Hypocrisy: Calling Myself Out

May 25, 2024

I am sitting in a family counseling appointment with my child who uses the pronoun “it”, holding my breath and dreading the expected onslaught of rage and resentment that often comes my way during these meetings. I am so done with therapy; I have been in personal counseling off and on for decades, I did two years of marriage counseling with my now ex-husband, and now I am also in couples counseling with my boyfriend of not even two years. I can’t help but think that the only problem is me. 

Self-blame and judgment have run the show in my head for as long as I can remember. If the problem is me, then it’s in my power to fix things.  This line of thinking left me open to a lot of emotional abuse during my marriage, and the aftermath was bad enough that I remained single for nine years after it was finally, mercifully, over.  

My child has had little to no contact with its Dad for years now, and I have been attempting to single parent my child through the emergence of various mental illnesses. Dad doesn’t know about the OCD, self harm, suicidal ideation, dissociative episodes, or Borderline Personality Disorder diagnoses that have been added to the pre-existing ADHD, anxiety, and giftedness.  

Ahhh giftedness, how I love/hate you. I cling to the fact that my child is beyond intelligent, thinking that fostering its education is the path out of the quagmire of mental health struggles. That’s what worked for me, after all. Kind of. I became somewhat addicted to the validation an A+ provided me while I was in university. After coasting along on 50s throughout most of high school, it was comforting to finally find my place in academia.  

Grade twelve was hell for my child. It did not complete high school due to some terrifying mental health episodes. I was so determined that it was going to graduate that I pushed way too hard and in my effort to help it feel a sense of achievement I did the opposite. In my effort to show it that education was still accessible and achievable, I have been “encouraging” (read: pressuring) it to take online classes or go to the local university to take high school completion courses concurrent with whatever it wants to study. The panic I feel at the thought of my brilliant child not graduating is constant and nauseating. I tell myself it is because the world is scary when you don’t have a profession and benefits – it’s a safety thing, but there’s a whisper in my body that has always been there for numerous reasons… I have failed my child.  

Back to family therapy. We are nearing the end of our year of support with the Emerging Adult Clinic. My child has been on a waitlist for an outpatient program specific to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) for nearly a year.  It’s almost June, the school year is winding down, and I am already feeling the panic of another impending academic year where my child will not be in school. It could take years for BPD treatment to have any positive effect and it has been waiting for a year for a spot in the program. 

Have I mentioned that I am a teacher? I HATED school until about second year university. The only thing I knew after high school was that I did NOT want to be a teacher, but volunteering in a special needs classroom to support an autistic child I nannied changed my mind. Elementary classrooms were no longer the hell I had experienced and I couldn’t get enough.  

I dropped out of grade ten due to health issues and went back in grade eleven. I dropped out of university twice. Always went back. I have no issues with circuitous pathways to education, except for when it comes to  my own child, apparently. As a teacher, I know that formal education isn’t for everyone,  especially highly creative, gifted types – of which my child is one. I continue to be flummoxed by the intensity of my insistence that it return to school ASAP, especially since school has been anything but a safe place for my child. I had high hopes that it would find itself in university and somehow that would fix all the mental health struggles, but the only message my child hears is BE NORMAL!

As the anticipated onslaught of rage toward me begins to unleash, I realize that my university safe place is not something I can pass on to my child like a safety blanket. I am terrified. I feel the gut punch that comes with the helpless feeling and the whisper in my head becomes a shriek… I HAVE FAILED MY CHILD! Then comes a gentle whisper… You think you’re helping, but you’re hurting the one you love most. I hear myself say “STOP”. We have fought about my expectations for education in this room for a year, and it ends today.  

I don’t know where these words come from,  because I have not rehearsed them or spent days overthinking the perfect phrasing, but I hear myself say “I’m over the school thing. I am not going to insist that you finish high school or do post secondary. Intelligent creative types often don’t finish high school and go on to be entrepreneurs and artists and have happy lives. I know this as a teacher but haven’t been able to accept it as your mom because university was my safe place. I won’t pressure you again to get back into school.”

Silence. My child says nothing, but looks me in the eye and the anger I have been seeing dissolves into huge tears. After a few minutes, the tears spill over and it says “Thank you, Mom.”

In my attempts to be encouraging, I have been reminding my child that it was unable to complete high school and making it feel like a loser. In my attempts to provide hope for the future, I have been taking away hope and making it feel invisible. I have been asking it to run a marathon when it can’t even get out of bed.  

One of the things I have been carrying from my marriage to the father of my child is shame that I couldn’t parent the ADHD out of it. “You’re supposed to be some great teacher but you can’t even handle your own child?!” or “If you would let me spank every time it is hyper it will learn. When it’s in jail it will be your fault for not letting me discipline it.” 

You can’t spank ADHD out of a child, just like you can’t encourage OCD, suicidal ideation, BPD, and depression out of an adult child. Both are traumatizing for the child and the message is “You’re wrong as a person. Be someone else.”

As a high school special education teacher I often coached parents to let go of their expectations and let their child lead the process of their transition to adulthood. I have reassured parents that just because the path their child takes may look different, that doesn’t mean it’s less or wrong. The hypocrisy I feel sends waves of shame through me, but it is quickly replaced by empathy for the parents of my former students and deep compassion for all children, including my own, who are walking different paths. I have a glimmer of hope that maybe one day I will be able to apply some of this compassion to myself. 

Calling out my fear and hypocrisy feels like a new beginning. A scary new beginning, because something inside of me rails hard against self-compassion, (see https://interrobangmehardbaby.blog/2024/02/03/in-defense-of-self-compassion/ ) but it has become evident to me that facing my own struggles and fears is where I need to focus my energy. Decades of therapy are useless if I continue to fight, rather than surrender to the work I need to do on myself. It’s time to start living by the ideals in which I claim to believe.