Joe enjoyed being around kids, but only if they were other people’s kids. He loved the spontaneity of children, their humor, inquisitiveness and innocent wisdom but he was terrified of having children of his own. That was because he feared repeating his own childhood experience, in an emotionally disconnected family. So when he married, Susan, a woman who always wanted children, and a big family at that, his fate was sealed. Within a few short years, they had four children. He was terrified during her first pregnancy, scared of being thrust out of his comfort zone and into what seemed to him like the abyss of parenthood. He dreaded the thought that he would be cast aside, in the role of the outsider in the family as he saw his own father had been but there was more. Having had an absent father created an emotional void that was filled by an over-dependency on his mother. She was too important to Joe as a child. She used that power to control him by giving him the ‘silent treatment’ whenever he displeased her. Joe was terrified to anger her and this translated to a fear of angering any woman, in his adult life, that he was attached to.
But when the first child came along, and with the help of therapy, Joe was able to put his past aside and enjoy the controlled chaos of fatherhood. All that changed, however, when he realized that Susan was determined to win the award for “Mother of the Year” and equally as bad, when she deemed herself as an expert on all aspects of parenthood, like telling Joe what he should be doing as a father. Her idea of good parenting was to live a life of self-sacrifice, of deprivation for the sake of the children. While it’s true that a good parent puts the children’s needs first, she was way over the top and the couple suffered for it. She wouldn’t allow herself very much R& R from the stresses of raising a family, and gave Joe a hard time and made him feel guilty for his wanting to enjoy life with some down time away from the kids, both with her and for himself. Any attempts on Joe’s part to nudge the Mrs. away from the children for some time alone together was met with stony resistance. She acted like an oppositional adolescent, saying no to anything he offered without proposing a healthy alternative plan of her own. The irony was that Susan, not so secretly, resented her children’s incessant and unrelenting emotional and physical demands on her. She was frequently short with Joe and the children, often losing her temper. At times, she was verbally abusive. Susan turned to alcohol as a stress reliever, self-medicating away the growing dissatisfactions; she had become clinically depressed. Susan’s attitude was ruining her life and their marriage. At the very least, it was driving a wedge between her and Joe. Her tragic flaw as that she was aware that something was wrong with their relationship but didn’t understand her part in it. She thought that living an inordinately stressful life was normal. When the stress in the household got really bad, Joe dreamt of leaving her; and not so strangely, she dreamt of leaving all of them. She intuitively felt his emotional and physical pulling back but was either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. For his part, Joe all too easy slipped into the passive-aggressive role of the absent father. He had morphed into his own father, who had put his narcissistic interests ahead of the family. Joe often stayed very late at work to avoid going home and when at home retreated to his study. He took his resentment toward Susan out on the children. The irony for Joe was he became aware that his worst fears about parenthood had come true. It seems to me that one key element of a successful parenting team is for both mother and father to resist the creation of a common family dynamic of marginalization. I have observed that in matters of child-rearing decisions, it is often the case that the father moves to the sidelines. The mother takes center stage as the de facto resident expert. Mom needs to resist the impulse to push Dad off to the periphery and Dad must resist the impulsive to passively go there.
