This week, the Ladies of Hive community asked an interesting question,
Nowadays, some parents pass on to their kids the family responsibility after they graduate from school. As a parent, do you agree with this, or will you allow your kids to shoulder burdens that are not supposed to be theirs? As a child, is it necessary for you to pay back your parents' laborious efforts even though it means you have to sacrifice your freedom?
And while I didn't necessarily resonate with the structure of the question itself, it did spark a freeflow of thought that eventually turned into this article.
Disclaimer: Very rarely my Hive articles also end up on Medium. Very rarely, as I like to keep my writing pools separate. This was one of those times, with the article also appearing on here.
Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child
I want me. Just me. I won’t pretend. I want to live before I die. One day perhaps you shall look beyond the mask into your own mirror at your own reality. Are you appalled? Are the terrified eyes that look back at you the eyes of your own child?
This quote, a fragment of such palpable terror for me it’s even now difficult to put into words, comes from Marion Woodman’s Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul. Woodman was an English teacher, author, and analytical psychologist, and is considered one of the sharpest Jungian thinkers of all time. For the purpose of this piece, she was a woman possessed of the unwavering courage to look inward, something not all of us manage.
That last line chills me each time. As children of our parents, we seldom ask where one ends, and the other begins. We’re taught to think in terms of loyalty, tribal regard, and material success, and only rarely acknowledge that for one (and both) to flourish, the other must inevitably let go.
No, this isn’t merely a discussion of needy or clingy parents. After all, no one sets out to become Norman Bates. People just…slide into it, I think, and it often stems from a very natural, very healthy (up to a measure) inane trait of our society — the delimitation of the family as a clan.
Many of us twist that around. We think only really happy people, or people with a great relationship to their parents adhere to this mentality, but in reality, that’s just wishful thinking.
Historically, tribes were never perfect, often involved inequality between members, and relied chiefly on the principle of strength in numbers.
In the 21st century, that hasn’t changed.
Leaving the Tribe, and Venturing into the Woods
You form your tribal attachment to your family as an infant, and you’re not to blame. Naturally, children are dependant on the adults in their lives. For food, shelter and protection, yes, but our need of our elders goes deeper.
We rely on our tribe to learn behaviour, attachment skills, coping mechanisms. Our parents and our grandparents teach us how to think, how to structure thought and assessment, how to react, how to engage. Though this is more rarely acknowledged in our society.
Gustav Klimt, Mother and Child
When the boy grows into a man, there comes a time where he must inevitably ask himself: what do I owe my tribe?
Typically, the answer comes in material terms. My parents sacrificed so much for me, therefore I owe them, and am somehow bound to them. While rationally sound, this reasoning bypasses the underlying (and infinitely more complex) psychological and emotional debt we owe our ancestors. The correct answer, in my view, should look something like this:
My parents sacrificed for me, therefore I must help them financially and physically as I can.
Though, were that alone the issue, we’d have far fewer adult children who can’t separate from their parents. Many of us can either afford to help our parents out with money, or at the very least, provide physical aid in what they might no longer manage themselves. And we could do all that, while leading independent, fruitful, and healthy adult lives all on our own.
Which is why the answer continues…
My parents passed on their fears, their insecurities, their mistrusts, their faulty thought patterns. They have (sometimes wittingly, but more often not so) manipulated me into subservience, and co-dependency that’s slowly killing us both.
When children fail to separate from their parents, eventually both die out for lack of oxygen and space.
In truth, this unspoken, unseen debt we owe our parents and our larger family is what keeps us from leaving the parental nest, sometimes for decades.
I may thrive financially out there, but if I’m convinced that no one there will understand my jokes, my fears, or make allowances for my toxic traits (some inherited, some developed in response to my upbringing), I won’t want to leave.
And why should I, when I still have my old tribe to cling to?
Except that’s not the choice you get. Historically, tribally, the child must venture into the unknown and sever familial ties to be able to return as an adult. In some cultures and tribes, the children who reach a certain age of maturity, especially the boys, are physically torn from their mothers to be “made men”.
