No matter if the child is 5, 25, or 40 years old, if you are a mother, your task remains the same: you contain feelings, soothe fears, and provide stability. No one else can do this. Without it, it’s hard for a person to live. When a child doesn’t receive support from you, they build it themselves, and since no one has taught them how to build it correctly, their strategies are often maladaptive: physical illnesses, neuroses, and troubles in life.
What does this have to do with anything, you might ask? In a literal sense, everything. When a person has received support from their parents, they might be described as “nothing gets to them,” or “they brushed themselves off and moved on,” or “they were born in a shirt,” etc. On the other hand, whining, illness, poor well-being, and constant troubles are not fate but a cry for help, a search for balance.
At any age, there are moments when someone needs to provide external support. Even if you have a thousand sources of internal support, sometimes you need a thousand and one, something new. Ideally, parents provide that support. When parents are absent or unable to provide support because they themselves lack it, friends, spouses, or therapists step in temporarily to fill that parental role. In marriage, it’s good if partners take turns doing this: “I’ll support you now because I have the energy, and later you can support me when you have the resources.” It must be done in turns; otherwise, the constantly supporting partner risks becoming overly enmeshed in the parental role. This leads to problems in intimacy (how can you sleep with someone who is like a “parent”? you don’t sleep with parents), resentments and claims arise (“the parent should give support, why aren’t you?”), and perceptions of reality get distorted (I am small and helpless, and you are powerful and big).
If you are a mother, ensure you maintain a free internal space where your child can come and share their feelings. You should not be frightened by their feelings, belittle them out of fear (“Is it really worth crying over something so trivial?”), try to “turn off” their pain (“Why are you being so melodramatic? You’re grown already!”), retreat by hiding in busyness or illness (“Mommy is feeling bad/ Mom is busy, later”), or attack preemptively by unloading your own feelings onto the child.
The last point is especially important. Sometimes mothers, intending to support their child, confuse “giving” and “taking,” which leads to role confusion. This often happens when a mother grew up without emotional parental support. Now she shares her feelings with the child “so that our relationship is trusting, unlike mine with my mother.” Some mothers pride themselves on being “friends” with their children and sharing everything with them. I then ask, who is the mother in this scenario? If the child is aware of your emotional and other issues, do they have the resources to help you? And can they cope with the helplessness they feel witnessing your struggles and being unable to stop them? And should they have to? Of course, a mother might say, the child doesn’t have to do anything! But the younger the child is, the more egocentric they tend to be (which is normal for a child), and they perceive everything happening around them as being due to them or for them. Thus, they also see your problems as connected to themselves.
So, should you completely refrain from discussing your feelings?
You should talk, but only about those feelings that are directly related to the events that you and your child are experiencing together. “Are you scared of the firecracker? I was scared too, but I’m okay now. Come here, I’ll hug you.” “I can’t draw with you right now because I’m upset and want to sit and calm down. We’ll draw later.” “We won’t go to the playground after kindergarten today. I’m really tired from work and want to rest a bit. After dinner, we can read or play together.” Avoid saying things like, “Grandma only thinks about herself; she doesn’t care about her grandchildren!” or “Your dad doesn’t want to listen to me,” or “If I don’t finish this project by Friday, it will be a disaster.”
As a mother, you contain the child’s feelings, not the other way around. If you need to vent or want a shoulder to cry on, call your mother or a friend. Vent to your husband, wife, sister, godmother, or favorite uncle. Or see a psychologist, go to church, or hit the gym. They are adults, larger than you or equal to you, and they can accommodate your feelings. Your child is small; there’s no room for your feelings in their world. But there is room for theirs in yours. Please don’t confuse this.
And take care of yourself. It is your responsibility if you have children.