Under the Influence

June is graduation time, a season of celebration, endings, and reflection. As my son prepares for his departure from high school and imminent move to a college dorm, I’ve been reflecting on what has influenced him over the years.

When we initially meet people in life, after first noticing their dress, facial expressions, mannerisms, and general appearances, we unconsciously move to the presence or absence of influences in their life. Something stands in everyone’s background, and that influence give off hints of company kept and places visited.

Influence is an interesting concept. Authors often reveal their literary influences – the other writers they’ve been reading and absorbing. William Styron admits to being influenced by other Southern writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Thomas Wolfe. The discerning reader can hear that influence lingering in the background.

Musicians are the same way. A rock and roll band that loves Celtic music includes a tin whistle or the emotional sounding bagpipe and suddenly they are described as having a “Celtic influence.” A musician’s favorite band flows into their own music, and someone else’s sound becomes a part of their own.

The word “influence” began in Latin with the astrological term “influential” which means “to flow in.” It denoted a sort of fluid that was supposed to be given off by the stars to influence human character and destiny. There is also the different notion of “emanation” that had its roots in the Italian word “influenza” or “epidemic.” I find it interesting to think our influence over our children can sometimes be compared to a flu virus you want to destroy.

When we consider a parent’s influence, the word’s definition applies. Our physical characteristics most certainly “flow into” our children – a mother’s nose, a father’s height, a grandfather’s hair texture - but so does our value system, our opinions, our tongue, and our behavior. All these things work together to shape our children’s “destiny.”

When we meet young graduates, either we see that they’ve been left to their own designs and they suffer from a lack of positive influences, or we “see” protection and provision, love and sacrifice, the effects of braces, the teaching of manners, the influence of church, the results of studying, the purchase of clothing. We see that someone planted a value system, turned off the television and introduced good books. Those who have been taken on vacations carry the aroma of distant mountains and oceans, hikes and backpacking trips. They’ve been forced to get a job, taught to pay their way, and to live by truth.

Those who have been left alone often carry sadness or melancholy. A mother told me recently that her son had the tragic experience of spending time in a federal prison – every parent’s nightmare. When the young man had a dental emergency, the prison dentist took one look at her son’s teeth and chided, “Someone cared enough about you to take care of your teeth like this and you wound up in here?” Straightened, strong teeth say lot about past influences, but so do other things.

I know some of my influences in my son’s life have been good, and some I’d like to erase with a big, fat eraser. Thank goodness I’m not the only one who has influenced him. Others have “flowed” into him as well – his friends, and enemies, classmates, teachers, and all of his experiences combined. If you listen, you’ll hear them there in the background of his life. His youth pastor has shown him that it’s worth giving up an engineering career to devote your life to developing future adults, encouraging my son to see people the same way. His wrestling coaches have shown him that they’re excited when he succeeds, but they’ll stick by him when he loses with a hug, and an encouraging word. His peers have both admired and disliked him, leaving him with residues of both confidence and insecurity. He’s been rejected and despised and loved and adored, which shows through in his yearning for the real and the true, mixed with an awareness of the false and worthless.

He’s been around the wise and the foolish, developing a discerning eye between those competing elements. Family has shown up for both the dark and exulting moments, loved him when he was unlovable and asked forgiveness when they were unlovable. Friends have shown him that others can love you as much as your own blood relatives, sometimes more. He’s been influenced by adults who cared enough about an inexperienced, immature teenager to hang out with him on a Friday night and play guitar, egging him along to confidence and never hinting that his guitar was untuned, or that he needed a lot more practice to match their experience level. Those adult friends attend his band concerts and wrestling matches, and help him make video presentations. Their gift of time has influenced his view of his own worth, as well as the worth of others. I know my son is one of the lucky ones.

I’ve been preparing for that emotional moment of watching my son receive his diploma. Always at those major times in life, we see a million elusive memories with all the years melded into one. The same will be true as he walks across that podium in his cap and gown – I’ll see the image of a hyperactive youngster whirling into a seven-year-old washing his father’s station wagon and further into a grown young man driving away in his own car. I’ll hear his voice deepening from the high frequency of youth into the deep tones of young manhood. His hair will be long, short, long and then stand on end in stiff, chaotic tendrils.

All of his life’s influences will be there, too, lingering in the background. They are the hidden authors who have written his prose and provided the detail - the emotional bagpipe and tin whistle that sings of others in his past, resounding in his actions, shaping his attitudes while he goes out and spreads some music on his own.

