Toward Commitment

by Diane Rehm

DIANE: We've been talking about our own anger. I'm wondering to what extent we've passed our attitudes on to our own children. We raised two wonderful kids, but at times they saw the anger, the hostility, the hatred being expressed. They heard the slammed doors. They heard the long silences. So they in turn will have to deal with their internal models of anger, just as you and I did.

  JOHN: Do you think they're in a better position to deal with anger than we were?

  DIANE: In my own case, my parents were gone, and I didn't have an opportunity to engage with them as an adult, and perhaps have a chance to move on from their model. David and Jennie have both had that chance. In your case, your father died when he was just seventy-two. Your mother died in 1990, and her hold on you, as far as anger was concerned, continued until she died.

  JOHN: Do you think I was better able to deal with anger after her death?

  DIANE: I definitely feel that her death freed you in some ways to allow yourself to express your own anger. She was one who could never, ever express anger. She would act it out in strange ways. But once she was gone, without your even realizing it, you found a new freedom within yourself to express your anger toward me—which was constructive. Finally.

  JOHN: You've drawn a good distinction between, on the one hand, how I react to another person's anger—yours, in many cases—but also how I would express my own anger. I've been talking for the most part about my reactions to the expression of anger by others. I've found it a little easier to express my own anger, although its negative implications, its threatening aspects, are still there. But I think I've made some progress in viewing both sides of anger.

  DIANE: And I think that's one of the most important and positive elements of a long-term relationship. We do learn, we do grow, we do change, because we're living so intimately with someone else. If I were living alone, I wouldn't have to absorb or reflect someone else's anger. I've heard people in group therapy say to me, “Your anger scares me.” And I would hear your voice in that. Even though you had never actually used those words, I would understand what was happening to you through them. And so I think I've become able to express my anger in quieter, more constructive ways. At the office there used to be times when I'd really blow my lid! I rarely do that now, and I don't think I do that with you, either.

  JOHN: Well, of course, now we're touching upon a really important point, which is how, in the maturing process, we learn to deal with greater skill with so many of the emotions that beset normal human beings, anger certainly being one. For me, anger has been a significant test of my own maturation. And the distance I've come, however great or small, in dealing with anger is certainly part of the growth that I've experienced.

  DIANE: I feel the same way about myself.

  Family

  John

  In recent years, I have come to realize that, as a single child, I grew up without a sense of family. This may seem odd, since the apparent signs of a family were present: after all, I lived together with my father and mother, each of whom unquestionably loved me, albeit in different ways. In turn, my father and mother assumed the roles of spouse and parent. As a threesome, we celebrated such familial events as Christmas and birthdays. Together we spent time at the beach on Long Island and frequented authentic Chinese restaurants in lower Manhattan.

  What, then, was missing? I would say a devotion to one trilateral relationship, as opposed to a series of bilateral relationships. The absence of such a devotion sprang from the estrangement between my father and mother. It remains a mystery to me why they married in the first place. Although they could be quite charming and outgoing with others, each was powerfully drawn to a solitary life. As a result, I recall very few instances when, by a word or gesture, they communicated their love for each other. I think a kind of love was there, but it was rarely manifested.

  As I grew up, therefore, I had two separate links—one with my father and one with my mother. But the triangle was rarely if ever closed, because my father and mother never established the link between themselves. Indeed, their relationship—such as it was—was grounded primarily in their attachment to me. This was the one powerful interest they had in common. But this placed upon me—or caused me to assume—the responsibility of keeping the threesome together. This is a burden that should not be placed upon any child.

  Accordingly, without a parental model to draw upon, I had to create my own sense of family. At the time, I couldn't have expressed this thought so clearly, but as our son, David, arrived, and then our daughter, Jennifer, I haltingly began to understand the dynamic interrelationships among four human beings who are in the process of living together. Such interrelationships are made all the more complex because over our—at times, strenuous— resistance, they are constantly evolving. I sensed that Diane, for her part, brought a strong sense of family, both immediate and extended, to our marriage. I learned from her, in particular, the great value of having the four of us celebrate the events of the calendar year, including the Christian holidays, together.

  Diane

  Having been raised within a family I didn't understand and could never trust, I created within myself an image of the kind of family I wanted. The family of my dreams consisted of my adoring husband as a loving and caring father, myself as a warm, protective, and unselfish mother, with two beautiful and well-behaved children. Where did that dream come from? How can I know? Magazines, movies, radio, and, later, television programs and ads. Somehow, I believed that this fantasy could be my reality if I worked hard enough to achieve it. It was absolutely contrary to what I had experienced in my family of origin, where I felt neither safe nor loved, and where, as a child, I believed I was the bane of my mother's existence.

