Parents. Gotta love them. How?

My dad and step mom are in town, and when we were out to dinner last night I let Anonybabe play in her food when we were done.

"I think she's done eating," my dad kept saying. "You're just playing with your food now, aren't you sugar?" Without saying so, they were obviously uncomfortable and wanted me to make her stop, but she's sixteen months old, she wasn't making an obscene mess, she was sitting happily and quietly, and I was more than willing to pick up the oyster crackers and sugar packets that were dropping around her chair when she was done.

So I just smiled and nodded while my dad gave a little speech about how children really appreciate boundaries, how it makes them feel safe and secure...he actually went a step beyond that and said no children feel safe without them. It sounds benign and well-meaning when he says it like that, but I know the history of heavy-handedness (spanking, yelling, shaming his kids into and out of things) that backs up that statement.

Flannery O'Connor wrote something I read years ago about how sometimes you honor your parents by doing the opposite of what they did. You honor them by learning from their mistakes. That made a big impression on me at the time. I was just out of college and was trying to sort out what to make of my parents and my upbringing. On the one hand, there were all the fucked up ways they treated me and the baggage it left me with; on the other hand I knew they did the best they could and that it was an extreme luxury to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they loved me. I was torn between resentment and love.

O'Connor's little blurb offered me a third way: take all of the anger and discontent from the ways they done me bad, and use it to build a better life, do things differently, and pass that along to my kids/friends/family. And do so in the name of my parents. If they taught me a million ways not to do something, they taught me a lot. I'm honestly grateful to them for that. It's a good way to reconcile my need to love them fiercely and my need to put all of the bullshit they threw (and throw) my way behind me.

I know I want to raise Anonybabe differently than I was raised, no matter what my father & mother's good intentions. They parented me a lot better than they were parented, and I plan on raising the bar for Anonybabe as well.