do our parents deserve compassion?
some thoughts about your thoughts
Last week, I wrote a personal essay and accompanying video about how radical compassion for mothers has been an instrumental part of own healing. But what was a political revelation to me, was taken as a personal attack by some. This was something that I didn’t expect but that I want to explore with you now.
One person’s cure can be another person’s wound, especially on the internet where we never know how or when our posts will meet the people who scroll past them. We all project our own “stuff” onto the things that people post. Depending on our mood or personal experience, the same post that conjures an eye-roll one minute, could leave us with me a smile, a few hours later. I know that the same post will hit different depending on what’s happening to me internally. If I’m feeling burned out, my reaction to a motivational speaker’s post about failure not being an option will trigger negative feelings, but if I see it right after I had a productive meeting or had a win at work, I’ll have a completely opposite response.
And while my friends lovingly instructed me to stop reading the comments (and reminded me that most of them were actually positive) I reflected on the ones that weren’t. I didn’t do this to self-flagellate, but rather because I wanted to dig deeper into why having compassion for our mothers, and more generally our parents, can be so hard.
I’ve always known that talking about children or parenting online is often risqué because parents can feel attacked, alienated, and misunderstood. I don’t have children yet so I usually steer away from it, because truly, what do I know? “But here’s the thing, not everyone has kids, but everyone has some variation of a mom. Some people tragically lose their mothers young or even at birth. Some people have absent mothers. Children who were fortunate to grow up with a mom have different experiences with the same mother. When I watched the film, Everything Everywhere All at Once (which is definitely on my list of Liz’s favorite things this year) I thought about all the different choices that my mom made that would have radically altered both her life and my own.
I noticed a generational difference in the reception of my message of empathy and understanding for mothers. On TikTok, where the platform skews much younger, many were incensed that I would recommend having compassion for an abusive mother, which of course, I never said, and do not believe.
But what people project onto my writing or my work has always been fascinating to me. It can give a snapshot of the pain people are dealing with at this moment in time. This strong reaction tells me that being mistreated by your mom can leave you with a deep sense of guilt over it, even after you’ve come to terms with it. As I wrote in my original essay, we all feel the need to save and be saved by our mothers, so when neither is a possibility, it can feel personally defeating and devastating. Even as adults, it’s extremely hard not to blame ourselves for the way our moms treat us. And some mothers will subconsciously or even deliberately use this insatiable desire to be loved by them, against us. So, if you are being harmed by your mother, compassion rightfully might not be where you want to put your focus.
Young people also have a lot of valid and righteous anger towards their parents right now. They’re not just upset with the way they were raised, at times in dysfunctional family systems that have caused long-term damage they’re undoing in therapy if they’re lucky, they’re also mad that their parents’ generation were recipients of mass wealth that hasn’t been shared it with them. As NYU professor and friend of the Man Enough podcast Scott Galloway puts it, we are witnessing the largest transfer of money to the wealthiest generation in history, boomers. If you’re a millennial or a gen z person, your parents were probably better off than you. Millennials are the first generation to be financially less better off than their parents were and to be projected to die faster than their parents. Young people feel abandoned and they have the data to back it up.
But here’s the thing: compassion is not for them, it’s for you. I use my own book as an example for this. When I decided to write For The Love of Men, a book about expanding our empathy for men’s pain, I fielded uncomfortable unsolicited advice, even from some my own friends, warning me that by calling on female compassion, I was somehow excusing male abuse. But the most common lie about compassion, or forgiveness for that matter, is that we do it for others, where as I believe it’s something we first and foremost do for ourselves. The best thing I ever did as a feminist, was forgive men. It set me free. I had wasted so much of my time trying to understand why so many men treated women (especially the ones they purport to love) so badly. But having compassion for men and boys meant I could separate their behavior from my worth and view their healing as separate from mine. I no longer personalized their actions. I could see their abuse and neglect as forms of self-harm to themselves, and in the words of the great Toni Morrison, I took myself out of it. She often spoke about the biggest cost of racism being wasting the precious time and attention of Black people.
“The very serious function of racism is a distraction It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.”
-Toni Morrison
Inspired by Morrison’s astute observations about white supremacy, I found that the best way to liberate myself from patriarchy was to separate myself from the way that patriarchy made men treat me. It may sound counterintuitive, but having compassion for men meant their choices were no longer my responsibility.
In other words, having compassion for our parents doesn’t mean that justify their behavior, it can mean that we more effectively hold them accountable for it. That because empathy and boundaries are not opposites, they’re self-reinforcing. This even shocked Dr. Brené Brown, a world renown academic researcher in shame and human relationships. When she studied what the most empathetic people had in common, she found that it wasn’t faith, devotion or self-sacrifice, but rather, possessing rock-hard boundaries. In a patriarchal-oriented culture we are trained to view empathy as weakness, but it’s the strongest thing we can do.
I certainly haven’t figure out how to do all of this and have complicated feelings about it and I can’t wait to have kids so that they can have complicated feelings about me too. If setting boundaries and compassion is also a challenge for you, I want to leave you with a question that might be a good writing prompt from Dr. Brown.
“What boundaries do you need to have in place for you to keep your integrity and still make the most generous assumptions about other people?”
Before you go, I want to share a great last-minute holiday gift idea: this newsletter! If there’s a person in your life that would enjoy being part of our community, and the ideas we share here, please consider supporting my work and giving them a present that will last the entire year!
And if you’re more into listening than reading, this is your last chance to listen to Race to 35 before where Monica Padman and I go through our egg retrieval! I loved our conversation with Andrew Solomon about family, and it pertains to so many topics we discuss here, including imperfect mothers. I hope you like it.
Thanks for being here.
Liz-
Hi Liz,
I so loved your previous post. I found it to be so gentle, so insightful, and so necessary. Relationships of any kind are inherently complex and yours was a mature take. Parents are imperfect people raising imperfect people and a quest for moral purity does us all a disservice. Of course, it's implied that I don't mean abuse here. I'd also caution any reader against conflating abuse with the normal human failings we all possess. I'd love to talk more about this. Thank you for a beautiful piece.
I appreciate the question. It's taken me a long time to feel more compassion and acceptance of my parents' rather standard level of emotional neglect. While I have found some compassion, and our relationship has improved, it's still not all that interesting, and I still resent them for not showing up better when I was a kid. Who am I to judge, but I do anyhow, and—I imagine you hear this from others, if they're being honest—my resentment is the main source of me feeling like I don't want to take care of them in their old age. I know, I'm sure Sharon Salzburg (mentioned below) would say "forgive everything," but this runs below the level of conscious forgiveness.