The Toughest Love of All

You know that guy who is unpleasant with you, has been for years? You know the one I mean. Maybe he’s a colleague at work, maybe a neighbor. Maybe he’s the bully in your algebra class, maybe it’s your wife’s sister’s husband.

Whoever it is, he’s always giving you a hard time, telling you to change, communicating that you’re not okay as you are, that there is something fundamentally wrong with you as a person. It’s not just your clothes or your haircut. It’s not just your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or where you’re from. This guy just doesn’t like you for you. He doesn’t like what you do, but at a profound level he doesn’t like who you ARE.

You may have thought to yourself: What if you were different? What if you were taller? Shorter? Smarter? Dumber? What if you were left handed? What if you had red hair? What if you played the trombone? What if you had studied engineering rather than philosophy?

As a functioning adult you are able to ignore this guy, get him out of your head, understand that, truly, it’s him not you. You know that you are okay the way you are and that his issues have nothing to do with you. You’re happy with the choices you’ve made, the way things have turned out. You know that this idiot’s vision of you is absurd. As a result of his negative attitude you keep your distance. You choose not to see him any more than you have to. You walk your dog down another street. You briefly make small talk at the family reunion then move on to chat with other relatives. You have no interest in changing what you do or who you are for this guy. You have no interest in playing the trombone or being left handed for goodness sake. You’re certainly not going to go to graduate school or drop out of graduate school on his suggestion. Under no circumstances are you going to devote hours every day to learning mathematics on his uninformed say so. You don’t like math, you never have. Why would you study math just because this guy who doesn’t like you to begin with says that you should, that you would get along better if you did?

But what if the guy who doesn’t like you, who can’t accept you the way you are, who wants to change every aspect of your personality, of what you do, of who you are-what if this guy were your parent?

What if, from the day you were born, the person who was supposed to look after you, to take care of you, to give you unconditional love and support was trying to change you? What if you got the feeling that your parents could not accept you for who you were?

We see rather a lot of this sort of thing in the mental health field, tell you the truth.

“I am a highly successful, academic person; my son doesn’t do well in school. We never communicate unless we are arguing about homework and academic performance.”

“I am a mathematician, but my daughter refuses to study math; we haven’t spoken in years.”

“My son married outside my religion; he is dead to me.”

Tragedy after tragedy, sadness heaped upon sadness.

Rabbi Kushner taught us that “Nobody on their deathbed ever said ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.'” I would add that nobody looking back on those brilliant, magnificent, transitory years of parenting ever said, “I wish we had spent more time arguing about homework.”

Here’s some gentle, directed advice: this Saturday leave the cell phones at home. Skip soccer practice; ignore the homework; leave the dishes. Forget about Facebook; disregard your email; snub your work responsibilities.

Instead, grab your kid and drive for an hour. Or hop on public transportation. Go to the woods. Take a walk.

You don’t have to say anything. Don’t talk about the uncertain future or how there aren’t any jobs for children who don’t take five advanced placement courses in 10^th grade. Just take a walk in the woods with your kid. A two-hour walk is good; a five-hour walk is better if you remember to pack some sandwiches and a water bottle. For extra credit you can pick up a rock and throw it at that tree over there. Up to you. Again, the less talking, the better.

Thirty years from now, call me and tell me whether you remember any homework your child ever did (or didn’t do.) But I bet you remember the day you put aside your electronics and blew off all your responsibilities and just went for a silent walk in the woods with your kid.

Because you don’t want to be that parent who is always negative in the life of your child. You want your kid to know that you love her just the way she is–even if she doesn’t get a PhD in math or marry the person you prefer or get that high paying job or keep the house as clean as you would like or raise her grandchildren as she might have done.

You don’t want to be the parent who, when the kids are grown and gone, has that emptiness because you didn’t take the time with them when it mattered most and loved them unconditionally.

You just don’t.

Because after all, what you think is missing in your child is really about what’s missing in you.

Or as a dear friend expressed it to me recently, “There’s not enough stuff in the world to fill the hole in my mother’s heart.”