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Copyright 2004 Linda MacKillop

Linda MacKillop is a mother of four sons, with the last being twins. She lives in Midlothian, Virginia, as a transplanted Yankee. But she loves the speed of life there and its conduciveness to raising a family. Linda has a background in Communications, having spent a number of years as a television engineer before staying home with her boys. While at home, she returned to graduate school and earned a master’s degree in English.

The Imperfect Mother

It’s time for Mother’s Day again and I always feel a little awkward on this day. When a tray appears at my bedside with a steaming cup of coffee and a card or flowers, I feel undeserving. For the entire day, my family wants me to sit down in a quiet part of the house and read while they run the show.

Part of my discomfort probably is because I keep a running tally in my mind of all the mistakes that I’ve made in parenting – the times that I’ve raised my voice, acted like a spoiled brat by walking away from an exasperating conversation, or told my sons to serve themselves because I was too tired to wait on them.

But one night several months ago, my older son had his girlfriend home with him from college for a visit. We sat around the table after a meal and my son told his girlfriend, “We did this every night while I was in high school. We always had dinner together.”

I corrected him, “No, we didn’t, Kyle. We missed a ton of nights. We only ate together maybe three or four out of seven nights a week.”

“No. It was more than that,” he insisted. “It was almost every night.”

My husband agreed with Kyle, but in my mind I could make a list of all the places that people sped off to, causing us to have missing family members from the table, or causing us to eat separately in shifts. There were graduate school classes, church activities, part-time jobs, trips to the gym, school meetings, work travels, dinners out with friends or guests, and the list goes on and on.

“No, it was nearly every night,” Kyle insisted. “It was definitely more than three or four nights a week.”
“That’s amazing to me that you remember your growing up years that way, because I felt so guilty each time we missed a night.”

While they all talked together, building their case for how I wasn’t remembering things accurately, adding that I never remember anything anymore, I realized that children remember a tone of what their family was like. They remember a feeling of stability, of safety, of happiness, if those elements were in their lives, and maybe even when those elements were missing. Kids skip over the specifics and focus on the general sense of their growing up years, while obsessive parents remember the minute-by-minute details. Children also have a magnificent capacity for white-washing the ugly.

I’ve been researching the foster care system for a piece that I’m writing and the stories put my feelings of guilt into perspective. There are mothers and fathers who are so broken and incapable of focusing on a child that they become terribly guilty of neglect, abandonment, or abuse. Children in elementary school and younger can be responsible for taking care of themselves and possibly even a sibling. Despite the fact that the child may be removed from their parent’s house and shifted for years at a time to strangers or relatives, many of the parents remain unable or unwilling to get their act together.

Pointing fingers isn’t the intent here, but I want to make this point – in most of the cases, despite enduring gross mistreatment, in the end the children just want to go home. What the government is realizing is that money that has been spent to support the foster care system is best spent trying to shore up the families of origin rather than paying for substitute care. Sadly, that option isn’t always feasible, but it doesn’t change the fact that the hearts of most children just want to be with the folks they started out with in the beginning of life.

What this says to me is that while I’m obsessing over three skipped dinners in a week, there are kids who may never have one dinner around a candlelit table with laughing, joking, loving family, leave alone hundreds of those dinners. Suddenly my guilt is put in perspective. That’s not to let me off the hook and say, “Well, at least I’m not addicted to crack cocaine and bringing home drug dealer boyfriends,” and then skip off without considering the needs of my sons. Certainly there are ways we can harm children long before hitting the far end of the scale of neglect. But it does give me a stark reminder – children love their families and want to remember them in a positive light, whether the families are deserving or not.

So, this Mother’s Day when I’m remembering my failures and mistakes, instead of feeling guilty, I’m going to be appreciating my children’s unconditional love and forgiveness for me - something that I like to think that I’ve show them, too. They love me whether I deserve it or not. I’ll simply say thank you when the tray and the cards appear, knowing that their “sense” of what our family has been like is that Mom and Dad tried hard to give them a childhood they could lean on in their older years when the rest of the world starts to batter them.

But to me, their ability to forgive me and paint me in a flattering light will be better than any flower arrangement or card - and it’s the greatest gift of all to this mother’s heart.

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Copyright 2004 Linda MacKillop

Underdog

He gets out of the car each morning and I watch as he braces himself and puts on his bravest and most guarded expression of bravado before he walks into the school. He adjusts his body and raises his head just a little in the air as he takes his French horn and thirty pound backpack.

I catch a last glimpse of him before he disappears inside the school doors, watching the back of his carefully selected outfit, one that he chose to try and avoid criticism in at least that area. His hair is fixed to look like his eighteen-year-old brother’s hair, carefully and meticulously coifed to be absolutely messy and spiky – chaos with a plan.

