Father's Day Redux - The Third Eve

Father’s Day Redux

At our Father’s Day cookout last weekend, with four generations of our clan milling about, all our temperamental differences and likenesses were on parade. As adoptive parents, my husband and I never assumed that we’d be like our children temperamentally or vice-versa. In fact, the emotional distance we experienced with our own mothers prepared us to become better parents, because it drove us to do for our children what our mothers did not do for us—to love them with hands-on, present, be-there, I-see-you sorts of love throughout their childhoods.

The tree frogs bawled as my husband and I lingered over our beers on the back porch long after everyone had left. We talked into the night about how we had learned how to love every child of ours as they are, how precious and valuable each one is in our peculiar family system.

“I’m a lucky man,” my husband admitted, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

“I’m a lucky man,” my husband admitted,
and I could hear the smile in his voice.

As we lingered with the fireflies, talk turned to the oldest kids, who, hubby observed, seemed disconnected from the family and from us as parents. These are the the ones we didn’t get to raise, who came to us as traumatized adults. Though in the middle of everything, chatting, laughing, letting the energy bounce around them, they’re disconnected from the psychic and spiritual energy of the family. When they show up physically, they eat and drink with pleasure, but they avoid participation in the intimacies of day-to-day life with us.

As intuitive types for whom communication, meaning, and connection are essential, there’s a sadness attached to feelings of what might have been, had those kids received more love and experienced less trauma while they grew up. Repairs are always possible, but recovery and healing require profound acts of commitment and a lot of good help.

Over time, we’ve learned to let go of the wishes, hopes, and claims we attached to our kids, something we ironically learned as we tried repairing relationships with our own parents. As it turns out, when we finally gave our parents what they ought to have first given us, we discovered we were repairing not only our own hearts, but tears in the fabric of the universe, too.

June 30, 2009

Eve

The Psychology of Connection

Family Complex, Shadow Work, The Orphanic Wound

2 responses to “Father’s Day Redux”

wheneverydaymatters

June 20, 2009

Yes, Eve, the intuitive types – of which I am one – found this post particularly touching, meaningful and introspective. I loved the picture of you and your husband having a beer and discussing the individuality of all of your children with the sounds of the night as background.

These last few years I have come to believe that what I used to feel was a ‘withholding’ from others may not be that at all because ‘holding back’ would imply there is something there to hold back from giving over or forth. (I’m not speaking about your children here, of course, but of people in general.)

That awareness has made me feel more free and has prompted me to spend slight time pouring forth from my little vessel lest it run permanently dry and then crack.

Peace be with you from your PA friend across the miles,
MJ

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1. Eve
  
  June 20, 2009
  
  Hello, MJ. How nice to see you, and thank you for your comment. I think I understand what you mean. Have you read “Looking for Gold,” by Susan Tiberghien? In this memoir, she wrote beautifully about her first year in analysis. One of her first dream images was of a vase or vessel she’d bought at a monastery. As she drove home from her retreat, she had a car accident that flipped her car. She walked away from the accident with the vase intact, but with a crack running inside it from top to bottom.
  
  The crack was invisible on the outside, but occurred along the inside–a very fine crack that could barely be seen. When she dreamed later about such a vessel, this one came to mind, and its hidden crack, or fault.
  
  Your comment reminded me of this. I think I understand what you mean, for especially in the past year and a half, I have not had what it takes to continue to pour anything from “my little vessel” that is unwanted or unwelcome to others, “lest it run permanently dry and then crack.” A flame flickers and goes out. The oil runs dry.
  
  Another thing that comes to mind is how Jesus sent his disciples out two by two, and told them that whenever they came to a household that rejected them, to shake the dust from their feet and move along. That’s the freedom I think of when I read your comment. It is the freedom to stop trying so hard.
  
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