Dear mother,
Whenever we hear the word “power”, we immediately connect it to a CEO of a giant company, a president, a king, police forces. But, if we think about it, who are the people who have the most power over us? That, dear mother, you got right: our parents. Not just the authoritarian or rigid ones, but everyone. Everyone, even the most permissive in the world. And its influence is carried out with completely invisible ties, and for eternity.
In other words, it is not so much the pedagogy that is used or the type of parenting that is chosen that brings power, because the point is that it is already there, imbued in the total dependence into which we are born. Whether you like it or not, to the point that, ultimately, even parents who abandon or mistreat their children somehow maintain it.
This is why, even as adults, we continue to throw tantrums with our parents, because tantrums, most of the time, are nothing more than attempts to free ourselves from the power that someone has over us. When we don’t feel safe enough to be able to calmly but firmly assert our territory, we scream and kick.
These are tantrums that represent an ongoing effort to determine how much power we will continue to give our parents over our lives. And this is a long and difficult job, with ups and downs and that often only takes a qualitative leap when we also become fathers and mothers. The moment we suddenly become aware that we have in our hands a power equal to theirs and that, with it, comes a responsibility so gigantic that, sometimes, we prefer to take refuge in that speech that at home we don’t command anything.
But tantrums are always a fight of unequal power. As parents, if we are serious with ourselves, we recognize that we have the knife and the cheese in our hands, and that they scream and scream because they understand that they cannot survive without our love and protection, with all the frustration and fear that this causes them.
The truth is that when we realize that it is not an arm of arms, but a request that with all our power we help them to grow, we become more capable of managing their outbursts, teaching them effective ways of asserting their will, making them more independent every day. The better we have managed to do this in relation to our parents, the easier it will be to do it in relation to our children.
In short, can I continue to throw tantrums against your power over me?
Dear Ana,
Of course you can, because I still make them every day with your grandmother. This is the dimension of the power of parents over their children, which not even the barrier of death can (fortunately) put an end to. I argue with my mother every Saturday morning, because I hear her telling me that I shouldn’t sleep so late, I protest to her because she continues to tell me to eat on time and, no matter how much she complained about always telling me to comb my hair back — to which I responded with “It’s not worth it because I can’t see it!” —, the truth is that at 66 years old I am constantly stuck in the dilemma of whether to contradict her or not.
But these are benign tantrums, the ones that no longer hurt or make a dent, but so often the taste that children have from their parents’ power is much more bitter. It’s about the abuse of power, how they were humiliated and unloved by parents who, probably, repeat in a new generation the arrogance they suffered.
By narcissistic parents who wanted to bend their children to the image they saw of themselves in the mirror, without any respect for their individuality. Parents who put such a straitjacket on their children that they could only free themselves from it with violence. And when this happens, you really need to ask for help (and not be afraid to resort to therapy) to stop the cycle, before repeating it because, unfortunately, it’s not enough to wish not to do it. We use power as we have seen it used at home, at work, in relationships with others, and when we let our guard down, we give what we receive.
The moral of the story is simple, even if it has a Sunday sermon flavor: when we deserve the power we receive and put it at the service of others, things end well.
THE Mother’s Tantrumsone grandmother/mother (and also mother-in-law) and a mother/daughternow with four children, separated by quarantine, they began to write to each other daily, to talk about their fears, irritations, perplexity, anger, misunderstandings, but also about the feeling of perfect communion that — occasionally! — to the invades. And, after the confinement, they realized that they didn’t want to lose this channel of communication, in the hope that whoever reads them, mother or grandmother, feels that they are talking about them. The authors write according to the 1990 Orthographic Agreement
