The Battle of Peer Dependency: Author's Anxiety - Part Three

We've finally settled into a pattern of winter weather here in Michigan.  After months of unseasonably warm weather, we've got frozen ground and accumulating snow.   I'm not a huge fan of winter - but I do prefer having all four seasons rather than waiting around hoping that the winter isn't so bad when it finally comes.

I met a guy at my job who recently moved from Florida.  I cautiously asked him how he was doing with the weather change.  Turns out he likes winter weather and is not a fan of the huge heat of a Florida summer.  His only frustration is that Michiganders seem much less friendly than Floridians.  I told him to give us a few months; the complete lack of sunlight plunges most of the people in West Michigan into at least mild seasonal affective disorder.  Essentially, we all become zombies - but we perk up once the sun comes back.   He laughed pretty hard and promised to reassess come summer time.

In my review of Marina Sears book "The Battle of Peer Dependency", I've discussed two stories presented in the book that show Mrs. Sears struggling with anxiety prior to her husband Jeff's untimely death in a car accident.   The last anecdote of anxiety touches on the difficulties that parenting brings with (or without) anxiety.

Parenting is hard.  My husband and I are always referring to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip where 7-year-old Calvin's parents are sitting up in bed after they found that their house was robbed while they were on vacation.  The overall theme is that no one would have been in such a hurry to grow up as a kid if they knew that adulthood doesn't come with a book of easy answers to follow. 

For me, parenting feels like I'm taking random guesses about what the best course of action is when I don't have all the facts.   In my humble opinion, our current societal assumption that how kids turn out as adults is directly tied to every tiny decision made by their parents during childhood is harmful crap.  Call me cynical - but I've seen enough kids who turned out well in spite of horrible parents and a few who turned out badly in spite of really dedicated parents that I've become an advocate of "good-enough" parenting.  Good-enough parenting, in my definition, is parents who do what they need to keep their kids clothed, fed, sheltered, loved, medically cared for and kept away from abusive persons.  That's pretty much the basics.  Don't get me wrong - encouraging your child's interests, exposing them to cultural stuff and giving them age-appropriate toys is nice if you can pull it off - but those things aren't going to matter much if the kid is in an abusive home or has an untreated medical condition, right?

With that definition in mind, see how severely Mrs. Sears overreacts to a perceived slight by someone who knows her oldest son:

God used the wisdom of one of Chris's nursery workers to teach me a valuable lesson. Chris was a happy, contented child, who required very little attention. He played for hours by himself, thus enabling me to accomplish a great deal during the day. One afternoon the church nursery worker called and told me that Christopher was a very loving child. Whenever he was in the church nursery, he would crawl up into her lap, give her hugs, and stay there the whole time. She implied that because he was so starved for attention, maybe I didn't love him. I cried the rest of the day, until Jeff arrived home from work. That evening I shared with him the telephone conversation and asked him if he thought I didn't love Christopher. The tears began to flow all over again. My heart was broken as the thought haunted me: what kind of person doesn't love his or her own child. (pgs. 98-99)

Reading for facts and actions gives a story where a nursery worker decides to call the mom of one of the kids to tell her what a nice kid she has.  The nursery worker loves having a kid who cuddles with her during the day.   I assume the nursery worker hung up the phone and felt good about complimenting a nice mom about her sweetie-pie of a boy.   Instead, a conversation that sound pretty innocuous sends Marina into a multiple hour tailspin.....

From that, Marina assumes that 1) her kid is being affectionate with a nursery worker because he's getting no attention elsewhere and 2) all of this is caused by Marina's lack of love for her son.

Marina's assumptions are not a given - and not well-based in child psychology at all.  Well-adjusted young children will seek comfort in new situations through physical contact with safe adults like the nursery worker.   On the flip side, some kids are fairly independent at young ages and don't want an adult in their face all the time especially in a situation where the kid feels confident and the adult figure is a safe person.  Kids need space to be independent - and caregivers need time to do the scads of chores that come with small children so the system works out.  I say that as the mother of an introverted kiddo.  Spawn certainly likes playing with me during the day - but there are also times where he's clear that he wants to play by himself and I should make myself scarce for a bit.  If I stick around too long, he'll tell me "Bye-bye.  Mama clean!".

Obviously missing from the story: the point where her husband responds to her question of if Jeff thinks Marina loves Chris or not.   Based on the few short stories we have about Jeff prior to his death, he sounds like a nice, stable, well-grounded guy.   I cannot imagine he responded with anything except "Marina, you love Chris - and Chris loves you" but that would undermine the idea that Marina's reaction was based more on her anxiety than reality.

No, instead we get a standard CP/QF trope where Marina realizes that she's done wrong by her kid and starts loving on him all the time at home.   Chris seems to like the attention - so that's nice - but there's not a part where the nursery worker calls again to tell Marina that Chris is ignoring her now...or a part where Jeff congratulates Marina on learning to love her child....so we don't have any independent verification that any of Marina's assumptions were based in reality instead of anxiety - and that's sad.

This is the end of the pre-Jeff's death anxiety motif.  The next post is going to be from Chapter Three because the first paragraph of Chapter Three does a better job of pointing out the real goals for battling peer dependency.   Once we've covered that, the rest of the book makes a dark, tragic sort of sense.