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Whenever I think about how trauma impacts parenting and inter-generational conflict, I think about how my great-grandmother wouldn’t let my teenaged grandmother get an after school job
My great-grandmother had experienced a very traumatic childhood. Her mother had died, her stepmother had treated the children from the “first family” terribly, she’d been forced to do back-breaking labour in the fields and as a caregiver to her 22 (!!) siblings and half-siblings
My great-grandmother, Alma, had watched her step-mother rule despotically over the family farm in Cape Breton while her father was gone for months at a time on deep-sea fishing trips
One of Alma’s most vivid and horrifying memories was of her step-mother’s mistreatment of her sister Sabine, who had a bleeding disorder. She forced Sabine to walk barefoot through the fields to bring her brothers water, and Sabine nearly bled to death
Anyway! Alma peaced out of her family home as soon as possible. She moved to Halifax, where she got a job as a scullery maid at the hospital even though she didn’t speak English. She met my great-grandfather, married him even though he wasn’t Catholic, had 10 kids, was very happy
And she always swore that her kids would have real childhoods and not have to work like she had. Except, of course, when her kids were teens they wanted jobs so that they could have their own pocket money!
My grandmother spent years trying to trick her way into a job. They had a neighbour who owned a grocery store, and my grandmother BEGGED them to tell her mother that they had to hire her and only her and no one else would do
Anyway. My grandmother became this very job-obsessed person and delighted in working her entire adult life. She went back to work just a few weeks after my dad was born because she missed the office so much!
And it always fascinates me that my great-grandmother and my grandmother were these two very strong personalities and both were operating from good intentions but found themselves at odds because of their experiences
Like my great-grandmother had done such a good job of protecting her kids from the things that made her childhood traumatic (without ever explaining why, naturally) that they thought she was absolutely bananas until they were older and understood where she was coming from
And in some ways that just feels like some aspects of parenting in a nutshell
