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sexeteria wrote about mothering things for Mother's Day, and I was sort of 'I want to write about this but I don't know how just now', and so I've seen sort of stewing since then. And then today ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pantryslut wrote about the parenting bubble thing, and I think I'm coherent enough to start writing.
I'm going to start out by talking a bit about the ways I wasn't actually raised in the parenting bubble, and a bit, I think, about the ways I was.
I was a child on a shady bit of street in Hyattsville about a mile's walk from Route 1, five to ten minutes from the border with Washington, DC. I could walk to Magruder Park -- it was a bit more than a mile, I think -- and did so regularly in the summer for swimming lessons. Walking the other way would bring me to a place where we could get milk and basic staples; it was theoretically possible to walk to a grocery store, but I don't ever remember doing so. We lived a bit over the crest of a big hill (which was loads of fun on the walk home from elementary school, especially after about April) that got closed during big snowstorms, so the entire neighborhood would be out sledding.
This was before there was the deranged social paranoia that children had to be kept under active parental attention at all times (including in their own back yards) or they would be abducted by aliens or whatever. I walked places. On my own, even. It was about a mile to school. The park, as before mentioned. My friends' houses -- none of them lived within a mile of me, but most were less than two, I think. I played in the back yard all the time, on the swings or the monkey bars. Sometimes I hit my head on the underside of the deck (the swings were attached to the deck), and that was life.
I was the oldest kid on the street. Most of them were my brother's age, more or less, with a few younger siblings. (So I was about four years older than the kids on the street.) There were four families with kids on the street, and one down the street and around the corner. More further away, but I didn't know any of them. There were also two pairs of older couples that we associated with, and our next-door neighbour, a woman who I knew only as Meemaw.
The families with kids had a babysitting cooperative. People had cards that were good for a half-hour of babysitting, and most of the 'parents want to go out to dinner' sort of stuff was covered by one of the other sets of parents. We kids milled about under the supervision of parents-in-general a fair amount of the time when we were in the front yards, passing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as we went up and down the street. At one point I was basically a junior babysitter for one of the kids -- not for when her mother was out, but to supervise her so that her mother could work (since she worked at home) and let her know when crises happened or diapers needed changing.
I would spend time with Meemaw, who taught me how to do folk crafts of various sorts. She smoked, but not when I was around, and had a parakeet named Fred. Every so often her grandchildren would come to visit and she would be occupied with them, though occasionally I would be welcome to come over and watch Disney's Robin Hood with them. I adopted the Mays, one of the elderly couples, as my grandparents (as my father's father died when he was about twelve, I was short one, I explained to everyone). They taught me to play Solitaire and gave me ice cream (and the bowl was licked clean by their little dog) and Bea was my first introduction to ceramics work; she painted porcelain. A plate she gave me is part of my ancestor shrine. The other neighbours expressed concern that I was being "raised to be a little heathen" (insert laugh track here, please), which led to me attending several churches in a comparison shopping sense and winding up somewhat active in the Methodist church's youth group for a while.
And then everyone went home to their respective houses for dinner, more or less. There wasn't much in the sense of shared parenting responsibility beyond the knowledge that we were all, the whole neighborhood, in it together. Yes, I could get a lift up the hill when I was walking home from school if I happened to be doing so at a point at which one of the other parents was driving up the hill, but that's not much. Still more than isolationism.
One of the things that got me settled that I was finally emotionally ready to have kids was a time when I was helping mindthastygliax and meranthi's Blackbird at a games night and had this major emotional rush of 'this child is one of my tribe's children; I am caring for her'. A couple of things shifted in my head right around then, and I've been working on building my nest at some level ever since, rather than the haphazard collecting of material that I had been doing beforehand.
I have so very little experience with the actual practical caring for children. I envyautumnesquirrel's childhood with younger siblings she helped raise, a little, because I don't have any real practical knowledge of how to manage such things. By the time I was old enough to be significant help at childrearing, the age band in which the local parents were reproducing had passed; they were all done. The age bands were too stratified that way, everyone did their four years of reproduction (my parents a little before the others) and then it stopped. No organic continuity, smooth passing of the skills. I find myself awfully apprehensive.
