Chapter 21: Reflections
I spent much of this time reflecting on everything that had happened with my parents.
I felt for my dad.
His life had been turned upside down after decades with my mom, and some of what I watched him go
through reminded me of my own experiences with my wife.
At least, I believed I could understand some of it.
But I also knew that I couldn’t go through this for him.
It was his experience to live through.
Advice and comforting words could only go so far.
I could recognize similarities between his reactions and mistakes I believed I had made in my own marriage,
but that didn’t mean our experiences were the same.
When my wife was struggling with her eating disorder, I had been angry with her for hiding it from me.
With time, that anger forced me to confront some difficult questions about myself.
Why had she been afraid to tell me?
Had my history of anger made it harder for her to come to me?
How would I have reacted if she had?
I didn’t like the answers.
I had spent so much time focused on what her illness was doing to me that I had failed to fully consider what
she was experiencing.
Eventually, some of the anger I had directed toward her turned inward.
I wondered how I had missed what was happening.
I questioned whether I had failed her.
I felt sorry for myself.
Why me?
What did I do to deserve this?
For a time, I became trapped in those questions.
Eventually, however, my wife and I began working through what had happened.
I started looking at the choices I had made and the ways my behavior had contributed to the problems in our
relationship.
I couldn’t take responsibility for her eating disorder.
But I could take responsibility for me.
That distinction became important.
I could acknowledge my anger.
I could acknowledge my selfishness.
I could acknowledge the ways I had made communication more difficult.
And I could try to become someone who responded differently.
That experience taught me to pay closer attention to the people I loved and to resist making someone else’s
suffering primarily about how it affected me.
Becoming a father forced me to confront that selfishness again.
Each experience seemed to expose another part of myself that I needed to examine.
The more I reflected, the more I began thinking about the way I had learned to deal with pain.
Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that suffering was supposed to be handled privately.
Suck it up.
Don’t complain.
Your problems are your own.
Be a man.
I no longer wanted to live that way.
I had seen what could happen when people buried emotions, avoided difficult conversations, and waited until
everything exploded.
I had done it myself.
I didn’t want my children learning that strength meant suffering alone.
I wanted them to know that they could talk about what they were feeling.
I wanted them to understand that asking for help was not weakness.
I wanted them to learn how to disagree without treating disagreement as rejection.
And I wanted to become the kind of father who could actually teach those things by example.
That meant confronting patterns I believed had traveled through my family for generations.
I couldn’t change the way my parents had been raised.
I couldn’t change the way I had been raised.
But I could decide what I carried forward.
It had taken years, the struggles in my marriage, and the birth of both of my children for me to begin
understanding that.
I was still learning.
But I wanted the cycle to change with me.