Sharing the Shame
Parental shame is a two-way street, and my kid is already pedaling down it — in the pink tricycle he insisted we buy him.
Will I embarrass my son? Sure. That’s a given. But that dude is going to shame me, too.
Enough worrying about all I have done and will do to make him slink down into the front seat of life. It’s time to talk about me, and all parents, and how we sometimes get embarrassed, too.
Of course I’ll show up to soccer games in vintage mini-dresses suitable only if I were opening at Coachella. And 23. There’s no question that as a parent I’ll wear and say and do things that make him wish he lived in a group home in New Mexico sustaining the nightly possibility of being molested by his bunkmate. It’s a given that parents shame their children.
However, it’s a tricky thing to talk about being embarrassed by our kids. Because no matter how illogical it may be, messes they make will always seem a bit like our fault. And they may be.
Look, I don’t care if my son prefers a pink tricycle or wears a tuxedo to day care every day and goes to “Glee” camp. None of that does or would bother me.
However, when I look around with my new perspective as a mom, I see every human creature as someone’s child (I know, duh) and can’t help wondering: When your kid does something — from mildly idiotic to massively criminal — aren’t folks secretly blaming the parent? Even when they understand that a person has free will or some biological predisposition to act out, or is simply a full-fledged grownup who should be responsible for her own actions, don’t most people look a bit askance at mom and dad?
When Michael Douglas has a kid in jail, don’t we think “absentee dad”? If Lindsay Lohan were a shy veterinarian living in a condo with her accountant husband, would her parents seem like pieces of work?
I’m going extreme here for a second, but don’t worry. I’ll come back to the small stuff our kids do. I just need to make this point: Have you ever seen an interview with Jeffrey Dahmer’s father? That guy seems really normal, even caring.
His kid ate people.
Yesterday, my child didn’t want to leave the sidewalk because he was staring at a giant truck removing slabs of metal from the street. We sat there for 20 minutes. I tried everything — getting down on his level, reflecting back his frustration, giving him a countdown. I finally had to pick him up and surfboard him to the car. The lady walking her dog in a chartreuse Juicy Couture sweatshirt? She judged me. The guy selling hot dogs in the parking lot? I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m an incompetent mom. Anyone without significant hearing loss within a mile radius? Well, it’s safe to say they thought I was using enhanced interrogation techniques on a high-value prisoner.
When you see a parent prying their screaming child out of a restaurant booth for a little timeout in the alley, trust me, that parent is acutely aware that his child’s behavior is reflecting on him.
My toddler was just being a toddler, and I was doing my best. Still, I got in the car and we both cried, and that kid, by way of a little garden-variety freak out, made me pretty self-conscious about my parenting and, thus, the very core of my being.
So, yeah, he’s not eating runaways.
There’s a continuum. You get credit when your kid gives the valedictory address or strikes out the side, and you get the blame when he eats people. Or, to work our way toward cannibalism, when your kid fails algebra, bites the teacher, gets busted smoking pot, gets a DUI, ends up at sober living, ends up on the pole, holds up a bank or just plain doesn’t write a thank-you letter to his grandmother, fair or not, that looks bad for you.
Keep Mr. Dahmer in mind. He has it worse than you do. While you’re complaining about your kid’s pink tricycle, you know what he’ll be thinking? Eat me.
* This post was originally published in print by Creator’s Syndicate and online by the Huffington Post.
Hi Teresa.. I wanted you to know what a complete airhead you are.. yes, I know you have a bit of a following.. but I am so glad I can now listen to Peter Tilden without hearing your inane comments..and about your father’s home foreclosure.. Let’s get this out of the way: I’m an old bag. .. a UCLA grad old bag with a Ph.D., and who left Brentwood (where I lived) several years ago to get away from LA crazy. .. and who successfully raised a kid (a tough job indeed), and something you are now trying to do). Oh, and yes, who never had my house foreclosed upon.. so there I was a few months ago, listening to Tilden, and once again you insult old bags like me. This particular morning, you sneer about “older women” spending our days watching Ellen & The View…two programs I have never, ever watched, along with Oprah, Friends, Seinfeld, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol or any other insipid pointless programs. So while you sneer and mock we Old Bags, the very next day, when Tilden and a guest were discussing the C Anthony case, you said, on air, that you didn’t know what “Voir Dire” meant..then, the next day, revealing that “back in the day… (another cliche from you mouth) you never, ever missed an episode of Oprah – this, from a radio host who sneers about Ellen/The View. … hmmm, I thought:maybe you should have spent less time watching Oprah, and more time reading books. .. on the Tilden show, you were always ready to chime in about TV programs, actors, actresses,
etc., but had nothing to say (& nothing of substance to say) about anything else..
so, Teresa, if you’re lucky, VERY lucky, you too will grow up to be an Old Bag.. good luck with motherhood and that whole thing and, oh yes, stop watching Oprah re-runs, my dear, and pick up a book sometime..
