Healing From Your Parents Mistakes
Growing up as a child people would always express to me how privileged I was to have the parents that I had. Till this day, I must agree that I am truly blessed with the parents God gave me, especially at the age they had me. My mom was sixteen when she birthed me and my father turned seventeen not even a week after that. When I think about it, they were two kids themselves trying to raise me and I must say I believe they did a great job. But now that I am a parent and an adult I realized that before I could become the parent I wanted to become, I had to heal from the things my parents did and did not do.
If you ask my mother, she’ll tell you herself that she wasn’t very affectionate to either my sister and I. We know she loves us but she never hugged or kissed us to show us that. It was more of a verbal I love you’s and that was it. Dating, I realized that not only did I not know how to show affection, I did not know how to receive it either. Lets just say that my love language is not physical touch. It would make me extremely uncomfortable for someone to hug me, and don’t you even dare go as far to kiss me because I would mentally vomit. I was always cool with just being told how they feel about me and let it be just that. To many, physical touch is also not your love language for one reason or another and I'm sure you’ve noticed some sort of strain it puts on your platonic and or romantic relationships.
After I became a parent, I noticed for the first few weeks that it was hard for me to coddle my baby. I didn't want to kiss him or hold him too much. It wasn’t until I sat in the dark and listened to him cry to be held that I had to tell myself “Demia, how else is this baby bond with you or how will he know that you love him?” he wasn’t verbal, so me telling him that I loved him would be something he would comprehend, evidently. I had to take the habits that i had learned from my mother and relearn new ones that I want my son to express with not just me but with others as he grows up. It was one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve had to do but I am more than happy that i did because now that I’ve adopted healthier affection habits, it's easier for me to practice them with others. My mother recently apologized for not showing us affection as children and I’ll appreciate that more than she will ever know.
When dating a guy with kids, I try my best to stay out of his parenting but it’s some things that I feel I need to voice my opinion on. If he has a daughter, I always remind him that she should come first before anyone else. Make her your valentine, take her on dates, make sure you check in on her every single day, do not allow your adult life to corrupt the relationship with your daughter. If he has a son, it's a must that he laces him with the game properly. Do not allow him to cuss at his mother, make him take the trash out, don’t call him a punk because he’s feeling his emotions, show him to treat a lady. Once before, someone told me that I had daddy issues- I had to laugh it off. No, I do not believe I have daddy issues, because even the blind can see I am a daddy’s girl. I also had to reflect on the statement that was made if I was projecting the standards I had of my dad onto another dad.
As a preteen and teenager, my father and I had a rocky relationship. Mostly because of me, now that I am an adult I can admit my wrong doings. He and my mom would argue and that would result in us not talking for months at a time. I think the longest we went without talking was a whole year. The inconsistency of our relationship has, reflected in my dating life. I allowed men to walk in and out of my life whenever and for a while I was okay with it. I grew tired of inconsistency as I matured because it added no substance to my life. It made me insecure, questioning why they continued to leave and the real answer was, me. I was giving them the green light because my dad had done it so much to me that I believed that it was natural and normal for them to do it. In all actuality, the reasoning were two completely different reasons, for some reason I still saw no wrong in it. Once I grew out of the same boys disappearing and reappearing once I was finally over them, I had to dig to see where my comfort came from, that's when I had to grasp and understand that my dad had set the tone unknowingly.
One thing parents don’t understand is even though they may do nine out of ten things right, that one thing that may really hurt us will stick with us forever. Many people go through life making the same mistakes that their parents made and they defend their actions with “I was shown this way” or other people will defend them and say “they don’t know any better” and the truth is, we do. We just have to be willing to understand that the mistakes of our parents do not have to continue. You have to forgive what your parents did because if your parents were as young as mine, they were growing with you so it wasn’t intentional. Heal so your children do not have to repeat the same healing process.
