Parental love
I read about
Ren's awkward conversations with her parents right after a day of my mum's own special brand of parental love, and it got me thinking about what parents want for their kids. I think we all want our kids to be happy, but our values of "happy" vary enormously.
I want Andrea to be happy, but I don't trust her to effectively pursue happiness on her own. Leaping up and down on the settee makes her happy, to take one example, but I can see the potential for extreme unhappiness looming in the future if she should miss the settee and go crashing down onto the floor. So, even though it annoys her, I lift her down off the settee and suggest that maybe she'd rather play something with less potential for a dangerous fall.
The thing is, by the time Andrea gets to my age, she'll be able to decide for herself whether the potential benefits of any given activity outweigh the potential risks. She'll be too big to manhandle and supremely unimpressed by a statement that I'm the grown-up and I make the rules. Coming down on her when she does something I think is too dangerous won't keep her safe; it'll just make her resent me.
From where I'm sitting now, that's a very scary thought. When I think of Andrea, I think of her as she is now, and when I imagine letting her take her own risks it's always stuff like jumping on the settee where I can see very clearly the dangers she's oblivious to. So I've got a lot of sympathy for my mum and the way she tries to manage my life. She's just overlooking the fact that I have done some growing up and I am capable of working out the risks for myself. I hope I don't make the same mistake with Andrea, but there's no way to be sure.
It hurts me when Andrea's not happy, and I'm guessing it hurts my mum when I'm not happy. She deals with it by laying down the law and telling me I ought to do xyz and then I'll be happier; I've tried to handle it differently by telling Andrea I want to make it better and can't she please stop crying long enough to tell me what's hurting her. But when she's crying too hard to tell me what's wrong, I do understand the temptation to fix everything by fiat. If only it worked.