a very passive-aggressive Christmas?

[tielan]

A number of years ago, I remember reading a story on FB - one of those copies-of-a-copy things.

The story was about the neighbours of the poster, who watched next door's mom drag the Christmas tree and decorations out in a fury and put it in the trash can, then storm back inside. A little while later, the kids came out and dragged the Christmas tree out of the trash, arguing about 'who broke mom'.

IIRC, the poster found it funny. So did lots of other people.

But lots of people also responded like the mom had put cigarette butts out on the kids' wrists. It was abusive! It was cruel! What kind of mom would do that?

I thought it was funny myself - like, "wow, what did the kids do that was so bad that mom resorted to this", but a friend waxed lyrical about how taking away Christmas was a terrible thing to do to the children for anything they'd done.

Slowly, talking to her and going through the comments, I teased out that what we (all the people commenting on the post) were responding to was how secure we felt about our parents' justice.

If we trusted our parents to be fair and loving, then the mom's reaction was amusing, because obviously the kids had done something TERRIBLE. But if our experience of parental justice was whimsical and volatile, then the mom's reaction was overwrought and excessive.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

I like this insight.

[tielan]

It really helped me realise just how our experiences colour our perspectives, and that the same event seen through two different sets of eyes can have very different meanings.

[kore]

Hunh, that's interesting.

My dad was a total volatile off-the-wall alcoholic with a hair trigger temper while I was growing up, and my mother was completely dependent and enabling as they say, so I would not have found it at all funny.

[tielan]

Yes, I thought it was interesting, too!

[booksarelife]

Interesting!

[wpadmirer]

Yeah, if you grew up secure, you have no idea what it's like to have something like that happen.

If you grew up in chaos, as many of us did, you've experienced this kind of volatile response from a parent. You know the fear and the pain it causes.

Kids don't break mom. Mom's already broken, and now she's breaking the kids.