Caring for My Kids Taught Me More About Myself than Therapy

Does Parenting Make You Happy or Unhappy? Part Two

Thanks for reading “Made With Care,” a deep dive into the cultural roots of the care crisis, and how parenting and caregiving is a wild, meaty and profound ride that men pretty much ignored forever. For so long, care has been hiding in plain sight. I’m working to make it visible.

For more on the subject, check out my book “When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others” which is now out in paperback. Bay Area: I’m having an event in Berkeley on April 9 with Anna Sale and the Department of Invisible Labor. Check my socials for more info.

“When You Care” is an April Kindle Deal. Only $1.99.

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Care provides a mirror to the self, whether we like it or not.

I recently wrote about why the “Does parenting make you happy or unhappy?” question is a generally unhelpful one when exploring our own experiences as parents, or fighting for the structural supports parents need in order to stay healthy, sane and financially secure.

You can read it here:

Does Parenting Make You Happy or Unhappy?

Today, I want to dive into another aspect of parenting’s psychological impact that I didn’t get into in my previous post. This is how parenting, and care in general, pushes us to really see who we are.

Caring for others is largely about meeting their needs. But in trying to tend to another, a mirror emerges, a mirror through which we can see our selves, often more clearly than we ever have before. There it is, on display, our beauty, our ugly, our decency, our narcissism, our pesky certainties, our weaknesses hiding as strengths, and our strengths hiding as weaknesses.

“Oh, that’s who I am?!?!?” is something I have thought a lot while caring for others. It’s why I am not a big fan of the idea of self-actualization, and a far bigger proponent of the notion of co-actualization.

Relationships are our best tools for self-knowledge, even if it isn’t always pretty, easy or fun.

Here’s an excerpt from my book exploring some of the self-knowledge I experienced through care. In it, I write about the long legacy of my parents’ divorce and how it shaped me in ways I couldn’t see until two small humans, Augie and Levi, were dependent on me. (If you like it, consider grabbing a copy of the book, now out in the softer, more portable paperback version.)

Here’s an adapted excerpt from CHAPTER SIX The Feeling is Mutual: How Caring for Others Can Better Our Minds and Bodies.

When I decided to become a parent in 2012, the debate about whether or not parenting makes parents happier took off. I had read the books, the blog posts, and the research and decided I would go ahead with the being a mom thing anyway, but considered myself warned.

Thirteen years later, I can confidently say that the happy vs unhappy question was, individually speaking, the wrong one to ask. (Collectively, parental unhappiness is a clear sign of how deeply unsupported parents are.) Being a mom has brought me profound psychological benefits, but they are not in the day-to-day, easy pleasure, buying a cute top or grabbing sushi with my best friends category -- even if there is plenty of that, too. Instead, parenting has led me to a more honest relationship with myself, drawing my attention to old traumas and emotional tics that I long ignored.

Happier? Hard to answer. But more in touch with myself? Who I am, where I came from, and how I want to be in the world? Absolutely.

Here's what happened.

When I was sixteen, my parents announced they were splitting up. They told my three siblings and me at the same time, everyone gathered on the couch in our living room in our Southern California tract home. Brand-new at the time of purchase, it had five bedrooms, two stories, a curved staircase, wainscoting, a swimming pool—the third on the right of a pink-stucco-house-lined cul-de-sac. The house was a dream come true for my parents, grandchildren of impoverished Jewish immigrants, and children of parents who worked long, hard hours to achieve a middle-class existence. It was a way to say we made it, we belong, without anyone else’s history or decor choices getting in the way. They couldn’t exactly afford it, but maybe, they believed, if they got in there they would have become the kind of people who could, the kind of people who belonged, as if simply living in the house would bestow upon them the kind of confidence, clarity, and control that would manifest in both the quality of their marriage and the size of their bank accounts. California is filled with people for whom this kind of magical thinking works—but this time it didn’t.

Neither my parents’ unhappiness nor their financial stresses could be relieved by the pristine granite countertops or custom woodwork. They had met so young and couldn’t shake off the idea of something, someone, else. Separation is courtship in reverse, and can be a long, complicated process of untangling assets, worlds, and feelings. My parents took around twelve years to let go, which included an initial separation, move to another house, five-year reunion, move to yet another house, second separation, heated divorce, moves to a variety of sad apartments, and then slow rebuilding of their lives outside the context of a thirty-plus-year relationship. I was the closest confidant to both of them throughout most of it, engaging in long phone calls, going to upscale department stores to browse sale racks and get a salad with my mom, and waking up early on Sunday mornings to hike with my dad.

