My mom visited us for a month this past year, arriving just before Thanksgiving and leaving just after Christmas. As my son’s only living grandparent, we treasure the time with her.
She also puts up with a lot.
My son, who was almost 9 during her visit, has never been shy about letting it all hang out around her. He doesn’t pull any of his usual punches (both literal and figurative), and his tendency to feel things deeply and loudly is on display for her as much as it is for us.
I’m lucky that I don’t usually feel pulled to apologize for him—having parents and in-laws who mostly accepted our way of parenting (or were really good at keeping their mouths shut) has helped.
But internally, I definitely found it hard on this visit that he, for example, rarely consented to affection from her, or deigned to go with the flow when we followed an idea that wasn’t his.
One day, toward the end of her trip, my mom came into the kitchen chuckling after a typical display of feeling from our son.
“I can’t get over it. You were just like him,” she said.
Before last summer, I would have scoffed at the comparison. I remember myself as a kid who knew from an early age that there was a right way to be and a wrong way to be. And I was going to be right. Which made me good.
Last Summer
At the beginning of last year, it seemed like the time had come for my mom to move out of the townhome she had shared with my dad. He had been gone a year, and it felt like being in a community where she could get meals and more connection with other folks might be a good idea.
With the help of an aging life care manager, we found a new home for her that was affordable. We hired an estate sale company to help her unload decades worth of antiques, dishes, tchotchkes, and artwork.
I flew to Florida for a week to help her do the final clear-out of personal items before the estate sale. The company we hired piled everything she needed to sort through into one room of her home.
“How bad is it?” I asked her before my flight took off. “Oh, not terrible,” she said, “just a few stacks….”
She was wrong. We spent every waking moment of the week I was there sorting and sifting through massive piles of old photographs, letters, medical bills, and business materials. It was a slog.
On the fourth day, I uncovered a file folder that had my name on the tab.
Inside the folder, underneath a small pile of drawings and poems I wrote as a child, there was a three-page document that said “Psychological Evaluation: Carrie Griswold” (I was called Carrie until I went to college).
At the top, it said:
“Carrie [age 5 ½] was referred by her mother for evaluation owing to what is described as ‘very demanding’ behavior and temperamental difficulties. She is described as a bright child who has never had any trouble in school but who seems to have considerable difficulty at home, particularly in getting along with her mother and younger sister (age 3 ½).... At home she is considered demanding of attention and feels that she does not receive enough attention from adults. Mrs. Griswold finds it difficult to set limits with Carrie because she responds quite angrily whenever this is attempted.”
Me (right) with my sister, at the age I was when the psych eval was done.
When I asked my mother about the evaluation, she said, “I just didn’t know what to do with you. You were so intense! You had such strong feelings about everything, and I didn’t know how to help.”
When I relayed this information to my half-brother, who is 19 years older than I am, he just laughed. “Yeah, you were a piece of work,” he said.
The Stories We Inherit
I know from talking with parents every day that most of us have stories about how we were as children that are repeated in our families.
“My family always says I was the easy one,” one mom told me. Other parents have the exact opposite story—they were “the difficult one” or “the one who always caused trouble.”
The reliable one. The funny one. The angry one.
I think these stories say as much about our parents and our family systems as they do about how we truly were. In my case, the story that I was very demanding and difficult also surely speaks to both the age I grew up in AND the place—buttoned-up, affluent Connecticut—as much as it does to my parents’ capacity to handle what I was bringing.
And what I was bringing was surely the result of yes, my temperament, but also my father’s undiagnosed mental illness, my mother’s overwhelm, and my simple human need as a five-year-old to have good, warm attention from adults.
When I look at my own child and his behavior through all of these overlapping lenses, I can’t help but wonder:
How much of what we’re seeing is just his temperament?
How much is my overwhelm?
How much is his simple, inborn need for good, warm attention?
What We Can Learn About Our Own Kids’ Needs
The first thought I had in response to my childhood evaluation was, “wow, this sounds pretty similar to how parents who come for coaching describe their kids”:
Very demanding
No trouble at school but considerable trouble at home
Constantly asking for more attention
Difficulty with limits
And wouldn’t you know, my mom might actually be right: I WOULD in fact ascribe all of these characteristics to my own child, too.
It was hard not to jump from there straight to how I know myself now, some 40 years hence, in the present.
In between, I grew up, got pretty good grades, stayed on the straight and narrow (for the most part), acted like a jerk to my parents as a teenager, and then went off to a “good” college before beginning my life as an independent, self-righteous adult.
(I’m hoping that last bit is fading.)
So, lesson #1 is maybe that most of our demanding, troublesome, attention-seeking, argumentative, limit-busting kids might also turn into relatively well-adjusted, decently successful, normal-level-neurotic humans.
Cool.
I think, though, that what interests me more is what happens between 5 and 45, or maybe really between 0 and 7, when so much of who we are and what we say to ourselves about ourselves gets laid down.
I don’t remember being demanding, argumentative, attention-seeking, or anti-limit.
What I remember is how dangerous it was to demand, argue, try to get attention, or fail to heed a limit.
By the time explicit memory kicked in, all I remember is doing everything I could to be compliant, polite, self-sufficient, and “good.” The memories I have when I stepped out of bounds are memorable because they didn’t go well. At all.
The other night at dinner my son, who just turned 9, got upset with a suggestion I made about something that he had done that day. “NO!” he screamed. “THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED!” he screamed louder. And then, louder still, “I HATE WHEN YOU SAY THAT!!!!!”
A deadly calm washed over me. This feels familiar, I thought.
Quietly, I said, “honey, why do you think that makes you feel so angry?” and then, shaking with rage, he screamed back at the top of his lungs: “I. DON’T. KNOW!!!!”
And suddenly, it hit me. I felt that rage as a kid. Often. I used to pace up and down in my room, boiling with rage at my parents. Wanting to scream in their faces and never, ever daring to do it.
What if I had been able to do it, even once in a while? And not be labeled a problem? And maybe even be held in someone’s arms—or at least the circle of their warmth—until it passed?
What skills or knowing might be available to me now, as an adult, that still feel hard to find?
Where We Go From Here
I think we’re all trying to pull these things apart, little by little, as our kids grow.
We’re trying to figure out where our overwhelm ends and their difficulties begin—or maybe it’s the other way around.
And in some way, maybe this is what we keep doing as long as we parent, and even for our parents, as the tables turn with aging and life changes.
You might be interested to know that the psychologist’s findings were that I was basically ok—“a ‘slow-to-warm-up’ child” who “worrie[d] about being accepted” and was very “concerned about making sure she receives sufficient attention from adults.”
Since many of our kids (and we ourselves!) might still be described this way, here’s what I recommend:
Let’s go more slowly.
Let’s lean on connection.
Let’s give attention whenever it becomes clear it’s needed—even if we wish it were being asked for in a different way.
We’ll know soon enough—or in 30 or 40 years—how it goes.
