We don't get to choose our family

And how we ought to remember that with kiddos

When I was in college, my first year, I dated a guy that I had known in high school. His mother did not approve of me. She worried I wasn’t right for her son. She was still trying to parent him at 19.

It was made very aware to me that she didn’t think I was good enough for her son.

I didn’t come from the right family.

I wasn’t the right type of person.

Now.

It bothered me, then, greatly.

Especially because I cared for my first boyfriend and wanted her to like me. Their family was much more functional than mine was, more stable both relationally and economically—

But also because I was a people pleaser, a good kid, the hero in the alcoholic family. I had grown up feeling that I needed to prove myself, my worth, to earn love. Such is the situation with the coping roles for dysfunctional families.

I have thought about her a lot. I thought about how she treated me and some of the condescending things she said to me at that time.

I think about the impact her words and behaviors and actions had towards me.

I think about this often because I was the kid who grew up in the unstable environment.

If you knew my father, my family’s house, I get that many parents of more middle-class and stable environments would have misgivings about their kiddo dating someone from a rough, dysfunctional background.

I think about this now as I begin to date again, and I consider my background that I can’t change.

I consider those experiences and the stories that have shaped me.

I consider that I achieved much more than I think that my ex boyfriend’s mother ever thought I would achieve.

I lived abroad. I got a terminal degree. I left the area and never came back. I am traveled, cultured, multi-lingual, published.

I certainly have risen above where I came from and the hand that was dealt me, including genetically.

My mother often had a soft spot for those kiddos that were abandoned and didn’t excel—perhaps they reminded her of herself. And she took them under her wing.

I have a soft spot for those who are trapped by circumstances of their families, their decisions and actions that they did not make….

And desperate to move out and to decide their own actions and determine life on their own terms.

That is my story. I am that person.

When this mother of my college boyfriend reached out to me, contacted me after I earned my doctorate, I didn’t have anything to say to her.

We were not close. She was never a safe space for me.

I thought—If you were not interested in me and my potential before I could change my circumstances, I have no desire to talk to you now.

You were the adult. I was the child. You were the teacher and I needed support. You had none to give.

I am not resentful but I do want to set boundaries:

I am proud of where I am, from where I came from, and from the events of the last 5-8 years and how I have responded to them.

I know what it is to claw your way out of where you came from and intergenerational trauma, dysfunction, and mental illness.

We don’t get to choose the families we are born into.

I often think, and wonder, who did not think that I would rise to where I have, with where I came from.

And who will continue to be surprised.

And I marvel at how many others there are: I think about all the kiddos out there for whom that is true. For those like me.

And I so desperately wish more adults and parents would remember and center this, being gentle with others, especially with children, minors, who are are trapped.

Don’t judge a child for that which they can’t help.