He’ll face rejection there, I know it. He’ll try and talk with others who will turn and look at him like he has three heads and then he’ll give up and walk away, wondering what’s wrong with him. He’ll be shoved into a locker while the antagonist laughs and says with irritation, “What?! It was just an accident,” laughing some more and walking away. He’ll be bewildered, wanting to forgive the shove but sensing that the real offense was something so much more.

This is what happens to the awkward ones, the less sophisticated and less confident ones. He’s called “nerd” and “gay” because he isn’t athletic and a little too nice. He doesn’t know how to join conversations and make relevant small talk. He doesn’t live in the wealthiest part of town, and already in middle school the status-conscious folk have staked out territory and he’s fallen on the wrong side of the boundary. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing wrong and most days he just walks into that invisible wall between himself and peers over and over-and-over-again, trying one more time to connect and join a conversation, only to fail.

When he was young he had chronic ear infections which left him with scar tissue and auditory processing problems. Intelligence tests say he’s very smart, but his awkward, hesitant speech makes him different, something you never want to be in middle school. At home he seems conversant, intuitive and pleasant, but at school he doesn’t fit in. Thank goodness he has a twin brother to keep him company, God’s answer to loneliness.

From home, it’s pretty difficult to coach him. It’s hard when you haven’t witnessed the conversations to know how to prep him for the next ones. Often he can’t articulate what went wrong. Sometimes his emotions just betray him and take over, and then he weeps, speechless.

As a mother I worry. Someone in eighth grade committed suicide last month. He was overweight and bullied and had difficulty making friends. I wept for that one’s mother, how I know she must long to ease pain she thinks, and imagines, he’s still feeling somewhere, how she plays scenarios over-and-over in her mind, wondering how she could’ve rescued him. I weep for her, and for him.

When I pick him up school his sweat shirt is slung over his shoulder and he impatiently throws his instrument into the van. His face is weary and he tries to fight anger and annoyance. He tells the story of his day to me and his twin brother on the way home, couching the stories in bravado I saw him dress himself in earlier in the day.

But I’m the mother and I see the façade right to the heart of the matter – pain. In gym, he wanted to be on someone’s team and when he asked, the group of kids stopped talking, looked at him and said, “No.” People often talk to other people like objects, rocks.

At home we try to brainstorm how he can get through this. I tell him of his older brother who was picked on all through junior high and called names because he was small and blond and considered weak. This “small, blond” brother became the captain of the wrestling team and district champion in his 125 pound weight class, demonstrating that even small blonds can have heart and strength.

We tell him that it’s never going to go away completely so we need to make a plan to deal with it. We remind him that anyone who has gotten to know him, likes him. It’s that the people who choose to ridicule don’t take the time to know others based on anything more than address and outward appearance. We tell him to find his real friends and accept that this is his battle, but he can use it to make him someone who cares for the other hurting kids in the junior high – and there’s no small number of those. Instead of feeling hurt or protective of himself he can try and be a friend to the other ones who seem to have difficulty making friends, too. He can accept this.

It’s a plan of action and a hope that someday it’ll turn out all right. Maybe he’ll be a teacher someday and help kids. Maybe he’ll be a pastor, but he’s feeling better.

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Copyright 2004 Linda MacKillop

Silences and Motherhood

By Linda MacKillop

"Get a good education so you can take care of yourself," was what my mother told me when her own marriage ended after 19 years, and she found herself starting over. "You'll go to college no matter what, because that an experience I wouldn't want you to miss," she used to say to me. Her words programmed me into thinking about getting an education first and foremost.

Encouraging children to get an education is great advice, but she never said that motherhood was an experience she wouldn't want me to miss. Parenting was never presented as a prize to be sought. Instead, there were heavy silences and gaps about the experience of raising a child -- silences that gave way to my own misled perspective of the job -- leaving me thinking it was a pretty mundane event.

When I was in my teens, my maternal grandmother, Nina, help up a pearl necklace to me. "And someday this necklace will be for your daughter."

"Oh, that will be nice," I responded, completely oblivious to the implication and weight of passing something of value down from one generation to the another. At the time, I was also oblivious to the fact that this was one of the few verbal messages spoken to me about motherhood.

Knowing my mother's and grandmother's difficult journeys, I understood their emphatic and proud feelings of seeing me complete college. But in their efforts to see that I got an education they missed out on, they neglected to speak of motherhood as an experience laden with riches. Instead, parenting seemed to be a mere afterthought. My family neglected to describe to me the indescribable love a mother experiences for a child.

