A child deserves to be adored, but a parent’s love can be too much of a good thing.
By Ivor Shapiro [as Evan Vanovic]
Published in Today’s Parent (July 1999)
On a night shortly before our son’s fourth birthday, we woke at around 2 a.m. to hear Paul screaming. We found him sitting up in bed, inconsolable at first. “Aiy, aiy, aiy,” he sobbed, for what felt like hours. As he slowly settled into a restless sleep in his mother’s arms, I sat on Paul’s bed and watched, needing to be near. We concluded that this was a “night terror,” and when it happened again a couple of days later, it was my turn to sing to Paul and rock him to sleep, and my wife’s to stand by helplessly. Eventually, Paul quieted, his head buried in my neck, his ear close to the source of my humming, the palm of his left hand glued to my chest. Now that the terrifying wails had ceased, I realized with some discomfort that I was enjoying having him fall asleep this way in my arms, the way he used to.
This was not the first time I’d understood that part of me clings to the baby in Paul, rather than welcoming his growing up. But the selfish perversity of the feeling, coming at a moment when I should have felt pure relief, took me aback.
It reminded me of another encounter with an unsettling side to my love. Nearly four years ago, there was a moment (too fleeting to describe) when I thought a stranger was lurking threateningly. The stranger proved quite benign (I was a first-time parent, after all) but what I cannot forget is how I felt. Clasping my tiny son in my two hands, I boiled with a mix of fear and fury, and it was the fury, searing my eyes from behind, that seemed to belong in an alien world. In that moment, I discovered that I was capable not just of dying for Paul – that would be easy – but of killing for him.
Thankfully, in the years between then and now, the killer within me has remained hidden, but I can’t say I’ve gained much sense of proportion about being a parent. I love the way Paul says “chicken” – who can explain that? Watching him sleep, I’ll get self-conscious before I get bored. When he whispers “I love you,” I miss a breath. When he flinches from antibiotic eyedrops, I want to offer an eye of my own to save him.
There’s no doubt in my mind that these feelings are primal – a gift of biology to the species’ young. I’ve felt a love this intense in the past, in romance, but romantic love mellows as it matures. My wife and I still love each other after 11 years together, perhaps more than ever, but after the first rapturous months, we grew capable of annoying each other as much as any other couple.
Paul, too, can make us crazy, but for mere minutes at a time. We think him uniquely beautiful and brilliant. We hate for him to feel disappointment. We worry together over our parenting: Are we doing right by him? The possibility that he might one day suffer injury or, God forbid, death, scalds our brains (even as I write this sentence, I rush to the period).
And every parent I know feels the same insane way. Every parent I know has yielded to irrational pride or protectiveness over a child’s achievements or challenges; has felt goosebumps just watching the child at play; has shrunk from the mere thought that something bad could happen. And the parents I know who have actually lost children – their pain passes all understanding.
Sometimes, the very heat of my love for Paul is enough to scare me. He slips off a playground climber and I blush with shame for not noticing it was wet. Back home, he devours a bowl of ice cream with such bright-eyed delight that my mouth hangs open as I watch. Later, he stands dominant over a pile of sofa cushions on the living-room floor and issues rapid-fire instructions for the erection of a fort, while I trot around at his bidding, the happiest of slaves.
Stepping back from the flame of what I feel for Paul, I wonder if I feel too much for his good. Perhaps I swamp him by saying “I love you” so often; perhaps I weaken him by my attentions, retarding his becoming his own person, someone apart from his parents.
And even as I ask these questions, I’m aware of another, less altruistic reason I’m reacting against the power of emotion. Perhaps, deep inside me, a self-protective fuse inside has flipped. For Paul, I would give up everything, and I would not hesitate. Of course I am afraid.
Wondering what other parents make of all this, I post a message on the Today’s Parent Web site, asking: Does your love sometimes scare you? Responses come fast and fiery. Lee “melts” when her daughter says the word “elephant.” Loree sometimes finds herself staring into the face of her baby and “smiling so completely that my head actually aches.” Muriel, whose daughter is 11 months, confesses: “When she sits with other kids – who usually are older than her – I want to tell the other kids: ‘Be nice to her.’ ” One mother hates cleaning up her son’s building blocks if it means dismantling one of his “inventions.” And another simply writes: “I now know what they mean when I hear [people say] `I would do anything for you.'”
The recurring theme in these e-mails is dread: what if…? Hailie, whose daughter is 17 months, writes: “It scares me some days to think that I could have these kinds of feelings for another human being. My sister lost her son… I don’t know how I could ever go on living.” And with dread comes love’s darkest side. Loree, closely echoing my own experience when Paul was a baby, writes: “It’s odd, but sometimes I just have to begin to think about someone harming my child and I feel a primal rage.”
Loree also says this: “I am proud of my strong feelings. I would be worried if I didn’t have them.” But can there be too much of this good thing? Can you love too much? Do I? The question won’t go away, so I start asking experts, searching libraries, and thinking. What I begin to realize is this: Yes, you can love too much, and yes, I do – but not quite in the way I imagined. The problem is not what I feel, but what I might do with the feelings.
