It's All My Fault

The Gen X Overcorrection

It’s all my fault. It always is, has been, and if I let the pattern continue, it always would be. It’s my fault my parents got divorced. It’s my fault the dog ran away. It’s my fault I failed math in 6th grade. It’s my fault the neighbor’s kid got abducted, and so much more has been burdened upon myself, by myself.

As a Gen X survivor, I have learned to take on the responsibility of keeping myself alive long before I understood what living was. I was also, as a young child, burdened with the responsibility of keeping other children alive as well. So, it was always my fault. No matter the situation. If my brother spilled food on the carpet… my fault. If my sister wrote on the wall… again, my fault. Because when you are in charge, it’s always your fault. “They” say you take the good with the bad… I’d like to say not once did I get a “good girl” for keeping other kids alive. “They” lied.

Over the years of varying (although just as important), responsibilities that were kindly bestowed upon me, and the consequences that inevitably came with them, I began to associate anything bad that happens as “my fault”. I would apologize immediately and for everything, even if I wasn’t around when it happened. I believe it’s how the term “my bad” came about… a combo of “I’m sorry”, and “I’m bad”. I was, after all, a latch key kid, left to my own devices from dawn to dusk… and sometimes well past that depending on how high my mother was.

It was the rule that we kids must stay outside until the street lamps came on. In the summer, that was pretty late because they wouldn’t come on until dusk, which was like 9pm. We were expected to forage for our own food, often going to a friend’s house to raid the pantry while their parents were at work. Many families knowingly and unknowingly fed many non-biological kids like myself. I learned how to say “What’s for dinner?” and “Can I spend the night?” in Spanish and spent many nights across the street at my best friend’s house.

During the long summer days, I walked all over town, drank from strangers’ water hoses if I got thirsty, and if they happen to see me, they might bring out a cup of water from the house. I would drink it without the thought of them poisoning it. I ate their cookies too. Sometimes, I’d get invited in…

With said homelife, I had a lot of, um, well… let’s just call them ‘experiences’ of which I had no caring adult to confide in about these things. I stuffed each unpleasant experience deep down in the dark corners of my mind and when there was no more room to hide them there, I tucked them away in my heart’s hidden pockets and left them to fester and rot.

Pretty soon, that rot within my spiritual self began to spread and affect my physical self, which no longer cried out with each assault, resulting in my spirit becoming detached and separate. I wasn’t completely gone though, I still had emotions; feelings that were so strong, yet since I couldn’t even put a name to them, I wasn’t sure how to express them and if I could, to whom. I felt out of place everywhere I went. I learned to mimic the other girls in my neighborhood and the way they behaved. I wore the customary ‘pleasing smile’ while silently crying inside. I played their games, sharing laughter I stole from others because I didn’t know I had my own.

As free range children, we, in most situations, were told to figure it out ourselves. That not only left us feeling broken, but because we weren’t allowed to show ‘unpleasant’ emotions externally, we carried all that sadness through the years, unfiltered, and stagnant, ready to spill over the slightest speed bump. It was considered weak to speak of emotions or show feelings. We had to conceal the emotion before an adult could scold us or worse yet, ‘give us something real to cry about’. Having emotions but unable to name them or address them as a symptom of real pain, regardless if it were a scraped knee or a broken heart, turned some of us into narcissistic adults who enjoy manipulating the emotions of others they were unable to express in themselves as kids.

We swore when we had kids, it would be different! We would actually parent them, the way we wished to be parented. Instead, we (unintentionally) taught them to validate their pain by blaming and shaming others because we often speak of our own childhoods in such a manner. When we say “it’s our parents’ fault we’re so f***** up”, “…the teacher’s fault we didn’t pass.”… “They didn’t understand us”… “They didn’t let us express ourselves”... we demonstrate that focusing the cause of our emotions on external situations or people is a proper way to deal and heal.

We didn’t realize that to just teach them to name and show their emotions, without giving them the knowledge of acknowledging, understanding, and owning the emotions (the real deal and heal) we were basically handing them the keys to a brand new car without teaching them how to drive. We couldn’t explain to them how to take responsibility for their feelings… how could we? We weren’t taught to take responsibility for them. We were told to hide them. So, to correct the mistakes of our parents, we allowed our kids to vent and taught them how to name their emotions, good or bad, so they wouldn’t end up feeling about us the way we did about our parents.

Speaking of parents…. Parents always think they are helping their children when they have a problem and they step in and talk for them or they give the child the words to say even though they are old enough to find the words themselves. Parents like to give excuses for their children so their children don’t get in trouble, thinking that that’s what they would have wanted when they were young. But that just leads them into deeper trouble. It’s one thing to advocate for your child when the situation calls for such an intervention, but most times, your interference will enable the child to always look for external saviors, keeping the child from growing strong, confident and independent with the wisdom and knowledge they acquire from such a situation if left to conquer it themselves.

We are inadvertently playing out the cycle described by G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” We endured the hard times and became strong enough to create the good times for our children, but we forgot that it was the struggle that made us strong.

But… we can’t beat ourselves up over it, we don’t know what we don’t know until we know… Now that we know, we can change. We can offer an apology and explain to our kids, who possibly have kids themselves now, where we think we went wrong because of ignorance, not stupidity, and ask them if they would like to break the cycle of overcorrective parenting.

There is a line between neglect and coddling. It’s quite distinct, not a fine line at all. Give children the space and autonomy to grow into confidence with the safety net of their family cheering them on from the sidelines, occasionally handing them a glass of water like a runner on a track or perhaps a cookie. They will know they are safe as well as trusted, allowing them to more fully trust themselves. Give kids a chance; they might surprise you with how smart and resilient they are when given the right tools to thrive.

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