Family Life is a Detour
By Elizabeth Flynn Campbell
Most of us start our adult life with some kind of idealized vision of what our future families will be like – the ski resort ad depicting the good looking parents and their two happy children enjoying a day on the slopes comes to mind. We’re often not even aware we have such a vision until the reality of our actual marriages and actual children comes into conflict with the idealized version.
For some parents this meeting of fantasy and reality comes on like a collision, when they are told that their child has some kind of disability or long-term illness. They then stumble around the shards of their broken dreams, until they begin to imagine the possibility of a different kind of family, one with a kind of child rarely featured in advertisements for family vacation destinations. These families find themselves on a kind of perpetual unplanned detour that takes them to all kinds of places they never anticipated. Some of these places are remote dark mountain passes where they feel profoundly alone—and some of these places are, surprisingly, nothing less than heaven-like.
Families with disabled, troubled, or just plain difficult children wear their struggle on their sleeves, so to speak. With their noncompliant or nonverbal or too verbal children, they invariably stand out. The pretense that relationships are smooth sailing, and that parents are in control, is simply not an option for such families. But while families with “special needs” exemplify the gap between fantasized family life and real life, in fact all families travel down a road different from the one originally envisioned, some via a gradual exit and some by way of a sharp right turn.
As a therapist who has witnessed the many ways parents struggle with their children and with each other, I am struck with how vulnerable love is when it is contingent on a rigid expectation of who our children or our spouses should be. Families that do well and marriages that are good enough tend not to be too rigid in their expectations for each other. Fantasies of après-ski happiness notwithstanding, all relationships, especially the long haul that is family life, are fraught with challenge and growing pains. The ability to let go of our need for perfection and let those we love be who they are is the starting point for mature love.
We all know the burden of trying to live up to someone’s ideal image of us, yet we continue to hope that someone – our children, our parents, our partners – will somehow be able to live up to ours. In the end, the pursuit of illusory perfection in our relationships is far more work than accepting the reality. And many families that have found themselves in the desert rather than on the slopes have encountered rare and remarkable beauties, despite the change in location.
Elizabeth Flynn Campbell is a licensed psychoanalyst who has a psychotherapy practice in Burlington, where she can be contacted at (802) 860-2244.