Over a decade later, long after they both remarried and I got married and became a parent, I came across, mostly by chance, a pop psychology essay on “parentification.” I had heard the term in passing before, but it sounded too clinical and overly prescriptive to be applicable to my mostly stable emotional life, and so I didn’t think much about it. This time, however, there I was. There are two types of parentification. The first is instrumental, when a child is responsible for tasks like bill paying or food shopping that are generally done by adults. This was not me. The second is emotional, and it’s when children are expected to “gauge and respond to the emotional needs of the parent, serve as confidante and an unwavering source of support, and provide crisis intervention during times of psychological distress” as one paper put it. Check, yes, wow, check. Parentification is common during a divorce, when parents are in need of emotional support but can no longer turn to their longtime partners,and is most likely to happen to bright, sensitive, and empathetic kids. Parentification can turn one into a compulsive caregiver for life, always looking for ways to help others, even when nobody asks.

During the very long death of my parents’ marriage, I took to this role with a myopic ease. While my parents and siblings were always loving and supportive, I had played a leadership and nurturing role in my family from an early age. My parents will tell you that I wanted it, that I was a wise-beyond-my-years type of kid, one with a strong internal compass, precocious competency, and inborn empathy for others. I believe this is absolutely true, while also believing that there are other potential truths that could never flourish in my particular house, with our particular constellation of personalities and life stories, and that’s just how it goes. Their version of the story is indeed the one we lived and the one that led to me, following their separation, believing that their well-being and that of our family was mine to worry about.

The practical part of being parentified came easily to me. I’m a decent task manager and creative problem solver; organizing family trips or holiday dinners takes little effort for me. The psychological part had its benefits, too, as family intimacy has always been important to me, and so I found easy meaning and satisfaction in keeping mine close. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do,” wrote British poet Philip Larkin, arguably his most famous two lines of verse. True, and yet sometimes in that fucking up you gain a few powers too. Research shows that parentified children can grow into adults with strong interpersonal skills, having spent their formative years sharpening their ability to empathize, connect, and communicate. They’re also more likely to value and maintain deep family bonds and, at the same time, be more autonomous and self-reliant than their peers. Larkin, by the way, had a very close relationship with his mom. The two of them wrote to each other twice a week for thirty years discussing everything from relationships and books to the mundane details of their daily lives.

Underneath all this good from my years as my parents’ best friend, good that makes me feel like me and good that I still celebrate, sat a more troubled layer of my emotional life that, before kids, rarely saw the light. Here was the belief, not always conscious, that the internal and external emotional problems of those around me were mine to fix. I’ve never pursued an outwardly perfect life, but I did believe that something should be done about every problem for everyone, and while one may not succeed, one can at least try.

Except people, and life, can’t always be fixed. Levi, my six year-old tick-tocks between fragility and fire at a dizzying clip when he’s upset. Augie, my 11 year-old retreats within, often behind the scrim of a book, his features drained of vitality. Over the years, I’ve learned what works to ease the spell of sadness or anger. With Levi, it’s a gentle presence, patience, and an occasional aggressive hug. With Augie, directness and humor. But fixing them or their problem? Making it all better? I no longer feel as though that is entirely up to me. Sometimes when I can’t help myself, sometimes when I try anyway, Augie will say to me, “I think it just sucks, Mom.”

He’s right, of course. Life, other people, even oneself, can surprise us for the worst, and when that happens it’s possible to both show up and just let it be. This seems like the kind of lesson that should have come from my more equal relationships with people who didn’t depend on me for food, shelter, socialization, and love. The ones who would be fine enough without me. Yet I never found myself there with my adult family, husband, or friends. It wasn’t until I had kids and experienced the deep up-closeness one gets of another person, another life, through caregiving that I found my way to this truth. To care well for my sons, I had to get to know them better than I’ve ever known anyone else. Viewing the world through their eyes, those glorious little walking ids, I saw how inevitable pain and disappointment are in the big, bad, imperfect world. I felt their suffering, their weaknesses, their vanities, and I came to understand how ridiculous it is to believe I could, or should, fix everything. I am able, finally, to see the ways my parents’ divorce and subsequent parentification of me negatively affected me, and, bit by bit, undo this damage.

There’s no neat end to this story. My ability to distinguish things we can control from things we can’t remains far from accurate. But, thanks to Augie and Levi, thanks to every day I juggle care, I’ve learned to relinquish, to depend more on others, and to allow the struggles of others to exist outside the context of me potentially fixing them. Sometimes. More often than before. Believing there is a fix for everything might just be my forever weakness, the stickiest of vanities, but now it is one I can see, one that I can accept is a little outside my control.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please share, subscribe, and comment. Let’s expand the conversation on parenting and caregiving together.