I'm back from my diversion from the letters leading up to the wedding.
February 1953 - August 1957
Fulfilling his military obligations, Ronald and his new bride moved back to his home in Newington, Connecticut. Newington is a quaint suburb of Hartford. My father and mother are 23 years old, and have been married for a little over two months. Close by live his sister Alice, her husband Jack, and their new son Alan.
What was it like for Beverly to move from Texas to Connecticut and live with her mother-in-law? I don't know for sure. I can imagine from Ronald's previous letters that he was "torn between two lovers." Both women demanded attention. He also was trying to take care of his alcoholic father and keep him from taking the family into debt.
When I first read the letters, what struck me about my father was how much guilt he felt towards his mother. It was amazing to read how he continually put himself down. Almost every letter began with an apology. After I read these letters I was reminded of my own writing to my grandmother Hutchinson. Almost every letter I wrote, began with an apology for not writing more often. Where did that come from? Following is an interesting article about guilt:
Good Guilt/Bad Guilt
Maria Alba-Fisch, Ph.D.
A recent study by C. Zahn-Waxler, et. al. in the January, 1990 issue of Developmental Psychology suggests that the type of guilt children develop is influenced by their mother's emotional condition. Rather than think of guilt as a source of misery, maybe we ought to think in terms of good guilt and bad guilt.
The National Institute of Mental Health researchers studied 87 children ages 5-9, the years when feelings of guilt begin to mature. Of the 87 children, 35 had mothers who were well, and 52 had mothers who were depressed. The children were given ambiguous situations illustrated by photographs, told to make up their own stories about what was going on and interviewed specifically about blame.
When the children's responses were compared, the researchers noted differences between the children of well mothers and the children of depressed mothers. Children of well mothers generally expressed more guilt as they got older, expressed guilt directly and in association with empathy and responsible behavior towards others. This was understood as adaptive guilt.
Though the children of depressed mothers also showed an increase in guilt symptoms with age, the pattern was different. Five and six year old children of depressed mothers seemed to develop a premature and exaggerated sense of responsibility, laden with tension and distress. Their guilt was associated with empathy but the researchers speculated that this type of guilt could burden children, overinvolve them in parents' problems and overextend their sense of responsibility, thereby interfering with their own growth. At seven and nine, the children of depressed mothers seemed to suppress guilt but voiced it indirectly and defensively in the form of unrealistic fears. Their guilt was not associated with empathy and responsible action. In fact, the researchers were concerned that this defensive suppression of guilt may interfere with their empathic involvement with others, increasing their interpersonal distance and vulnerability to depression.
About Me
- David Michael
- Katy, Texas, United States
- Being a husband and a father is the greatest blessing in my life. I am also a Special Educator to students with an autism spectrum disorder.
4 comments:
Very intriguing.
I also noticed and was struck by the amount of guilt it seemed your birth father had. I related to some of his words.
Reading your father's words reminded me of how young and vulnerable we all really are (or at least were at some point).
Reading the article reminded me of how much guilt I felt with my mom.
I am very conscious about not creating a similar dynamic with C because my feelings of responsibility for my mom were so great, all-consuming and harmful.
Regardless, he will feel a sense of responsibility by default simply because I battle with depression - even though it really has nothing to with him - or even me for that matter. Hm. I need to think about this more.
Thanks for challenging me.
Great insight! My prayer is that you will become free of depression.
Hmm. Now that is interesting. I had a depressed mother when I was four. Then she went on medication and I don't think acted depressed after that. She always said I was a good kid, in that I accepted guilt for misdoings, and accepted punishment and then it was over. I still feel that today. It interestingly my father who did the guilt thing. The "you loooove me don't you?" the "where would you rather go, your mother's in the city, or your father's in the country for your day off?" And since we never got a day off where we could see our friends, shop, go to a movie, we opted for the city for the one extra day of the long weekend.
He spent the next half hour sobbing that he missed and loved his children, but stubbornly would not let us change our choice once we saw it impacted on him. So the nice day with our friends in the city was clouded by guilt.
By the time I was 15 I would only say "I love you" to my mother, and one friend. I was so used to it being a needy grasping thing. My father would say "I love you" almost with a question mark that demanded the same reply. It felt like an obligation to make someone feel better rather than an expression of him loving me.
With my mother I felt I could be myself freely in the world. With my father it felt like every different opinion or doing was felt by him as a rejection, thus clouded by guilt on our parts. He often played for our acceptance, saying things like "wouldn't it be lovely if I got full custody of you and you lived with me full time. Maybe we could move to another country"... well, we just kept quiet (I mean, we really were not wanting to leave our mother whom we loved and trusted) and felt guilty.
So there. I have tons of guilt. Tons. Some from my mother (most of that more recently) but the overwhelming feeling, the defensiveness, the over-responsibilisation, I believe was due to my father, not a maternal problem.
cheers.
ps, I believe my father was one of the main reasons for my mother's depression to start with. I wonder if in studying depressed mothers link to guilt in children, if they consider what life events, or relationships in her life are triggering chronic depression.
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