We're going to screw up our kids...and have fun doing it
Let me acknowledge from the outset that my wife and I are crazy. We come by it honestly and will pass it on as productively as possible.
Early in our marriage, we’d often joke about the idioms of our families of origin. ‘Your people,’ we’d joke. Only we were’t really joking. I thought her family was crazy and she thought mine was nuts. Turns out, we were both right. We’ve learned in time that each of our families has a unique combination of dealing with conflict, giving affirmation and expressing love. It’s not a matter of if they’re crazy, but a question of what their particular flavor of crazy is. Different isn’t crazy. It’s different. This perspective allows us to borrow one side’s conflict resolution process and another’s affirmation routines as we build our own family traditions.
Look, we are fully aware that our kids are going to have issues. They are broken people being raised by broken people in a broken world. Inevitability is not the same as futility. Yet brokenness is not the goal. Neither is ’not brokenness.’ I would even suggest ’normal’ is too low an aspiration. We’re shooting for ‘fully alive'.
We do have a few guiding principles as we navigate toward ’fully alive':
We’re going to do pass on crazy honestly (and unintentionally). We’re trying to do right by the kids. Our mistakes are honest ones.
We’re trying to do as little damage as we can. Therapy isn’t cheap.
We’re trying to contain our crazy as much as we can. The world doesn’t need more crazy.
We’re going to have some fun in the process.
My wife and I are both in the helping industry. We wake up everyday looking to heal neuroses in the world. There’s plenty of it to go around. We start by firstly dealing with our own and that in our home. But it takes time. What’s more, there are real issues in the world — real physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological brokenness. So as much as I want to implore my wife that sweet potato casserole without pecans is simply orange mashed potatoes, we’ve gained some perspective through the years. Real crazy deserves real attention with real support and real clinicians. The rest is fun.