Space For Jean

What do they need?

As a person who has relationships, and especially as a mother, I am confronted frequently with confusion around how to give all these people the right thing; how to give them what they need. While it is evident that children need lots and lots from a parent, what that is varies tremendously as they develop. As you live with a spouse and as you grow your relationship with them, what each of us needs can vary, too. And then there are all those relationships "out there", the friends who go through stuff in their own lives, family members you've grown up with and need to interact with as an adult and not as a child. It's all so confusing!

My daughter is at the tremendously breathtaking age of thirteen (almost, anyway) and she has morphed in a very short amount of time from a girl-child into a nearly-woman. She has developed a great deal of poise and grace about her. And yet, the toll is sometimes apparent. She has access to more than she used to. And yet it doesn't always come smoothly. Then, of course, we must appreciate the turmoil inside, the necessary biological development that brings with it emotional fall out.

I have more objectivity now than I used to. When she was little I saw and heard the demand for attention, succor, comfort. I fell over myself to provide it. Failure to do so had immediate consequences. Especially in public. If I couldn't give her immediately what she needed, I was embarrassed and I cannot, and never could, cope with that sort of public spectacle. My training was hard and it took me a while to get it but I did. I knew, though, that the course would change and I would need to prepare for different requirements. None of it feels like it came naturally. But, first and foremost, I have never lost the understanding that I needed to respond immediately.

Now that she is reaching her teen years, it's clear to me that I need to change how I interact with her. This is hard. It means letting her face some of her own emotional challenges on her own. That is how she will learn best how to move through an adult world. This is harder because it takes time to think through that logic. I've been operating on autopilot, kind of emergency-based autopilot, since she arrived. And now I need to be more thoughtful about it.

Autopilot explains a lot of my interactions with friends and family. I think only when you see that the old pattern isn't sufficient anymore do you face this challenge. And it is a challenge, particularly with people you've known a long time. I want to give my friends and extended family what they need, not what I've always given them (the two are not necessarily the same). And that isn't always easy to determine. What I think is harder is my know-it-all style gets in my way and I need to back off and just support more than advise. That's what I've been working on largely since I finished the cancer treatment. It isn't something I decided to do, it was a result of seeing how others had treated me. And how much I appreciated that. That whole cancer thing jolted me out of a lot of behavior patterns that I'm glad to be changing. Who would have thought?

But for a teenager, this is a rough road ahead. And I know that sometimes I need to rush in and help and sometimes I need to stand by and let her figure it out. My, that does not come naturally. I will work at it. Maybe by the time she is through with it I'll have figured out what I'm doing.

Relief

Even I have reached the end of my interest in my own whining in the last post below. I have traversed that territory too many times in the past and there was nothing new there for me to learn. I kept circling the same dissatisfying qualities, the same empty places and misunderstandings. Something else would have to happen before I could feel relief. Since I have spent so much time actively working on finding new things to happen for just this purpose it is wonderful to report that it has. It is easiest to explain this way.

I have a quote that I read recently, one I've read before but which, this time, sprung off the page and touched me in a new way. It comes from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It goes like this:

"Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a turn about the room. --I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so long in one attitude."

The statement is made somewhat ironically to the story's heroine by a Miss Bingley who does not wish Miss Bennet well by any means. This is not the meaning to which I was drawn. To me, the quaint comment makes a point about perspective. Sometimes we need to get up and take a turn about our situation and see it from a new direction in order to understand it, and if necessary, resolve it.

I needed to shake myself free of my little-girl view of growing up and see it from the vantage point of the grown up I am now. That is a challenge, but, wonderfully, it is very freeing to do this and the relief is very refreshing. I've read in various self-help and child-development books that children have a hard time seeing the big picture in their families. They aren't experienced enough to do that. I think that was true of me as well. When I looked back on my childhood I could only think of it in terms of my own needs as a girl living in that family. If I could only look back as an adult, without getting drawn into the emotional upset of the girl, I could look back and make sense of the early years. My general purpose these last two years has been to leave those childish responses to things back there where they belong and proceed from a stronger position of adulthood even though my stated purpose has simply been to be happy. One proceeds from the other, I think.

It isn't easy to do this. It takes help; from loved ones who can point to specific memories and say, "remember this?" Help, also, from a good, objective, friend or counselor who can start to re-frame things in a way that begins to shed light on reality. Not the child's reality, the one who sat in the middle of things and yet could not see the forest for the trees. But the sort of thing you might see if it weren't yourself you were talking about. Such a perspective is also a lot less emotional, and therefore, a safer place to view things. Children often only know that they need something. Adults are better able to determine what their need is. . . and find a way to meet it.

I feel like I've been able to do that more of late. It is a relief and I'm glad I was able to start down that path instead of retracing my steps on a path that is worn so thin I could find it blindfolded. Can you say that of a metaphor? I don't know but I have, so there.

As I move onward and forward, the journey takes me to some very happy places! I wonder where I will go next.