Just give a little kid with a dirty diaper a look of disgust and you’ve got years of time on the couch locked up, barring, that is, a crack habit or porn career doesn’t occupy the time they would otherwise spend with Dr. What’s-her-face.
Shame is like a volcanoe that erupts within us. And aren’t we often erupting because of it? It seems to be activated by those early childhood experiences of eyes looking at us, sending messages to boil over or stay at the right temperature and remain “contained.”
There’s no way around it: humans are social, to be social means to be accepted, to be accepted means there are standards by which we judge, and judgement is a double-edged sword.
Somehow just knowing we are all in it together gets us by, even if much of life feels like inhabiting prime real estate in Mount Vesuvius.
LOL “his kid ate people” is just awesome. Yes and just, yes. Have you seen my cartoon on eating with kids in restaurants? Every time they do something shitty I automatically think it is my fault. At what point do we just get to blame them? That will be so much easier.
Dahmers Dad used to really, really freak me out because in the interviews I saw of him he seemed to be beyond the sweet kindly guy next door who would help a neighbor, or a friend or family member with any sort of problems. He always mentioned it was a “christian home” and he insisted on it – which initially didn’t alarm me. But as more detailed information came out, it was revealed that Jeffrey was like the majority of the other garden variety cannibals living in our neighborhoods who are acting out of extreme personal hatred grown in the perfect manure of misguided judgemental, narrow minded fundamentalist “version” of Christianity that teaches nothing about love and acceptance and everything about malignant self hatred for themselves and especially about any confusion a kid might have about their own sexuality. Then the soft spoken, kindly exterior of Daddy Dahmer seemed as sinister as Norman Bates’ “Mommy”. I no longer worried that *really* normal-ish parents don’t accidently create monsters like Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy. Dennis Rader or Gary Ridgeway … these hideously defective miscreants killed relentlentlessly to attack their own demons – almost all of them had both abusive childhoods combined with sickly misinterpretted scripture – resulting in soul-less killers because they were consumed the idea they were so unlovable that even God couldn’t love them. By the time they start killing they feel that any “witnesses” to their “defects” could potentially bring down the fantasy life of “normal” you are trying to live – you pretty much have no choice but to not only eliminate the possibility they could talk, by killing them and because many of them have quite high IQ’s they realize that whatever you could do to reduce the possibility that a body might be found is even better. The Green River and BTK killers had perfectly normal wives, who had no idea they were living with two of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Ted Bundy literally had a fan club until the moment he took his last breath in a FL death chamber. So really who is sick in THOSE situations. I would be more horrified, if I had raised a daughter who wanted to join a serial killers fan club – now THAT would be shameful to me. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with the therapist … that MIGHT be something that would prod me towards ‘The Bridge II – shame or cowardice – parents who jump”. LOL
=S
Insightful and witty on KPPC! Would love to swap thoughts on good guilt vs. B
bad guilt. Best, Ellen Swallow MFT
Insightful and witty on K
Big fan of the blog, Teresa — I know what you mean about the ‘every human creature as someone’s child’ goggles. I had them on when I was watching the Vancouver riots from my home just outside of the city last week, my 9-month old tucked into bed and oblivious of the mayhem. I felt awful for those kids’ parents and prayed to Buddha that I wouldn’t be watching my kid light a cop car on fire in 17 years.
It takes extreme measures to drag my son away from a construction site too….which is only one reason I can relate to this post. I have two kids, and I’ve noticed that it’s really easy to judge other parents when their kids act out — but when it’s my kid, of course I don’t want to be judged! Parenting is hard work, and we can’t get everything right. We all do the best we can, hopefully.
It’s VERY difficult to be a parent. We are the ones who get the blame (or recognition) for how our kids turn out. Thank you for this post. It makes me reflect on what I’m doing now as a mother and how my actions now may or may not affect my kid in the future.