Parents should set example of healthy relationship
Ask Carolyn
Dear Carolyn: My husband and I have a 4-year-old. I come from a toxic family full of addiction. I’d love a relationship with some of them, but they come as a package deal. We haven’t spoken in four-plus years and I have no plans to change that.
I thought I was marrying into a “super healthy” family, but eventually, after years of therapy, I realized they are just healthier than mine, which isn’t much of a standard. That said, his dad is a great example of learning and growth, and his mom (divorced) is mostly manageably erratic. She also had/has addiction issues.
His brother drives me nuts. He has had enough therapy to learn words like “boundaries” and “self-care,” but not enough to learn what a boundary is. He has actively chosen not to be in our son’s life. After my husband had depression this summer, my brother-inlaw cut us out permanently, believing my husband just wasn’t making enough of an effort. That stung.
The point is that my poor son is getting very low on family members. All five biological uncles and aunts are estranged. He has four grandparents, two estranged. We have two cousins far away, and my two best friends, who are the most involved “aunties” you’ll ever meet. What is this teaching my son about family? That it is expendable? Not worthwhile? That there is no permanence, import, between parents, children, siblings?
We have already decided not to have more children because we don’t trust sibling relationships. I’m truly fearful he’ll get the idea that you estrange from a family member as easily as you throw away a napkin. – Low on Family
Low on Family: You do your best with the family you have, and you invest yourselves most in the people who treat you well. Because that’s what you want to teach your son, isn’t it? Not to force harmful attachments to people just because you share DNA or grew up in the same home?
There is a lot of room between that and discarding people like used paper products. You know that, so trust it. Trust that your son will see your efforts with your husband’s family. Trust that your heartbreak over your family, and the members you miss but lost to the “package deal,” will come through when you explain more to him as he’s ready for it.
Trust that you and your husband teach your son that family is the first place to look for connections that are meaningful, trustworthy, safe. Yes, your family was not those things for you – which is why you want your message to be that it’s the first place to look but not the only. You and your husband and his parents and those best-friend “aunties” can teach your son as much about maintaining a loving network of support as he will ever need to know.
I understand this may feel acutely difficult. Also trust, though, that it’s just one of the many impossibly complicated things we somehow manage, and always imperfectly, to teach kids.
The world we’re sending them into is not only as big and strange as it has always been, but is also in the grip of technologies with implications even their creators can’t fathom, not to mention adults who can’t even agree there’s such a thing as objective reality.
So what your complicated family teaches your son is that family is complicated, like every darn thing else. Even love. But you can keep some things simple: Be there for him, always, the best you can. That’s his model for every loving connection he makes.