Sure, I think of Paul as uniquely beautiful and brilliant – that’s natural. But to act on that irrational belief – by praising him indiscriminately, or by making him the centre of my existence – would be a mistake. I do not, after all, want him dealing with other children as if he’s in a class of his own. “A wise love,” says Hamilton, Ontario child psychiatrist Joanna Santa Barbara, “will include the kind of socialization that makes for happy and equitable relationships with others.” From toddlerhood on, she says, parents need “to help a child understand that time spent with one’s partner, time spent taking care of oneself, time spent with other people, can be important.”
And sure, I hate for Paul to feel pain or disappointment. That’s natural too, but it’s vital I get over it. Lee, on the Web-site forum, has a daughter of three, a son just turning two, and this wisdom: “Keep in mind that you are here not only to love them but to guide them as well.” And Santa Barbara says: “The good parent’s job is to let the child take risks, to let errors happen, and to be aware when the costs might be too great, rather than to protect a child from all risks.” (Easier said than done: In a parent’s eyes, every danger is magnified.)
As for worrying – wondering whether I’m doing right as a parent – that, once again, is natural. But to seek perfection is to gamble my own self-esteem on Paul’s unknown future, which is a long shot because inevitably, I will be disappointed sometimes. And Paul will inevitably sense it. In When Parents Love Too Much, a book that’s mainly about parents who remain too enmeshed with their adult children, psychotherapists Laurie Ashner and Mitch Meyerson write: “We don’t have to be perfect to raise our children well. It’s emotional common sense to strive instead to be a good-enough parent.”
Thinking about myself as the adult child of my parents, it strikes me that some of my own best qualities (according to my friends and colleagues) have their beginnings in the failings of my mom and dad. No question they adored me, but they both needed understanding and support from their children at least as much as they offered it. So, my sisters and I learned to listen well and wait our turn. And because my parents warred until their divorce in my teens, we kids learned to be peacemakers. I’m glad to have learned those skills. I wouldn’t wish my childhood on Paul, but it’s comforting to know that a moderate dose of parental error might actually be good for him. At the least, Paul needs to learn that disappointment in a relationship doesn’t have to mean devastation.
As years go by, he and I will rely less on each other than we do now. In fact, our relationship is already changing. The first time Paul strode into nursery school with a cheery “Bye, Dad” over his shoulder – instead of imploring me to “stay for just a few more minutes” before leaving – only some of me was happy to have reached this milestone.
But he will continue to grow up, of course, with or (mainly) without my help. Along the way, as Janet Morrison, a Toronto child psychotherapist and Today’s Parent columnist, warned me, he will develop goals for himself that may be very different from mine. Parents who fail to foster this kind of separation will be as immobilized by their children’s failures and challenges as are the children themselves, “because the parent is the child,” Morrison says. “And when your adolescent turns around and says, `What the bleep is this about? This isn’t for me, it’s for you,’ then you have to be able to see that there’s always an element of truth in that, because to some extent every parent has an agenda for their child.”
The separations ahead will be a little easier if – as with most parent-child ties – the feelings between Paul and me lighten up slowly as the years go by. One of my Web-site correspondents, Kelly, recalls a bond with her daughter in early childhood that was “so intense it’s almost scary.” But her little girl is 6 1/2 now, and things are not quite the same. “I don’t know how or why or when it happened,” she writes. “The family road has been bumpy for about two years now – that could be why. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my girl very much, of course. I would be crushed should she ever come to harm… but those great, intense feelings just seem lost forever.”
This hasn’t happened to me yet, and thus far, I have probably done Paul more good than harm by loving him so much. But I may find it harder to reform than I’d hope. I am middle-aged, and therefore dealing with the harsh revelation that my life is not as important as it once seemed. The other day, while writing a letter to a best friend, chewing over the modesty of my career, I caught myself describing Paul as “my one and only legacy.” What a terrible load to throw on a child’s shoulders – that he must make my life worthwhile!
Clearly, I must learn to manage my love better, and become more ready to detach. And how will I learn this? “Listen to your child, search your soul and pay attention to your feelings,” advises Janet Morrison. “There’s nothing wrong with love if it’s the child you’re loving, rather than your fantasy of who the child should be.” Just as parents of children with disabilities have to “mourn” their images of the perfect children they didn’t have, Morrison says, “to some extent we all have to give up our fantasy, because this isn’t a doll; this is a human being.”
Point taken. But I’m also not going to sweat my affection-management project too much, because I know it can only go so far. I’m not sure I can ever stop loving Paul more than life itself, and I’m not even sure I want to. As Joanna Santa Barbara puts it: “The profoundly intense love of a parent is built into us. That’s what keeps us doing what is a hard job under some circumstances. Thank goodness we do feel so strongly, because sometimes the strength of those feelings can be put to the test.”
When the testing comes for Paul and me, I won’t be able to rock him to sleep or hum his troubles away. But the bond we’re building now may cradle us both, and give us strength.