“I have been married now eleven years to my high school sweetheart. We have four boys between the ages of 11 and one. About five months ago my father-in-law died after being diagnosed with cancer. Since then my husband has had to take over his business and he hasn’t been able to grieve. He refuses to get professional help and has become very verbally aggressive toward me. I love him dearly, but I can’t hold on for too long. His behavior had affected our marriage severely and it affects our boys.”–signed Help
Years ago when my daughter was small, she developed an illness that required longterm medication. She hated the taste of it and would run when it was time to take her dose. To get her to swallow the medicine, I actually had to pin her between my straddled knees to the floor and force it into her mouth.
Talk about trauma…and I don’t mean trauma for her! She has no memory of the experience, but I sure do.
Not long ago, this same now-adult daughter had a kitten hanging around her apartment, clearly without a home or owners to care for it. Our family loves cats. But because she already has two kitty-buddies, she couldn’t take in this new feline, no matter how cute it was. To her grave sadness, she knew she had to capture the kitten and deliver it to a shelter where someone else would hopefully adopt it.
This bruised her soft heart and she felt like she was actually betraying the kitten who let her close enough to capture it. Love is like that. Sometimes loving things look like mean things.
Loving others can be very difficult and we do things we hate having to do. No one talks about it much, but parenting involves quite a few of these moments. Incidents when the adult in the relationship has to do difficult things for the kids’ own good. (There are parents who do bad things to their kids, claiming pure motives, but most of us really aren’t that twisted.) Most of us love our kids with all our hearts and want only the very best for them.
Sadly, this requires us to insist they eat their vegetables, finish their homework and pick up their toys, none of which they like sometimes and none of which they want to do. But it’s part of the parenting job description to insist on those things that are good for our kids, even if the kids don’t like them.
We have many, many examples of parents and others treating kids badly–this is largely what Child Protective Services watches out for–but we also have an often unacknowledged reality to this parenting job. Sometimes we have to insist on our children doing things they don’t want to do. In some cases, the kids have annoyed us to the point that following through isn’t that hard–the little jerks deserve it! But sometimes we just hate being the bad guy, the one who administers punishments and lays down the law.
This is particularly true when the other parent is only too glad to be the good one, the fun parent, the one who never makes the kids do anything they don’t want to do. But you know the truth that we all do things we don’t want to do. Kids are smaller and weaker, but they still need to learn the lesson that others care most about actions and they’ll get a lot further by taking care of responsibilities even when these aren’t fun.
We all do things we don’t want to do.
You, after all, probably go to work, sometimes at a job that doesn’t value you or pay you near what your worth, but you do it to put food on the table and clothes on those kids you love so much. Some lessons are hard, but children need parents who love them enough to be the bad guy, to introduce them to shampoo and broccoli.
They may want cartoons, sugary cereal and toys strewn all over. They need you to follow through.