COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION -- AND LOVE
By Meredith BrowningA friend tells me:
When her daughter was twelve years old, the two of them had an altercation (not unusual for a mother and a pre-teen daughter). The daughter yelled “I hate you!”, ran up to her room and slammed the door. After quite a long time, my friend went up to her daughter’s room, knocked on the door and heard no reply. She gently opened the door, sat down on the bed and asked what the matter was. “I hate you. Go away”, was the response. So my friend got up to leave. Her daughter yelled, “Come back!” She went back and sat on the bed again. “I hate you. Go away”. Again. So my friend got up to leave. “Come back!” My friend came back. This “Hate you” “Come back!” routine was repeated numerous times, and finally the mother left the room. Some weeks later, my friend asked her daughter what she would have wanted her to do. “Hug me”, her daughter said, “and tell me that you loved me.”
A second friend tells me:
Her son-in-law announced recently that he wanted a divorce. Seemingly, out of the blue. But her daughter tells her now that the marriage had been unhappy for a long time. The couple just never acknowledged it. The husband, a successful investment banker, vows to declare bankruptcy, leaving his soon-to-be-ex-wife destitute. And their children suffering, too. An awful lot of anger must underly such behavior – anger that must have been building for a long time and that was never acknowledged or discussed. The couple’s son blames the wife for the divorce. But neither his mother nor his father understood that their lack of ability to talk to one another would lead to such dire circumstances, rending the family apart and the children feeling unloved.
A third friend tells me:
Her daughter sought independence at an early age. By thirteen, she was choosing all of her own clothes; was running a summer baby-sitting business; and never asked for advice. The mother took her cue from the daughter and encouraged her sense of independence by not interfering with her daughter’s choices – of activities, clothes and friends. When the daughter was fifteen, she was home for two-and-a-half hours two days a week until her mother returned from work. The mother thought leaving the daughter home alone for that time would not be detrimental. Years later, the daughter told her mother that she hated being home by herself then and she felt very lonely. She never expressed those feelings then. Nor did she express feelings of despair when, years later, she was living and working in New York and was having deep troubles with her job and relationships. Now, almost fifteen years later, she lets her mother know that she should have been able to “read’ her needs all those many years ago. She does it by exploding into frightening rages and blaming her mother for all of her life’s problems, starting when she was eight years old.
If only the daughters could have told their mothers what they needed and the mothers could have recognized the signals of need, talked to the daughters and told them how much they were loved. And if only the wife and husband could have shared their unhappiness before it erupted into an acrimonious broken marriage – damaging themselves and their children.
