The trouble with the truth
My friend Brian Micklethwait says:
One of the more damaging assumptions you can make is to assume that everyone is like you, with the same values, ambitions, preoccupations and interests as you have.
I see this so much especially when people talk about parents. They take it for granted that all, or very nearly all, parents love their children. I have to tell you that this is not true, and I have dozens of friends for whom it was not true. Some of them recognize the truth of not having been loved, while some prefer to believe that their parents loved them “in their own way”. But no, their parents did not love them. It’s not their fault that they weren’t loved, and there is surely a logical explanation for why their parents were incapable of this, but the uncomfortable truth is still the truth.
I couldn’t help but think of all this as I read Nancy Rommelmann’s latest stunning piece of journalism, “Sacrificing Rebecca“. It’s the horrific, true story of a mother who did not love her child, and of all the witnesses who saw the evil with which she treated her, and preferred instead to believe that it was some kind of love. An unwillingness to judge yielded a murder-suicide which the witnesses have managed to sell themselves, and their city, as unpredictable. Only by clinging to the belief that this was a loving mother could these events have come as a shock. Nancy writes on her blog:
As for judging and not judging, I will go on record as saying part of the reason Laurie was allowed to do what she did is our institutional reluctance to judge people, and to hold them accountable for their actions. Chris and others may feel compassion for Laurie when they read her story; I do not. I feel sadness and pity and rage, and also, and always, the certainty that we must hold people accountable, lest we passively enable weakness and in this case, murder.
It is still seen as something of a joke to say, “Well, my parents didn’t love me,” as if this could not possibly be the case. Often it is the case, and maybe some of us who had one or more parents who did not love us - who treated us as liabilities from the day we started to develop personalities distinct from theirs - need to explain how that unfolds.
There are reasons we don’t: It takes so long, perhaps a lifetime, to understand it ourselves. The parents aren’t dead yet, and we don’t want to alienate our entire families by telling this truth. It’s shameful. Worst of all, what if nobody believes us? How can one achieve a status in life that is even one level above shambolic without parental love? It simply does not compute for most people - hence this post, hence this murder-suicide.
But I can’t help but think of Rebecca, who didn’t know what was happening to her and could not have articulated it if she had. Maybe, for the sake of children like her, those of us who have moved through it need to show others that lots of parents who look just like them - white, middle class, educated - don’t love their children. We survived, and perhaps owe something to those who might not.
Filed under: Life
Oh my gosh, you are so right.
I sometimes facilitate the dialogue on this by explaining that love has 2 distinct meanings. There is the emotion you feel inside, and there are the actions with which you treat people. Unfortunately, Western culture seems to focus almost entirely on the former- an impossible to define, easy to fake or lie about, often sporadic or transitory thing. So we actually believe we can passionately care about people we are murdering. Hurting the thing you love is a cliche. It’s a very short step indeed from there to claiming that child abuse is just mistaken affection, and everyone who engendered a child is hard-wired to have benevolent feelings towards it. All of which is total crap of course.
Love is how you treat people, and many of us still have a lot to learn about it. Which isn’t because our parents finished the job perfectly brilliantly.
Just as troubling is seeing problems within other generations or parts of your own family that you still cannot address, because calling out the problem would require telling a senior member that they really need to let go of worshipping the parent(s) who obviously don’t care for the senior member or any of us, and that that love for someone who never loved them back has created their lifetime problems (which continue to spill down into subsequent generations). You can’t address it because it’s the elephant in the room and the emperor’s clothes, and if brought up it’s denied, and if brought up forcefully than you - bad, bad person you -are responsible for the senior family member howling and threatening imminent suicide on a holiday. Lovely. I suspect this is the reason why some never have children - they’ve already had more than enough family, thank you.
Someone I know quite well with a family marked very strongly by an unloving and self-involved grandparent once told me that there are two types of love - actual love, and the love that you have to claim that you have for your relatives because that claim “is what you have to do” (though you have reason to loath them and do). I suspect that POV reflects reality for many, I know it well in some ways myself.