Though probably a very scarring experience, symbolically, this is a very telling practice. Obviously, unhealthy attachment and dependent relationships can develop with fathers, as well. That’s not what this is saying. Rather, these cultures knew that in order for the child (and subsequently, the tribe as a whole) to prosper, the child must learn to stand on their own two feet — physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
…which many fail to do today.
Are parents solely responsible?
Francisco Goya, The Wicked Woman
As a staunch proponent of individual accountability, I’ve always thought the answer is no. That one can only blame their upbringing up to a point.
It begins with the parents, yes, at least in our story. In truth, most of our inherited patterns can be traced back through history, across several generations. But yes, as far as we’re concerned, it begins with our parents. Who didn’t do the work. Who perhaps lacked the tools, the societal openness, and the voices speaking out about healthy development. Who perhaps failed to set boundaries with their own parents, or paradoxically, suffered from isolation from their primary caregiver, and in turn, became insecure in their attachment.
A mother who is identified with being mother has to have children who will eat what she gives them to eat and do what she wants them to do. They must remain children.
Yet we, as adults, must ask ourselves — am I still a child?
The answer might not be obvious.
Maybe the tell-tale signs are evident. You live with your parents, you rely on them for food, and to iron your clothes, and change your bedding.
But maybe, you rely on your tribe for other needs, more difficult to pinpoint. Maybe you don’t fit into the world, or are scared of facing rejection in the outside world, so inevitably, you turn inward, to the tribe that made you, and won’t reject you. And while having close relationships with our family can be a tremendous gift, when that is the only relationship of true significance and depth in our lives, it signals a problem.
One that only we, the children, can resolve.
Perhaps you’re lucky. Perhaps you have wise, self-aware parents who’ll encourage you to build your life and your self in autonomy and freedom. Parents who won’t shun you whenever you step away from the ways of the tribe.
(This is a common practice in tribe-families. You are only appreciated and encouraged when you do something that resonates with the values of the group. When you dress, speak, or think in a way they approve. Generally, tribe-families will discourage their children from befriending outsiders, or engaging in activities that are not endorsed by the larger group, to the point of cutting off the offending tribe member if they persist.)
Perhaps you’re not so lucky, and your tribe is rejecting you, or punishing you for asking questions, for trying to stand on your own two feet. Which is why you should stand all the more.
To answer my question, I think the individual is responsible. I think you alone have the power to carve a healthier future, and a healthier in-tribe relationship for yourself, and for future generations.
When the wounded child returns a healthy adult to the tribe, the whole tribe may yet grow and prosper (though not all are open to that).
So, where do parents end, and children begin?
What’s problematic with this necessary separation from family is that many among us erroneously believe they must sever their roots permanently. It’s natural for the human psyche to fight that. You don’t have to be a professional green thumb to know that if you sever a plant’s roots, it wilts and dies. So it’s normal for us to fight it.
And it’s paramount to understand severing roots is not what we’re doing. It’s not what the process requires.
There are people who, upon beginning this self-healing journey will cut off their family members. And in truth, when someone has abused and traumatised you, you have no duty to continue meeting, talking to, or spending time with your abuser. That is unhelpful.
But in many cases, healing and growing into independent adults who can seed their own, new tribe, and live healthy, happy, autonomous lives, doesn’t require complete cut-off from our past.
What it does, however, require is a hell of a lot of introspection. Gaining autonomy from the tribe shouldn’t be seen as a ‘fuck you’ to the people that raised you. But rather, a homage. For you are one of the cubs that survived, that learned to hunt, and breed, and love, and protect its own in the outside world, dangerous, and alienating, and strange as it sometimes may be.
And that’s no picnic.
Where your parents end, and you begin differs from person to person. Only you can look at your values, at the things that piss you off, or turn you on, and see how much belongs to you, and how much is actually inherited tribal values.
Maybe in your search, you come to the same conclusions as your ancestors. You might ask yourself why bother, then? But that’s the whole point. That you reach your conclusions, define your likes and dislikes, and your behavioural patterns autonomously.
How you are today may have been written by your ancestors. But it’s written in chalk, not stone.
