childhoods within us. In fact, they are the blueprints for all that follows, and, for the most part, we live our lives as adults based on emotional patterns we learned as children. Both consciously and unconsciously, with unerring accuracy, we make decisions in our adult lives that are our attempts both to understand and to heal what occurred in our early years. Our relationships, more than anything else, are the vehicles by which we try to understand the meanings of our childhoods. This is difficult for many people to accept, and, in general, we don't like to investigate our childhoods. We think it is a waste of time or we're afraid that if we do examine our childhoods, we will discover our parents’ flaws and end up stranded in a state of judging and criticizing them. Since intuitively we know that no parents can do the job perfectly, we don't know what to make of the failures we may uncover.
While it's true that no set of parents is perfect, our exploration is designed neither to give our parents an A for their work nor to level them with our judgments. Rather, it is an opportunity for us to evaluate their deep and abiding impact on us in order to have a more complete understanding of why we live our lives as we do and choose the partners we do. All information is good information because the more we know about ourselves, the more we become capable of being ourselves in the fullest and most holy sense.
Deficits from Childhood
Now let's take a deeper look at the two love stories at the beginning of this chapter. If we look at John and Deborah, for example, and why they really fell in love, we can see that they came together to heal emotional wounds from childhood.
John grew up in a family where his father, a corporate executive who worked eighty hours a week, was rarely home. Even as a child, John was left to take care of his mother. He took on the role of being her companion. He supported her intellectually by enjoying her achievements and emotionally by comforting her when she was sad. Without knowing it, he took on an adult identity much sooner than was appropriate. Not only did he not have a father who was a model for his development as a man (aside from the model of excessive work), but he also did not have a mother to take care of him. In fact, he had a mother he had to take care of, a mother to whom he became the surrogate husband.
When John arrived at adulthood, he had already had a long apprenticeship as an adult. He had a lot of experience making sure that the woman in his life (his mother) was calm and content. He was a wizard at making sure the lawn was cut, the trash was out, the doors were locked, and, eventually, as he reached adolescence, that the bills were paid and his mother had a dinner date.
There were a few things missing, however. John arrived at adulthood without ever having had the experience of simply being loved: being doted on and indulged, being held, caressed, and treated with special deference. He had missed the basic, unequivocal, unconditional love, affection, and approval that, ideally, parents give to their children.
Deborah, an immigrant, grew up in deprivation. Her father was an alcoholic, and, as a result, her mother had become the breadwinner of the family. Her mother, feeling guilty about her husband's alcoholism and her own continual absence, indulged her children materially, giving them everything they wanted. With gifts she tried to make up for what she was unable to give by being home and present to her children's emotional needs. As a result, Deborah grew up thinking that, materially at least, she'd get whatever she wanted, and so in spite of the severe emotional deprivation of living with an absent mother and an alcoholic father, she was a spoiled child.
When she met John, she was immediately attracted to what she called “his grown-upness.” A traveling furniture salesman, he seemed to know a lot about life and how to function in the outside world, things she had never learned because her mother had been too busy and her father had been too drunk. She had goals, educational goals in particular, that she had been too unfocused to pursue, and when she told John about them, he encouraged her.
He was, of course, a very grown-up person because he'd been taking care of his mother for years. As a result, he was both able to provide stability and consistency at home for Deborah and to teach her a lot about life in the outside world.
With John, Deborah explored and expanded her skills, and he continued to encourage her. He taught her how to apply for student loans, how to write a job resume, how to get financing for a car. He even taught her housekeeping skills, like how to make the bed and do the grocery shopping—all the things her mother had been too busy to teach her. In effect, he became both the mother and the father she had never had.
Because she was truly able to receive all John gave her, she felt an immense sense of gratitude toward him. Her mother's indulgence had taught her one important thing—and that was how to be generous. As a result, Deborah gave John what he had never received from his mother. She bought him big and little presents, just as her mother had done for her. She told him he was wonderful and she couldn't live without him, and she specifically praised him for all he did for her.
In this relationship, Deborah was growing up; that was her developmental task. She was learning the skills she would need as a grown-up, so she could function in the world. John was also fulfilling some deficits from his early life. Finally he experienced what it was to be appreciated and loved, to have some attention directed toward him.
Although Deborah and John may be unaware of the reasons why their relationship works, many relationships have as their raison d’être and their chief developmental task the completion of growing up. This is because many of us are not well parented. Perhaps we came from families where there were too many children, so our parents didn't have the time or the energy to teach us the skills we needed or to give us the emotional attention we needed. Maybe our parents were committed to the American dream of affluence and success to such a degree that the project of child-raising became a very secondary undertaking. Many of us were unwanted children, children who absorbed the blame for crises in our parents’ marriage or children about whose very existence our parents felt profound ambivalence. Whatever the reason, many children arrive at adulthood with severe emotional deficits of their own.
“It was a damn disaster,” one father said to his daughter, “when you were born. I'd just come back from the war, I was trying to go to college, and then you came along. I had to work two jobs and your mother was always exhausted.”
Because of the necessity of providing and burgeoning career opportunities now available to women, many parents are so preoccupied they don't have the time or desire to impart a number of physical, practical, or intellectual skills to their children. As a result, many of us come into adulthood without a lot of the skills we really need to possess. We don't know how to make our way in the world emotionally or practically because our parents, either through circumstances or some deficiency of their own, simply could not or would not teach us what we need to know.
We may be unparented in terms of self-esteem, personal motivation, or the capacity to express our emotions, particularly anger. We may be unparented in the ways of the world—“This is what a loan is,” “These are what interest rates are,” or, “This is what business is all about.” We may be unparented in terms of our health, personal hygiene, nutrition—how to enjoy and value our bodies. Or we may be unparented in terms of organization, how to make decisions, how to use our time wisely, and so forth.
Since no one set of parents can teach us everything, when we arrive at adulthood, we may well have never attained great portions of what we need in order to be ourselves. It's as if we've arrived at the doorstep of adulthood with our little overnight satchels only to find our bags have rips and holes in the bottoms, and we're not very well prepared to live at the grand hotel of adulthood. Our loving relationships are where we patch, mend, and repair the overnight bags of our childhood, so we can live in dignity and comfort in adulthood.
Discovering Our Personal Stories
Let's turn now to the other love story, Neil and Marie. Theirs is an example of a relationship that gives the gift of identity, and it shows how each partner can learn when valuable snippets of information from childhood turn up.
Marie was the youngest in a family of five children. She adored her older brother who, because he was so much older, was like a second father to her.