And that's without getting into what I alluded to insexeteria, that I don't know that I have the mental equipment to be a good mother. My brother and I had a conversation a few years ago, sitting out on the headland here and looking at the Bay, in which he said that he didn't want children because he didn't think he could not perpetrate the sort of fucked up our parents are on them, and that wasn't fair. I asked him to kick me if I started being that sort of fucked up. He said he would. I honestly feel better with that, though he's not local.
When I was thirteen or so, after we moved away from Hyattsville, my mother did a chart of relationships for her ACOA work, and did a little jagged orange line of hostility around the bubbles for herself and for her mother, characterising the relationship.
I have honestly no idea what line I would draw around my bubble and hers.
When I commented onpantryslut's journal I commented that I was less comfortable living in a little bubble the closer I got to seriously preparing for parenthood. Living in a little hole with teinedreugan and occasionally venturing out into the rest of the world is all well and good when it's just me. There have been times I've been out of touch with everything, like after I dropped out of school, because I was just too overloaded and unable to touch other people; there have been times I've been more or less socially needy. But I've lived in a bubble, in this slightly socially isolated location.
I know that if I have kids in the bubble I'll go nuts. My parents did all right by me, within what they could do (I think the Savage Garden song lyric "I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do" is utterly true, and have extremely mixed feelings about this fact) but they had the support of a fairly broad community. Even if, in the long run, it came down to the nuclear households (about which I have extremely mixed feelings), there was this broad base of people there sharing the load.
And to the extent that I don't think I'm able to handle this task I'm feeling the need to do, I can't help but feel that the broader the base of support I have, the broader the base of support my children will have, and that can't help but minimise the damage I can do them. :/
sexeteria wrote about mothering things for Mother's Day, and I was sort of 'I want to write about this but I don't know how just now', and so I've seen sort of stewing since then. And then today pantryslut wrote about the parenting bubble thing, and I think I'm coherent enough to start writing.I'm going to start out by talking a bit about the ways I wasn't actually raised in the parenting bubble, and a bit, I think, about the ways I was.
I was a child on a shady bit of street in Hyattsville about a mile's walk from Route 1, five to ten minutes from the border with Washington, DC. I could walk to Magruder Park -- it was a bit more than a mile, I think -- and did so regularly in the summer for swimming lessons. Walking the other way would bring me to a place where we could get milk and basic staples; it was theoretically possible to walk to a grocery store, but I don't ever remember doing so. We lived a bit over the crest of a big hill (which was loads of fun on the walk home from elementary school, especially after about April) that got closed during big snowstorms, so the entire neighborhood would be out sledding.
This was before there was the deranged social paranoia that children had to be kept under active parental attention at all times (including in their own back yards) or they would be abducted by aliens or whatever. I walked places. On my own, even. It was about a mile to school. The park, as before mentioned. My friends' houses -- none of them lived within a mile of me, but most were less than two, I think. I played in the back yard all the time, on the swings or the monkey bars. Sometimes I hit my head on the underside of the deck (the swings were attached to the deck), and that was life.
I was the oldest kid on the street. Most of them were my brother's age, more or less, with a few younger siblings. (So I was about four years older than the kids on the street.) There were four families with kids on the street, and one down the street and around the corner. More further away, but I didn't know any of them. There were also two pairs of older couples that we associated with, and our next-door neighbour, a woman who I knew only as Meemaw.
The families with kids had a babysitting cooperative. People had cards that were good for a half-hour of babysitting, and most of the 'parents want to go out to dinner' sort of stuff was covered by one of the other sets of parents. We kids milled about under the supervision of parents-in-general a fair amount of the time when we were in the front yards, passing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as we went up and down the street. At one point I was basically a junior babysitter for one of the kids -- not for when her mother was out, but to supervise her so that her mother could work (since she worked at home) and let her know when crises happened or diapers needed changing.
