Turning your child into a weapon

Another excerpt from my book health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety.

It’s easy to make kids proxies. You repeat the same things over and over, let your own pain or disappointment color the remark, until it becomes an inherited truth like racism. There’s an ignorant glee in thinking your child is having that same moment of clarity about your spouse that you had, the revelation that explains what’s been bothering you all this time but you couldn’t quite articulate, that thing to which there were so many early clues but you didn’t have enough context then. Your child isn’t going to be duped like you were. You do it without knowing it, the way you hold a fork or fold your arms. Or you do it with full malice aforethought, eager for an opportunity for someone to share your pain or understand your disappointment. Not some friend in whom you confide over tea or a beer, who sympathizes but can’t commit to your daily struggle; but someone who is there every day, who is tied to both of you, through whom you can retaliate because your partner’s like an open wound to your child.

When a marriage is working, it’s easy to resist the temptation and side with your partner. But when things aren’t going well, when your partner’s suddenly less of what you’d dreamed of, out of sync with your evolution, then the temptation is narcotic, an unmonitored opportunity to break that promise of always giving your best and instead inflict on her something like the pain she causes you, let some poison trickle out through the proxy of your child and tear at her in return.

But there’s no inoculation for your child against being the conduit of your frustration, no way not to poison her first in the process.