When and if the time comes to talk about why and how parents were the way they were, we have a more nuanced, less provocative expressed conversation about what may have led to parents behaving the way they did in the early childhood years.
We invite a wider lens into our conversations about the pain and suffering endured, and we begin to talk about how the abusive major forces of the world may have shaped their own individual parents’ behavior.
We have a conversation about social justice.
It’s Not All Your Parents’ Fault; Early Childhood Abuse Is A Social Justice Issue.
Before having my daughter, I could only intellectually guess at what I now know in my bones: having a child can be, at times, unrelenting, exhausting, and trying.
And then, having a highly spirited young child in a global pandemic with no community or parental support in any way shape, or form for nearly 1.5 years is next level hard.
And we are privileged.
We are incredibly privileged to be able-bodied, employed, and economically secure. To be White and not the target of racial aggression. To have done lots of personal growth work prior to becoming parents. And to have had reproductive rights and freedom to delay having a child until our mid-thirties.
We are privileged, too, that we are a couple. And that the whole burden is not falling on one of us.
Still, it has been an unbelievable hard stretch of time. It has tested our emotional regulation capacities regularly and sometimes brutally.
And that’s with all of our privileges.
Being a parent to a child in early childhood without those kinds of privileges? That’s a kind of hard I can only imagine at this point.
So why am I sharing this?
I’m sharing this because I now know – through lived experiences – that being a parent and attempting to do it well is, by far, the hardest job on the planet.
It’s why I personally consider those doing their very best, day in and day out. To give their children childhoods that they won’t need to recover from, as goddamn heroes.
I’m sharing this, too, because parenting without privilege and being at the mercy of abusive social and systemic forces is harder still by leaps and bounds.
I’m sharing this because I know that the reason I am able to show up and be a good mother most of the time (not always, though – I’m no saint) is because I was born when and where I was in time, able to take advantage of birth control, education access, financial freedoms, and political freedoms not afforded to the generations of women who came before me.
And, we have to name it: I was also born white, able-bodied, and neurotypical. And thus able to move through the American education system. (still only largely designed for someone with my neurotypical brain structure) Easily.
My privileges have made me a (mostly) good mother. Despite the fact that I come from a background of early childhood abuse from parents and, at times, poverty.
