Baby-Proofing Our Past

When I talk with people older than myself about parenting and trauma, they point to the fact that their generation didn't have the tools to heal themselves. Back when my parents were kids, people didn't talk about transgenerational trauma, co-dependency or toxic coping mechanisms. Now they do, and while it's healthy to do so, I do wonder if we're not talking about it overly much sometimes.

With an increased focus on mental health (good), on figuring out where your parents went wrong and how that hurt you (also good), I've also noticed a growing number of women who say

I'll only have kids when I'm sure not to pass down any of the trauma that was passed on to me.

I know multiple women in this situation, with this mindset. And while to them, it might seem very noble, I do worry that it spells the end of the Western human race (because let's face it, these are Western World mentalities). Not to mention the personal unhappiness it might lead to for some.

I know women who don't want to have children because they suffered (as do we all) as kids and they don't wanna pass that along. They wanna fix that. They think they can. I think there's a great temptation in my generation and maybe people within a decade or so of it either way to get hung up on this constant self-improvement. Because in a way, the growing popularity of mental health awareness and pop psychology offers the promise that one day, you'll be fully healed.

Except that's not how that works, is it?

It's painfully appealing. Because you look back at all the ways in which you suffered as a child because your parents didn't know any better, and you think okay. I'll work through this. I'll heal everything there is to heal so my kids don't hurt.

Except if you're waiting to be fully, completely healed before you start living your life, you'll spend the rest of it waiting.

It's like me saying I'll only ever travel again when my left ankle stops being weak. My ankle's always gonna be weak and predisposed to swelling and pain because it's not the sort of injury that gets undone. You are the product of things happening to you, and while in matters of psychology, you can work on and be observant of how your upbringing and past experiences shaped you, you can't ever fully fix it. All you can do is make it better.

But then, better is a comparative term, and as such can't reach a fully finalized, pristine state. Can it?

Say you suffered as a child because your parents had poor communication skills and yelled when they were frightened. Okay. You can see how that hurt you (and them). You can see how that shaped your own interaction with the world. Most likely, you'll either shout also or have an extreme reaction to people shouting at you. You can temper it. But you can't undo it, and I think there's a lot of focus in my generation on precisely that. We're trying to undo it.

Can these hands ever be clean of the past we shared?

I don't think so. I look around myself and what I see is a lot of young people (say, under 30-35) so desperately dilligent in their self-improvement efforts. They're working to fix the trauma and develop healthy communication and undo toxic attachment and be all that. Be perfect. There's this pervading hope that one day, if you work hard enough, you'll become good enough to not fuck up your kids, to not ever be labeled 'toxic', to somehow escape this cycle of pain that we've all been stuck in for millennia.

Aren't we a little bit too impressed with ourselves?

I think you can make improvements, certainly. I think you can be mindful of behavior that's off (either yours or another's). I think with effort and diligence, you can grow a great deal. But then, that's not good enough, is it?

In reading Mary Harrington's book "Feminism Against Progress" and Abigail Shrier's "Bad Therapy", I was struck by the thought that (surprise surprise) our generation isn't the first to try. Parents currently in their latr 30s, 40s, 50s, also belonged to generations that once set out to clean up the trauma. Who said "I'm not gonna be like my father". Who shunned the repression of their parents, who became frustrated with the punishments, who tried.

These are the same people that my generation now is blaming for fucking them up. So what happened there? Obviously, we're talking about different tools. I do think people now in their 20s and 30s have more resources at their disposal to fix and tweak unhealthy and unhelpful behavior patterns. We know more than ever, yet in our abundance of knowledge, we risk knowing too much.

What is too much knowledge? It's the gorgon that paralyzes you into inaction. And it's frightening to me how many young people are now falling into this desperate self-bettering race, in the hope that one day, they'll attain a level of perfection where they're not capable of fucking up their kids.

The only way you don't fuck up your kids is by not having them. And if that's your choice, that's fine, I think. But that's not what people are saying. Somehow, we've actually tricked ourselves into believing that we can undo everything that was ever wrong. And living inside an increasingly sterile, oppressively mothering society, we got to thinking that we can really scrub out every last trace of trauma and hurt so that our kids genuinely don't get that.

Essentially, what we're trying to do is obliterate every last trace of darkness, pain, evil, fear, and all those other inanely humane things that make us what we are. How the hell did we get that idea? And how on Earth do we think that's gonna make our kids strong?

I wish we could get rid of it because it seems dangerous. We can baby-proof the hell out of past generations, yet still the Devil will find a way to get into our kids. We can be mindful and we can grow tremendously, just as long as we don't delude ourselves that there's an end-point.

It's not noble to aim for complete healing. It's scared. It's thinking one day, I will be done with all this hurt. You won't. But one day, you will be strong enough to mitigate some of the hurt. And that's all you can aim for. :)

This isn't to say you can't do better. Just that it's really very scary aiming for perfect. And just because you get scared of that doesn't make you less brave.