  Perhaps many of us assume that by leaving our family of origin with a mate, we can make up for what was lost—or never found—in our own childhood. I believed that the love John and I shared in those exciting days of courtship and early months of marriage would help us create the “ideal” family relationship, where all was understood, where loving-kindness was always present, where arguments never occurred, either between the two of us or between us and our children. And I always assumed that if there did happen to be disagreements between one of us and a child, the other parent would surely step in to reinforce the position of his or her partner. Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine one parent disagreeing with the other over the disciplining of a child. All I had ever seen or known was my father supporting my mother in her strict attitudes, insisting that I eat certain foods (whether I liked them or not), present myself in certain ways (always neat and clean, without wrinkles in my dresses, with hair combed and braided), and strictly obey the rules my mother set down.

  Imagine, then, how stunned I was when, after I had lovingly sewn and smocked dresses by hand for Jennie as a toddler, she announced at age four that she did not want to wear dresses anymore (the word “tomboy” fits well here). Not even to church! I was aghast, and argued my position loudly with her. To my utter frustration, John took her side, one of many occasions where he supported the children rather than express his support of me. He argued that if she felt more comfortable in corduroy pants, that's what she should be allowed to wear. Of course, at the same time I took his statements as a further reminder of the fact that he didn't care about church and would just as soon the children not go at all. Arguments about clothing quickly turned into larger issues, my sense of “appropriateness” versus his. I felt like the outcast, with two children and one adult lining up on the other side, and I was furious.

  The same tensions arose when I'd serve scrambled eggs for breakfast. Jennie hated scrambled eggs, and I insisted she eat scrambled eggs. Why? Most likely because I had been forced to eat a boiled egg each morning and had internalized the requirement. The awful irony was that I had hated those boiled eggs so much I had somehow managed to camouflage an egg cup to make it look as if I had eaten the egg. I would then take the egg and get rid of the uneaten evidence in the woods behind my family's house. No one
had supported me in my hatred of those eggs, so how was it that our children could find support from John to prevent their having to eat foods they didn't like?

  I tell that story because it strikes me as a vivid example of how each of us believes we are acting as an independent being, free of the impositions placed upon us by our parents. Unless we work at it, investigate it, and struggle with it, we will likely never be free. Maggie Scarf eloquently makes this point in her remarkable book Intimate Partners, saying that we can “see the ways in which aspects of [our] intimate world have been picked up from the past generation and are being reenacted and repeated in the present one.” That is, of course, unless we become consciously aware that we are assuming those roles for ourselves. But back at that early point in our marriage, it never occurred to me that this was what I was doing. I was behaving in a way that was familiar to me, however distasteful my own childhood experience had been. I was acting out the role of my parents, insisting that food be consumed for its nutritional value, taste and preference be damned.

  When John stepped in to say that surely there must be alternatives to scrambled eggs to produce a nutritious breakfast, I felt I was once again being cast as the family villain.

  So here we were, two people who had come from extraordinarily different backgrounds, with totally different parenting styles as our models, and acting out what we knew because of our own parents' behavior toward us as individual children. John felt he was absolutely correct in defending his children's rights to make their own decisions, even if defending them meant opposing me. That was what his family of origin allowed— even expected—him to do. I, on the other hand, believed children should adhere to my directions without question. I was the person in charge. John was barely there. How dare he come home and overturn rules I had laid down? How dare he assume the role of “good guy” as soon as he walked in the door? How dare he disagree with me, in calling into question the only style of parenting I knew? And how dare he, after all, not act as my father did, by agreeing with every action my mother took? It felt like total betrayal, and led us both, out of our mutual frustration, to engage in ugly screaming scenes.

  Dialogue on Family

  JOHN: In talking about family, I find myself surprised—surprised that we created a family as the kids were growing up, and, maybe more importantly, surprised that we have sustained the family even as David and Jennie have gone their separate ways with their own families.

  DIANE: Why are you surprised?

  JOHN: I think it goes back to the basic fact that I never had a conception of a truly organic family. I thought that one got married, had children, and the mere coexistence of parents and children ipso facto created a family. And I think you taught me … you know, we do learn things in marriage …

  DIANE: [laughter]

  JOHN: … I think you taught me that if a genuine family is to be created, with a genuine set of reciprocal relationships, it takes work, it takes thought, it takes a constant determination to keep this often fragile entity called a family together.

  DIANE: As I watch Jennie and her husband, Russell, deal with our grandson, Benjamin, I see a true partnership between them. I see Russell doing so much—bathing Benjamin, changing Benjamin, playing with him. I see the two of them in true partnership with that child as an infant. I missed your participation with the children when they were young. As they got older, you were out in the street playing soccer, baseball, with both of them. But when they were younger, you didn't seem to be an organic part of their lives.

  JOHN: I think that's true. Looking back, I can see that as a young man in his late twenties, early thirties, I was overwhelmed by all the demanding roles I was expected to play: successful lawyer, affectionate husband, caring father. In some ways, it was just too much. I didn't feel I could handle all of it. The route that was easiest for me was to work and work and work, and to give short shrift to the other aspects of our marriage.

  DIANE: Why do you think you became monomaniacal about your work?

