By: Nancy Sungyun

Someone close to me once said, “we hurt the ones we love the most.”  Those were words iterated by my ex-husband to a very frustrated recipient, me.  Many moons had to pass before I finally got a chance to arrive at an understanding of my own.  Opportunity in the guise of pain forces me to see the truth of that statement.  It is not to excuse potentially hurtful behavior, but it is to become fully aware that I too have been participating in the behavior that I hate in others: the behaviors that caused me great pain.  Too many times.

I automatically rejected his words when my son accused me of being mean to him at times.  I waved it off.  I knew that he was just being dramatic, or just simply wrong.  I could not acknowledge what could never be true.  Of course not.  He was wrong.  I am not a mean person!

One morning recently, I woke up with a broken heart.  I woke recalling a scene from the day before and I was overcome by deep sadness I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I was standing by a kitchen table, busily putting together plates for the guests on their way soon, while Enzo, a large Rottweiler sat patiently waiting to see if he could earn any scraps .  I had not seen my son for months almost, and wanted this day to be special one for us.  I had wanted to reassure him of how important and special he is to me.

While I was busily cooking for other guests, my son offered Enzo a piece of beef, just the way we used to do with our own dog.  I quickly snapped: “Don’t feed him!  He’s on a diet and could have Diarrhea!!!”

It isn’t so much the words that I said to him that broke my heart. It is the tone in which I said it and how I may have made him feel, even if he was not clearly aware.

My son was right about me all along.  I had been mean to him at times.   Too many times.  I am at times mean to my loved one.  I love him more than anything in this world.  I have been hurting the ones that I love the most.  I have been hurting my son (and others that I love as well, I am sure of this).  I have behaved in that hurtful way to my precious one too many times in the past.

I called my son and spoke to him about my misbehavior and he in his wonderful fashion simply thanked me for sharing my feelings with him and my acknowledgment of his grievances that I had made mistakes in the past.

If “knowing is half the battle,” then I may have just arrived at the half-way mark on the journey to not hurting my son.  I am not advocating for editing every criticism, nor am I saying that criticisms themselves are to be all together banned from our communications.  But a regular practice of pausing to check on the intention behind one’s reactions (verbal and other wise) might be invaluable to becoming a genuinely loving parent and a genuinely loving human being.

I am not an expert in this…. But I have been wondering about this point for a little while now…

It seems apparent to me that children, our offspring, learn too well the negative habits that are ours… what is more interesting to me is that they learn behaviors that they sometimes hate from us.  I know this because not only has my son picked up and continued to practice my ex-husband’s destructive and less-than-profitable behaviors that he himself  hates, but also many of my own.

My mantra has been this: “do my best to behave in ways that I want my son to behave.” Of course I have by my own blind vision, or simple neglect and laziness, allowed my weaknesses to continue… I now see this in him.

As much as I regret and do not like seeing my own misbehaviors in him, but that makes sense to many degrees, since he likes me and feels connected to me.  There are behaviors of my ex-husband’s that he has hated all of his life, and now he is expressing them, whether he is aware or not…

One might assume that children would not copy behaviors that they abhor… but I am concluding that perhaps we human beings cannot help but learn behaviors if we are around them, even if we hate them…

I don’t really have a complete answer to this issue, except to suggest that we as parents do the best we can to nurture our own self growth and genuinely work on being our best human beings… and if we do that, our children might learn just that in itself, the self-growth, and be equipped with tools to work on their own human selves and be the best that they can be just as they have seen us, their parents, be the best of ourselves.

There is a wise and peaceful person I want to be, but sometimes I do feel violence rising in my blood. My blood sometimes does reach that boiling point where I can feel like I could punch someone. When I see a big person picking on someone too small to fight back, like a child, whether verbally or physically, I am occasionally guilty of wanting a good fight with them. I am a small woman, but still bigger than the child who is being dumped on.

The other day I was sitting at a fast food place having unhealthy-but-fun-to-eat-burgers with my son, when I heard a father arguing with a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and wasn’t even a third of the man’s height. I love a good verbal argument, especially when it utilizes and promotes the practicing and development of one’s mental faculties and everyone involved comes out of it a bit more intelligent or with a more complex views on things. A good debate is a fantastic opportunity to have your paradigms shifted in a positive direction. This argument was not a positive argument.

They were arguing about the existence of dollar burgers at another location that apparently did not exist at the location where we were eating. It appeared that the father was resentful at having to spend 15 cents more since at this particular restaurant the cheapest burger was $1.15. The boy kept saying that he didn’t see a dollar menu at the other place, and that’s why he came here. The word “argument” might be too generous a word to apply to this verbal interaction, since the man had most and loudest input, and when the man was done, he concluded this mostly one sided argument with one piece of verbal vomit.

“You are a dumb shit.”

What got to me more was what ended up happening to the boy as a result of my reaction. I was so shocked that I turned my head and looked at the boy. My reaction got the boy to look over at me, which would have been fine if I hadn’t seen him fill up with shame. He was embarrassed because he knew that I heard his dad.
I could tell how he felt and I wished to god that I could say, “no, no, it isn’t you, you should not be feeling embarrassed. You are not a dumb shit and your dad is the jerk; he is the dumb shit for calling his son that. No father or no mother should say such a thing. In fact, no adult should ever say such things to children ever!”

But I couldn’t and I didn’t.
I hated that man for that.

I believe education is the greatest equalizer; I believe education can take a child of poverty and elevate him or her to a financial standing that is far superior to his or her parents, where he or she came from, etc… but before any of that can happen, the child has to be able to have the self-confidence and self-value to study or to feel that his own self is worthwhile enough to invest his or her time in…

If it takes that, what can we expect from a child who has been put down and told that he is a dumb shit? A child like the boy that I saw at the restaurant has most likely been exposed to and been living under such derailment of his self-esteem and his right to self efficacy through out his entire life… what chance does that boy have to do well in school, to do well in life, or to feel sense of self, when he only knows about a world in which the people who are supposed to love and cherish him tell him that he is a “dumb shit”?
There really ought to be some sort of counseling program that parents-to-be are all required to go through before becoming parents, where the parents-to-be get an opportunity to work through their issues and gain helpful parenting skills that do more than warn them of all the pot holes of being parents, but empower them with real knowledge about children, how to parent in positive settings, etc… Parents seem to need to be told that children are naturally good.

When children behave badly, it is the adults around them helping to produce bad behaviors… Parents-to-be ought to be taught that it is never too late to bring about positive attributes from children, and to help them to become the loving and happy adults that we are all meant to become in the first place.