I am thinking about children.
We tell them the Santa story and the Disney story.
We don't tell them the truth.
Maybe some people do.
I think I did.
I talked about the hell that is medicine and the stuff I saw. Unexpurgated, in front of my children. They are five years apart. When the Introverted Thinker is four, she questions me.
"Can I get a baby without having one?"
"You mean without getting pregnant?"
"Yes."
"Yes. People can adopt babies. But the babies are not related to them then usually."
"Good. I am going to adopt a baby."
I felt rather bad then. Clearly I'd talked about scary pregnancies and deliveries and shit too much in front of my little girl. Or well, maybe not. At any rate, she was planning to avoid pregnancy at age four.
The Extroverted Feeler got mad at me and my Ex at about the same age. "When I grow up, I am going to have six children and I will buy them anything they want!" Ok, we'd refused to buy some damn toy. We both laughed and said we'd quote him when he was a parent.
My kids listened to me talk about all sorts of social and medical horrors. My Ex would tell ANY joke in front of our kids. He dressed in drag and was flamboyant and wore pajamas and a bathrobe to our grocery store down the block.
After we divorced, one of the checkers said, well, people would ask about him. He made people nervous. We told them he would not hurt anyone.
He got hurt by it. He was offered a job doing real estate and then it was withdrawn. There was a rumor that he was a child abuser. I was livid. If he was a child abuser they should be reporting it, but they didn't. They were just making up fucking reasons not to hire him. I still hate that real estate agent and she is a dishonest bitch.
He went to work in real estate in the next town over. Which is under five miles. We were rather outcasts in this town of 9000, I was too different for the doctors and married to a weirdo who wore pink and told raw jokes playing golf. WTF?
We got divorced because he pushed. He was being meaner and meaner. I said to another doctor that I was behaving like an abused wife. In a blinding moment of horror I realized that I WAS an abused wife. He was mean to me in public where I would not bite back. I would argue when I got home, but he was so mean that I stopped inviting anyone to our house. Subtle abuse. We went into counseling, couples and I went into solo counseling. How the hell did I let myself become an abused wife?
I realized that it was not about me. It was about our children. At some level, my ex knew he was not good for them. He pushed me until I divorced him. People said, he will never work, he will not pay child support, he won't stay in touch with the kids.
All wrong. He is a RN now, worked through covid-19, worked when he HAD Covid-19 and 1/3 of the nursing home patients died. He paid the child support faithfully. He stayed in contact with the kids. The first year he called them five days a week. "He talks about GOLF." said my daughter. Yes, but he is keeping in contact in his own weird way. He almost never took the kids. One week in eastern Washington. He calls me: "They eat so MUCH." "Yeah, you aren't sending enough child support." "Hell, I can see that." He did not send extra. I did the parent heavy lifting.
A friend says that his children were not allowed to watch awful shows like the Simpsons. My kids watched them and American Dad and so forth. Raw? Yes. But now I wonder. Maybe the Simpsons was safer than the raw glimpse they had of adulthood through me. My mother dying, divorce, hospital horrors, my sister with cancer for seven years and dying when her daughter is not quite 14, their cousin's aunt dying of cancer, court battles about my sister and niece, my father dying and me crying daily for a year about the outdated will and the burden left of what to do about my niece. Also me nearly dying of pneumonia four times and the hospital refusing help and not believing me. The Simpsons may have been a relief.
My ex calls me this past summer. Our son and girlfriend manage to score the 42nd house they look at and our daughter buys a 3 year old five speed small Ford in the same week. "Hey," he says. "Our kids are adulting. What is with that?" "I dunno. They seem good at it." "Do you think they are successful because they are rebelling against their parents?" I laugh, "Probably. They probably thought, hell, I don't want to be like my parents." Our son is in computer science, working all though Covid-19 and our daughter, also a computer scientist, starting a teaching career in Denver, working with a math teacher to write and teach a brand new computer science course to 8th graders. Remotely until March 2021 and then they come back and are a massive mess.
Many adults try to protect their children from the horrors of adulthood. My kids listened to me rant about opioid overuse, alcoholism, women tweaking in labor, newborns transferred for drug addiction, people nearly bleeding out, dying.
Maybe we need to be emotionally honest with our children.
And ourselves.