  JOHN: Because it allowed me to succeed intellectually and earn the regard of civil servants whom I greatly admired. Then, too, at the time our culture celebrated the work ethic. My addiction to work was therefore within—not outside—the values of the day. I was doing what was expected of me. So I felt trapped between society's demand that I work more and your insistence that I work less.

  DIANE: Did those people at work in some sense provide you with a semblance of family?

  JOHN: Yes, I think that's right. But I do want to stress this key point for me: if you don't grow up with the conception of a true family, if you don't have that in mind—and I think you did—it's very difficult to enter into marriage and then creatively begin to put together an effective family. I think that was probably true of me until David and Jennie reached early adolescence. Then I could relate to them on a number of levels.

  DIANE: Well, from your own adolescence. You saw David loving baseball, loving soccer and football, Jennie doing the same things, and you really could relate to them on that athletic basis.

  JOHN: And I was also able to do so on the academic front, discussing various topics, showing a genuine interest in what they were learning, helping them from one course to another.

  DIANE: So you entered the family on a physical and intellectual basis, but not on an emotional basis when they were quite young. That's not to take away from the fact that I can still see you bouncing Jennie and David on your knee and reading nursery rhymes and other stories, and they adored you. There's no question but that they adored you.

  JOHN: But again, I want to go back to the idea of family as a complex set of numerous reciprocal relations. I really took quite a while—some years—to reach an understanding of how that works, and how it's to be maintained. I can think of times when you and Jennie weren't talking, for example, and I mediated between the two of you.

  DIANE: Comfortable role for you, to be mediator.

  JOHN: Absolutely, because that was the model my parents gave me. But I also began to get a sense of what is constantly required, day in, day out. I don't want to make this sound dreary, but it does take a lot of attention and work to sustain the family, once created. There are always centrifugal forces at work, and I'm impressed that, in recent years, I think the two of us have consciously worked at maintaining the family. I think we've succeeded to date, and I think we will succeed. Both our children feel themselves to be part of the larger family in a genuine sense.

  DIANE: I think we both had to work at that, too, recognizing that, as they grew up, our children weren't going to be perfect imitations of us. They weren't going to reflect every single one of our expectations or our beliefs. That has been interesting for me to watch—both the similarities and the differences. For us to acknowledge that we need to back off in some cases, to just let them develop in their own ways, as opposed to trying to impose our systems on them.

  JOHN: You've just anticipated a point I was about to make, which is that there is a constant tension. On the one hand, you want to maintain the contacts by phone and by writing, gifts and so forth, but at the same time you don't want to try to get them too close. You want to give them, and acknowledge, their right to lead their own lives. There's a lot of subtle give-and-take, to keep them within the larger family and at the same time not deny them the freedom they should have.

  DIANE: Do you think there was any training we might have had beforehand that would've enabled us to anticipate what these challenges were going to be? I cannot believe that you and I are the only two people in the world who've had these kinds of shifts and passages and difficulties. Just take adolescence. My dealing with David or Jennie through their adolescence challenged me in my adolescence. My adolescence had not yet been played out, and here I was reacting to their adolescence through my own, instead of through an adult vision. It was very frustrating, to them and to me.

  JOHN: You ask whether there might have been some training available. Isn't that one of the fundamental problems we're dealin
g with in each of these topics—the lack of preparation, the lack of anticipation, the stumbling from one point to another? Yes, I think we could have benefited from some kind of training or instruction. But I frankly don't know where we would have turned to get it, since we didn't get it from our parents. Isn't it one of the massive paradoxes of our culture that all these demands are placed upon us as husband, wife, father, mother, with no preparation? It's almost as though we're expected to stumble and stumble, and somehow in the process keep this fragile entity called a family together.

  DIANE: Of course, all I had in training for motherhood were memories of my own mother and Dr. Spock. That was the only book I turned to at the time, though there were other books available. Now there are volumes on every stage, from infancy through adolescence and into the early twenties.

  JOHN: Maybe there are too many such books today. The field is overcrowded with manuals of one kind or another. To get back to the fundamentals and use them as creatively as possible —that's the trick, it seems to me. And not spend all your time as a would-be parent reading tome after tome.

  DIANE: But the problem is that most of us come to parenthood without the maturity to be good parents. So you've got to have 0some assistance unless you've come from a perfect home, a perfect background, which I just don't believe exist.

  JOHN: I fully agree. You know, I think so far Jennie and Russell are doing a fine job in raising Benjamin, but in a way these early years are the easiest. We'll have to see what happens as Benjamin grows up and is beset by all the pressures of this world.

  DIANE: Of course, as far as Benjamin and David and Nancy's son, Alex, are concerned, you and I are now moving into the role of grandparents, which extends the family even further. It becomes yet another new family experience.

  JOHN: Yes, and that's why I have come to understand the need to establish and to maintain a family. I think that we try to achieve both largely by staying in touch with our children and now grandchildren. So it's very much an ongoing process.