I had to wonder if motherhood had cost them too much, and if so, what? Was it the loss of identity, lack of fulfillment, the stifling of a dream, or the disappointment of an expectation? Or maybe it was all of the above.

I wondered if I had been part of the disappointment.

Yet, here I am with four teenage sons, loving the role of mother, feeling the womenin my family missed so many joys for themselves, feeling they missed so many messages and lessons that could have been passed down to another generation. Sometimes I think that I've made quite a big jump into a love affair with motherhood, considering my poor preparation. Other times, the jump doesn't seem really all that far.

When my first son, Kyle, came home from the hospital, my mother flew up from Florida to see him. When she arrived at my apartment, Kyle as lying on our bed covered with an afghan. Dumping her luggage in the middle of the floor, and forgetting to even take off her coat, my mother approached her new grandson with trembling hands and voice, and teary eyes.

"Oh, my goodness, this is him." She reached for Kyle, clutching him to her chest.

I was stunned at her reaction. I rarely saw her react emotionally about anything. She never spoke tender words to my siblings or me. And yet, here she was aweed at the arrival of her grandson.

In those days after my son's arrival, both my grandmothers responded to meeting him in a similar manner. Both women left their husbands in the dust as they raced to where the baby waited in the room. Each of these meetings seemed to combine my grandmothers' own memories of being passed their newborn baby, with the lifetime of experiences that reminded them of how quickly a child would fly from their arms. I had to wonder what had been said to them that caused them to pass down such muddled messages about children and motherhood.

All the women in my family seem to wrestle with some form of private demons. When I look at their lives in terms of motherhood, they said to me that children never fill your most vacant places. Have reasonable expectations. The love of a child is a wonderful gift -- but it's a gift that doesn't have the power to scare away our darkest nights.

Maybe these experiences hover over a newborns arrival -- tarnishing, staining, and diminishing joy. In the midst of the sterile, safe environment where a new infant is enfolded, wrapped, and held, there is another presence -- the lurking of potential heartache, that eyes the family, and waits for just the right moment to pounce.

I've learned that we need to approach parenting with eyes wide open, accepting the fact that some of our parenting years may not meet our expectations. In fact, our children may not meet our expectations. Some our our children may turn away from us, some may reject us our teachings, some will fail school, or have troubled friends, or be a troubled friend. Some will visit a police station, and we'll only get the phone call. Some will die.

My expectations about life and parenthood bean to take shape as I struggled to find my niche in the many roles of life. I thought about my grandmothers and mother's expectations about parenthood. They may have welcomed their experiences of motherhood, thinking it would lead to fulfillment, meet their needs for love and security, or just meet their needs period.

Parenting doesn't meet our needs, though. It doesn't fill our deepest loneliness. In fact, it can often add loneliness because we're isolated from people during the caretaking of a child. A young mother's time and schedule molds with naptimes, quarantine times with sick children, mealtimes, and bedtimes.

We sit home while our childless friends go out to lunch and dinner. They soar in their jobs to places we'll never be able to go. They travel, dropping everything at the spur of a moment for an adventure. We say, "No, I don't think that will work for me," instead spending an evening at the bed of a sleeping child's sickbed, watching them by the glow of a nightlight, while peace settles on them for the evening.

Soon after my son was born, one of my grandfathers entered a nursing home with early stage Alzheimer's. I would go to visit him often and always brought my son. How the other Alzheimer's patients responded to my small child was both telling and tragic. Here were elderly patients in a fog of dementia, pacing floors, talking to themselves, oblivious to people around them. They mechanically and rhythmically rocked, talked, hummed, and tapped. But the only thing that broke this trance-like behavior - was the appearance of a child.

I would walk down the halls and they seemed to sense the very presence of a child -- turning from their doorways, coming out of hallways, and calling to us: "Baby! Baby! Come to Mommy. Come to Mommy!" Their arms would reach for the baby. And sometimes someone would begin to follow me. Other times a woman would have tears in her eyes as she called, "It's me, Grandma."

Sometimes they would rock their arms as I passed, vicariously holding him -- remembering (so obviously remembering) what had touched them most deeply in their past. I knew they were back with their own children in their minds, remembering the touch and feel and unique infant scent they had experienced so long ago.

Their reactions caused me to look at this experience that is so profound and ingrained in our souls that it can transcend sickness and mental disorders, bringing people back from a foggy, diseased world to remember. But if it is as deep and life-changing, so personal and meaningful a moment above all others, we should talk about it that way, instead of giving way to silent messages where another generation can read falsely between the lines.

I wish my own mother had spoken in those terms.