when I was a kid I really enjoyed Suzy Eddie Izzard's comedy routines. I remember she had this one joke that went something like
(fatherly voice): yes little johnny. you must learn to play the clarinet, because I never got the chance when I was a boy.
(little johnny voice): well you got the chance now. why don't you learn it now?
I was talking with another trans person earlier, and we were talking about relationships with our respective moms. they were talking about how their transition was being viewed by their mom as something being done to her.
I was talking about a similar thing with my mom's feelings about my surgeries. I was jokingly saying, as if to my mom, "the things I do to my own body actually don't affect yours at all, because we have two different bodies. that one is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. but this one is mine."
this is honestly something I think is really pervasive with parents, even outside of the context of being trans.
with my own mom, I know she deeply resented the patriarchal way she was raised. I know (because she's told me such) that part of the reason she wanted kids was to prove that she could raise a boy and a girl equitably. It was very important to her to "have one of each."
what she never said explicitly, but I've sort of come to realize must be the case, is that on some level her desire was to re-parent herself. she wanted the experience of getting to raise herself the way she wished her parents had raised her. she wanted to see what kind of life she would have had if she had gotten the same opportunities as her brothers.
on some level, this feels almost progressive. a laudable goal. but the thing is, it's an impossible desire. you can't raise yourself. you are always going to be raising an entirely separate person.
I am not my mom. her raising me was not her raising herself; it was her raising someone who had never existed before. every effort to preemptively treat me as she wished she was treated, to make predictions about my life based on her own, or to encourage her own interests far past when I communicated not liking them, was often a kind of a replacement for asking how I wanted to be treated, asking what I wanted from my life, or asking what I was interested in. Instead of learning about me, she wanted to shape me.
I think this is so common. This desire to give a child all the things that the parent wanted as a kid seems so generous and heartfelt from the point of view of the parent. But for the kid, it often ends up in continuous signals that everything they might want, enjoy, or become needs to be justified through the lens of fulfilling this parental fantasy.
there is a sense of duty to live the life the parent wants, because the parent couldn't. then this child doesn't get to live their life either, and might grow up and have their own child and parent with the same approach. sometimes there's generations upon generations of everyone living their parent's life instead of their own.
eventually I think parents all do need to take stock of what they really want out of being a parent.
as a parent, you cannot raise yourself. you can only raise a new person in the world. if you are grieving the lack of support you had to be yourself growing up, you are not going to successfully recreate yourself through forcing a child to pretend to be you. if you really wished you learned to play the clarinet as a kid, you need to stop displacing that wish onto your child and recenter it.
this grief that drives the desire to create oneself through one's child relies on the belief in one's own life somehow already being over. it relies on a profound sense that it's "too late" (to ask to be treated differently, to pursue certain interests, or to become someone new). but unless you're dying, this belief is not accurate. there is still time. learn the clarinet now. you've got the chance now.
let your kid figure out what they want to do with their own free time and body. don't try to shape their life into the best version of what yours could have been. if you want to do right by your kid, then be a source of support so this entirely new human being gets the chance to live their own life.
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