Building Holiday Traditions Despite Problem Relatives
Gift or curse.
It’s all relative. (har, har!) All puniness aside, you may find yourself seeing family from a new perspective after you have kids. You may grow closer to some family members as you see them through new eyes and fresh challenges. Others may become the bane of your already chaotic life.
Leave your heart open to those you trust and let them help. “It takes a village” and when you let the village “in” you will build connections and relationships that will enrich your years with children.
But, and it’s a big BUT, don’t be afraid to protect your children from challenging relatives. Perhaps you have a parent or an in-law who believes in scaring children into good behavior. They tell frightening lies to your 2-year-old giving them nightmares. Don’t leave that person alone with your kids. Ever. No matter how much they push.
If they lie to your kids, then tell your children, “That’s not true. Grammie Tia likes to make things up.” Now they know not to trust everything Grammi says, and that they can trust you to help them when their world is confusing.
It’s your job to protect your children. Young kids have absolutely no power within a family structure. They are defenseless, and you must step up for them regardless of your relative’s feelings.
You can teach your children to be respectful of elders without condoning hurtful behavior by ignoring it. You wouldn’t hesitate to protect your babies from an angry stranger. Yet, sometimes we get conflicted when the bad behavior is coming from within our own family.
In particular, the fear of disrupting the established patterns of family relationships can leave us confused about how to handle situations that now include our children. Do you placate and protect the feelings of your relative out of a fear of disturbing family harmony? Perhaps you will become the target of their critical behavior if you challenge the status quo?
Well, you are the boss of your children’s lives. You are responsible for them and to them. Protect your kids. Be as diplomatic as you can, but don’t feel guilty. The grown-up is a grown-up…at least theoretically.
Some people are raised in very dysfunctional family environments. And that dysfunction can try to insert itself into the non-dysfunctional family life you are trying to build with your spouse and kids.
One key to managing your relationship with a difficult parent is learning to forgive them for not being the parent you’ve wanted. No parent is perfect. I’m sure our kids will remind us of that someday!
But some adults have parents who so badly failed them that the heartbreak lasts well into adulthood. It gets carried around within us, then when confronted with family events, it surfaces again in old family patterns of behavior and relationship.
On some unconscious level, we continue to want our parents to meet our childhood needs. Of course, they will never fulfill those needs. Letting go of this desire, forgiving your parent their imperfection, and truly accepting this loss is both hard and potentially liberating.
Once you let go of your old needs, you can see parents for who they really are now. All the good and bad becomes more clear. And that frees you up to manage your interactions and relationships in a way that is healthy for you and your family.
Let’s take Thanksgiving. Perhaps every year you find yourself skewered through the heart by a parent whose favoritism for one perfect sibling is nauseatingly obvious. If you’re still locked into the old family dynamics, you may go to Thanksgiving with the news of a new accomplishment to share, only to feel hurt when that parent trivializes it.
On the other hand, if you’ve really let go of wanting your parent to praise you like your sibling, then you can look at the invitation to Thanksgiving and ask yourself, “what would be good for me?”
You may decide not to go to your parent’s holiday meal. You may decide to start your own family traditions at home. Your parents may bring on the pressure, “We want to see our grandchildren!” Instead, you can make plans to visit for breakfast the day after or some interaction that feels more manageable.
You have the right to do this. You can find a way to meet your duty and obligations to aging parents, and still extract yourself, your family, and your little kids from people who can be toxic.
How you find a balance with a difficult family can take many forms. People are never cut and dry, good or bad. My husband’s parents were smart and lived with great integrity. But they were also capable of cruelty, insensitivity, favoritism, and selfishness. As they got older, their worst characteristics seemed to flourish.
I was impressed by how their adult children managed them. They stopped calling them “mom” and “dad.” Instead, they called them by their first names. It helped them see their parents as separate adults. This made it a bit easier to let go of the past.
Next, they banded together and discussed things on the phone. My husband was the “golden child” and capable of no wrong in his parent’s eyes. So, after making a plan with his siblings, he would take the lead and smooth the way as much as possible for a planned event. As the wife of the golden child, I basked in his glow.
So we would bring all the food to family gatherings. Thus, we headed off the requirement to eat the meat grandma had cooked into a rubbery mass and vegetables boiled into grey mush. In this way, my husband and his siblings cared for their aging parents while looking out for each other along the way.
If you have difficult parents, think about setting up some boundaries for you and your family. You can create your own non-dysfunctional family traditions, meet your obligations to your parents, and maintain a certain amount of safe reserve. A reserve that not only protects you, but also your very vulnerable children. Forgive your parents. They will never be all that you need them to be.
Once you let go, you can build something new and better for your own family.
Kathleen Cawley is a physician assistant and author. She is a regular guest columnist for the Auburn Journal where she writes on parenting and childhood. Her book, Navigating the Shock of Parenthood: Warty Truths and Modern Practicalities — from a mom with twins, is available in ebook on amazon. Paperback coming soon!
