Whose Fault is It?

Having been raised on a steady diet of Freudian analysis at the dinner table I know that it is close to impossible that I will ever rid myself of it's influence. I don't think I even know the extent to which Freud's influence on modern psychology has pervaded my life. Every therapist I was sent to (your child is acting weird? therapy of course) used his approach melded with whatever latest fad in therapy was popular at that time. Quite a few members of my family considered themselves aficionados and my childhood was infused with the language of psychoanalysis.
Some of my best memories are of the car rides home after a social gathering. Me in the back, intently listening, my parents in the front, deeply scouring the psyches of our friends and family. I cherished these times as a child because of the deep sense of belonging it gave me. My parents, and hence I, really understood the motivations and unconscious longings of others. We knew them better, in fact, than they knew themselves.
The idea, no, belief, confidently held, that I could - merely through the use of my superior knowledge of the predictable patterns of the mind - break anyone down into his base elements made me feel, I am ashamed to say, superior. Superior and safe. Safe in the belief that to know others was to know myself - in a sort of detached, painless way.
My mother has been accused over the years of being critical of others. When confronted with this accusation I remember her saying that what was being called critical was in fact a yearning to deeper understand the human condition. It was, I gleaned, good to talk about others and I thought at the time, I could feel confident that my parent's analysis of their motivations, desires, neurosis, etc was in fact, true.
Fast forward some 30 years to today. I have four children spanning 11 years. I have been living with my now husband for 17 years, 15 of them married. Right away, I trained him up good in my style of post-party analysis. No one was off-limits for my labels. Tom is passive aggressive, Lucy is clearly regressing, Bobby is undoubtedly a latent homosexual, Rose is asexual, Maggie is full of unresolved wounds. Just typing all this is embarrassing. This was all difficult for my husband who wasn't raised that way. But you know how marriage requires a certain amount of abandonment of one's values (even if those values might be really good ones, like not picking apart your brother's and his girlfriend's sex life).

The problem is, these labels are a whole lot harder to make stick when you want to apply them to your own children. Why? Because my children's story involves me. I am the fuel of their angst. I am the inflicter of their wounds. I am the content of their back story. The first thing that started to happen when I began to analyze my children was a release of blame for my parents supposed crimes. The other thing I realized was that it is easy to draw a map of one child's emotional brain but add another (especially two of the same gender) who is radically different in personality and your suppositions no longer click.

How can I possibly be to blame when I have children of all sorts, sizes, shapes, temperment, attitudes, learning styles, abilities and lack there of. One child might have been asked one thousand times to use his napkin, his utensils, to close his mouth when he chews, to not interrupt, all to no avail, while another seems to have attended classes in social graces inutero. How many times have I judged other parents for not disciplining their child the way I did - if only they would, theirs would be as sweet, kind and mature as my little angel. And then I had my second child. Turns out I wasn't doing any disciplining, I was simply lucky. My daughter, my first born, was just an easy going, seemingly wise and naturally kind kid. My second, well, he spit on people, peed in public, refused to eat anything but 5 foods and hit, scratched and bit his way through first, our block, then preschool and all the way through third grade until, miraculously (I once tried to take credit for this but no, I cannot) he "grew out of it" (those are his words). All the consequences, punishments and spankings I dished out seemed to only make his behavior worse - at least they made me feel horribly out of control and generally evil.

I do not claim to be at peace now that I have finally grown into a more modest person, a humbler parent. I still scour my memory of possible causes and canvas others with more experience for an explanation of the mystery that is my youngest and his utterly challenging personality. But it does comfort me to know, that in the words of my second son Edan, he will eventually grown out of it.