situation and we needed to figure out which of these people the situation forced us to be. We had to prioritize and try to make the right choice. And sometimes who we needed to be wasn’t even a choice, it was a necessity, or often it was simply a reaction to a situation we didn’t have time to really think through. It wasn’t easy getting things right every time. As a matter of fact, getting things right every time isn’t even possible given our inherent imperfections. And there were days we felt we got most things wrong. Those are the days many of us wish we could return to and, like a GPS, recalculate our route. Then we could turn around and choose a better way.

But we can’t do that. We can’t change the past and we can’t relive the times we regret. What we can do, if we’re so inclined, is tell our kids that we were just doing the best we could with what we understood about parenting at the time (which was, let’s face it, not a hell of a lot). Then we can ask them to try to understand the intent of our actions, to forgive the unintended impact those actions had, and to love us despite our mistakes, the way we have always unconditionally (though imperfectly) loved them.

There’s a meme I saw recently that said, “When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your parents grow up.” I think it’s as true that when we were parents of young children, we didn’t realize how much more growing up we had to do either. So, it’s important to remind ourselves that despite our frustrations with our kids when they made mistakes, we forgave them, we loved them, and we had faith (at least we really, really hoped) that someday they’d figure it out. And I think we need to grant ourselves the same grace. While we can never go back to those exhilarating, anxious, crazy-beautiful, young-parent years and fix those things we realize now we broke, we can learn from them. Maybe they can help us be the best version of our parental-selves now to our adult children, because sometimes it seems they need us more as adults than they did when they were kids. And as they’ve grown up, so have we. We know better now. We can do better now.

To quote Backman a final time, “We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that’ll just have to…be enough. So we can live with our faults without drowning.” 

So, just keep swimming, parents. Don’t let the memory of your faults drag you under. You navigated some pretty tough waters, rode out some choppy waves and weathered some big storms. And you loved your kids through it all, the best way you knew how. Now it’s time to love yourself.