I would spend time with Meemaw, who taught me how to do folk crafts of various sorts. She smoked, but not when I was around, and had a parakeet named Fred. Every so often her grandchildren would come to visit and she would be occupied with them, though occasionally I would be welcome to come over and watch Disney's Robin Hood with them. I adopted the Mays, one of the elderly couples, as my grandparents (as my father's father died when he was about twelve, I was short one, I explained to everyone). They taught me to play Solitaire and gave me ice cream (and the bowl was licked clean by their little dog) and Bea was my first introduction to ceramics work; she painted porcelain. A plate she gave me is part of my ancestor shrine. The other neighbours expressed concern that I was being "raised to be a little heathen" (insert laugh track here, please), which led to me attending several churches in a comparison shopping sense and winding up somewhat active in the Methodist church's youth group for a while.
And then everyone went home to their respective houses for dinner, more or less. There wasn't much in the sense of shared parenting responsibility beyond the knowledge that we were all, the whole neighborhood, in it together. Yes, I could get a lift up the hill when I was walking home from school if I happened to be doing so at a point at which one of the other parents was driving up the hill, but that's not much. Still more than isolationism.
One of the things that got me settled that I was finally emotionally ready to have kids was a time when I was helping mind
thastygliax and meranthi's Blackbird at a games night and had this major emotional rush of 'this child is one of my tribe's children; I am caring for her'. A couple of things shifted in my head right around then, and I've been working on building my nest at some level ever since, rather than the haphazard collecting of material that I had been doing beforehand.I have so very little experience with the actual practical caring for children. I envy
autumnesquirrel's childhood with younger siblings she helped raise, a little, because I don't have any real practical knowledge of how to manage such things. By the time I was old enough to be significant help at childrearing, the age band in which the local parents were reproducing had passed; they were all done. The age bands were too stratified that way, everyone did their four years of reproduction (my parents a little before the others) and then it stopped. No organic continuity, smooth passing of the skills. I find myself awfully apprehensive.And that's without getting into what I alluded to in
sexeteria, that I don't know that I have the mental equipment to be a good mother. My brother and I had a conversation a few years ago, sitting out on the headland here and looking at the Bay, in which he said that he didn't want children because he didn't think he could not perpetrate the sort of fucked up our parents are on them, and that wasn't fair. I asked him to kick me if I started being that sort of fucked up. He said he would. I honestly feel better with that, though he's not local.When I was thirteen or so, after we moved away from Hyattsville, my mother did a chart of relationships for her ACOA work, and did a little jagged orange line of hostility around the bubbles for herself and for her mother, characterising the relationship.
I have honestly no idea what line I would draw around my bubble and hers.
When I commented on
pantryslut's journal I commented that I was less comfortable living in a little bubble the closer I got to seriously preparing for parenthood. Living in a little hole with teinedreugan and occasionally venturing out into the rest of the world is all well and good when it's just me. There have been times I've been out of touch with everything, like after I dropped out of school, because I was just too overloaded and unable to touch other people; there have been times I've been more or less socially needy. But I've lived in a bubble, in this slightly socially isolated location.I know that if I have kids in the bubble I'll go nuts. My parents did all right by me, within what they could do (I think the Savage Garden song lyric "I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do" is utterly true, and have extremely mixed feelings about this fact) but they had the support of a fairly broad community. Even if, in the long run, it came down to the nuclear households (about which I have extremely mixed feelings), there was this broad base of people there sharing the load.
And to the extent that I don't think I'm able to handle this task I'm feeling the need to do, I can't help but feel that the broader the base of support I have, the broader the base of support my children will have, and that can't help but minimise the damage I can do them. :/
From: (Anonymous)
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From: (Anonymous)
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Interesting post! I don't have kids myself. For a long time I was under the impression that my parents' childrearing of me and my sibling was very good. It's only now, much later into my 30s that I've finally come to realize that, despite my parents not being monsters by any means, some of the stuff that went on in my familial bubble wasn't actually good or healthy at all for a kid to have to deal with. This discovery has thrown into question my own attitude about whether I'd be capable of being a good mother, so I know what you mean. But I truly do believe that being conscious of what wasn't working properly and why, and having good guidance on alternate methods rather than falling back on the patterns one was raised with, can make a big difference. Right now, I'm learning how to rethink the roles I was involved in. Next, I will rethink how to create new roles in my future, as a woman, as a potential mother, as many things. I think (at least for me) therapy helps a lot to throw all these concerns and the solutions to them into relief.