Every Mother is also a Daughter (radio interview)

As I’ve been raising my two little girls, it occurs to me more and more that I am potentially shaping future mothers. Each mom out there has also been a daughter and the impact of our families of origin is huge. It shapes how we view what is “normal” in our lives, in our parenting, and in our homes. It influences the kind of relationships our kids have with their grandparents. It can be source of confidence for us or a source of stress.

I enjoyed getting to share some thoughts about mothers as daughters and how we navigate those relationships during my radio interview this month. You can listen to the link here and I will also have some additional thoughts below. I’m happy to hear any of your thoughts about how your mom has impacted you or how you deal with the tricky relational issues between you, your parents, your spouse and your kids. (Fun fact– I mention boundaries. A lot. I really like good, healthy boundaries. As part of the radio interview Stan told me at one point not to mention boundaries because it was going to be addressed in the next question. That was the hardest 3 minutes of my life.)

Photo by Love Equals Photography

-When it comes to honoring our father and mother, I feel like my family has an extra level of responsibility. We also believe it’s important to honor the birthparents of our kids. Even if their choices aren’t ones we agree with and even if they’ve caused some level of harm to our kids, we still want to “honor” them. So what does that mean? We speak as positively as we can about them while still being truthful. We pray for them. We seek to understand them and see them as humans and not just mythical figures, which helps us to offer them grace. It is possible to honor someone and still need to have healthy boundaries. Honor doesn’t mean we have to obey them and it doesn’t require us to be dishonest about the realities of who they are and how their choices have impacted us.

-I appreciated the wisdom my mom gave me just before I got married about how to help facilitate a good relationship between my parents and my husband. She told me (I am paraphrasing since that conversation was over a decade ago), “If you and Brian have a conflict, it may not be good to talk to me about it. You are going to work it out and forgive him, but I’m going to remember it and it will make my relationship with him more complicated.” We are now at a point where I think my parents forget which of us was their original child and which married into the family so I don’t hold to that same rule anymore, but I think it really helped me to define healthy boundaries around my marriage. It also meant a lot to me to know my mom wanted those healthy boundaries too and never pushed for me to say negative things about my husband. Obviously, if there are major problems or issues of abuse, I think it’s important for spouses to seek wise counsel, but in the daily drama of married life, there’s a benefit to keeping your parents out of your business. If you choose to involve them, don’t be surprised if it makes conflict harder to resolve.

-Grandparent Envy is real. And we need to stop. It is very easy to hear about what some other grandparent is doing for their grandkids and wonder why that isn’t happening for you. Some grandparents provide daily childcare, some meet the kids for lunch at school once a week, some take the grandkids on trips, some grandparents pay for music lessons or summer camp or whatever. I think it’s really important for us to look at the strengths and struggles of our parents and let them express their needs and desires in this relationship, too. Not every grandparent is equipped to safely handle every grandchild. Grandparents don’t all have the same financial situations. Grandparents don’t have the same interests or energy level. We need to facilitate good relationships where we can and help our kids understand if their relationship with their grandparents looks different than their friends’. We’ve got to be respectful of our parents and their desires while also being honest if we have a need. We can’t be upset if our parents don’t invest in our kids in a certain way because we’ve never taken the risk to ask them.

-I heard a woman speak at a meeting of moms about navigating the tricky in-law relationship. She talked about the normal problems of dealing with somebody who has a different style of doing things (cooking, cleaning, parenting) than you and how to be gracious about that. She talked about how you’d like to someday be treated as a mother-in-law and handling your mother-in-law with that in mind. She talked about how you can be a help to your husband in keeping a connection with his family. Overall, I don’t think anything she said was wrong and I think it was the typical advice we get in Christian circles about lovingly handling in-laws, I just think it discounts the experience of people who come from toxic or abusive families. For many of us who grew up in loving homes, we can’t even imagine the kind of chaos and trauma some people have grown up in. In our years working with kids from crisis situations, I have seen some families where a healthy distance would have been a good and necessary thing. I have seen kids put in an unsafe position because a parent felt they had to do whatever a grandparent wanted. Some spouses are trying their best to get out of the cycle of abuse they were raised in and we need to be a help to them. If you have a spouse who expresses concern about his family, LISTEN TO HIM. There may be bigger issues our spouses have a hard time talking about especially because they love their parents. If your husband needs to draw some lines for his own health, we need to be respectful of that and not pushy about trying to create the happy family or perfect in-law relationship we dreamed about. The needs of our marriage and our kids need to come before our desire to just have things look good or our desire to keep our in-laws happy. Let those boundaries be a starting point for a conversation about what needs to happen before healing and reconciliation are possible.

-When it comes to having a good relationship with our children, we need to parent with the end goal in mind. I want my kids to value my opinion when I no longer have the control in their lives. I want them to WANT to call me, not have to be badgered into it. I want them to know how loved they are even if they make decisions I’m not pleased with. I want them to know they will always be safe with me. How I treat my 18 month-old daughter TODAY matters if I want that end goal. If I want to have a good relationship with her 20 years from now, I need to be respectful of her personhood, listen to her heart, help her be confident in her own value, teach and train her in ways that will help her be successful outside our home, and affirm how much I treasure her. Even if it was possible to do everything “right” I know she will always have the choice to reject that relationship, but I want to make it as easy as possible for her to choose to love me the way that I have chosen to love her.

Happy Mother’s Day, Ladies! May you all be blessed with a night of uninterrupted sleep and maybe several hours of not having to deal with anyone else’s bodily fluids! Dream big.