Holding on to your child’s past mistakes and where that leads me today
If I ever wrote an article that carried a message I’d like to send to my estranged mother, I think it’d be this one. I won’t send it to her though, because she and I have been much more than estranged. She’s been my enemy. She chose that role in my life over twenty years ago when she took my child and alienated him from me. She also alienated my entire family from me. She orphaned me in my thirties.
I’m 51 now. I live in Southern California now with my husband that she’s never met, and probably will never meet. We’ve been together ten years, and my entire family hasn’t met him. They probably never will. We own our own property and home on two acres, which she will never set foot on, and probably never will. We have three dogs and four ducks that she’ll never see.
It’s 6am, and as usual I’m reading the news. An article popped up on my feed called 7 Behaviors that you are pushing away your adult children without realizing it. Since my son is now 28 years old, married, with his own children, this article caught my eye since I’m still trying to mend our alienated relationship and I don’t want to push him away any more than my mother already done for me.
Then I got to this paragraph I’ll copy below and BOOM – THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER HAS DONE MY ENTIRE LIFE.
5) Holding on to past mistakes
In my son’s teenage years, he made some choices that I didn’t agree with. He had his rebellious phase, like many teenagers do.
It took a lot of patience and understanding for us to get through those years.
However, as he grew older and matured, I realized that I was still holding those past mistakes against him in my mind.
This impacted the way I interacted with him as an adult, often leading to unnecessary tension between us.
It’s important to understand that people evolve and change.
Our adult children aren’t the same people they were when they were teenagers.
Holding onto their past mistakes can prevent us from seeing the person they’ve grown to be.
This is it – what my mother has done- she’s never let go of my past mistakes, and in the very first sentence of that section, it describes EXACTLY what SHE’S done, or rather, not done, that has been the single most behavior that’s turned her into my enemy.
As a teenager I did the typical rebellion. My life was not typical though. My mother took me away from my father and brothers when I was 8 years old, and decided to raise me in Hollywood, CA, on her own, as a child actress. It had been her dream to be rich and famous and I was expected to fulfill that dream. Problem was, that dream belonged to her, not me. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to be normal, live with my family as a normal kid.
I wanted to go home. I missed my father and brothers, and childhood home she took me away from.
So we a teenager, I ran away from home. I don’t know what my end goal was necessarily, but I didn’t think about the long term life effect that running away would lead to. After all, I was a teenager. What teenager makes a decision with life changing effects like running away that proves to be a good decision? When I found myself free from her for the first time I experimented with things that many normal teenagers do . I smoked marijuana. I tried harder drugs. I spent my time around people who were older than me and weren’t the greatest role models. My boyfriend was 19 years old when I was 13, and of course as a teenager I was “in love”. Of course as soon as the heat was on us since I was underage and ran away, my boyfriend ditched me fast.
I was sent home. Finally. After nearly 8 long years, I was sent back to be with my father and brothers, as a troubled teenager. At least I was home, where I wanted to be for years.
Remember now, those years away were spent in an abnormal childhood of working as a child actress. In a life full of predators who were known to abuse children. I was abused by my manager. I didn’t go to school on a regular basis, we had tutors on the sets. I didn’t have regular friends. It was difficult to make friends because I was different. I was bullied when I did go to school. I was made fun of. After all, my mother sent me to school in hair curlers, and I looked like I had makeup on since she always had my eyelashes dyed (which was traumatic in it’s own way). I often was taken out of school early to go to auditions. When I did get a role on something, my mother would call and tell the school to watch it. I remember one time I was on a morning talk show. The interview was a plug for a role on the TV show Dallas that I was considered for (but didn’t get), and I performed a dance. Not just any dance though. It was a break dancing routine.
BREAK DANCING. The ultimate CRINGE in the 1980’s.
I was NOT good at it – in fact, the song ended with me spinning on my back and landing in a final pose, and I landed – backwards.
To this day I cringe when I watch it on VHS. I thank GOD smartphones and the Internet weren’t around then. That interview and horrible dance routine was played on TV sets in every room of my school on that fateful horrific day – why? Because my overly ambitious stage mother told the school about it. I was 9 years old, mortified and embarrassed. I was made fun of. Let me repeat that – I WAS MADE FUN OF. NOT MY MOTHER, ME.
She was not bullied, I was.
Kids were cruel, they threw papers and pens at me going “movie star movie star” and beatboxing as they laughed at me.
Even without the Internet them, the stories of THEN have come back to haunt the predators of THEN WITH THE #metoo movement, started by Alyssa Milano, who was a part of the rat pack of the 1980s child actress that I grew up in. Corey Feldman has discussed for years the problems in Hollywood in an attempt to hold those predators accountable in memory of his best friend Corey Haim, whose life was tragically cut short when he passed away from an overdose after years of addiction, following abuse in Hollywood as a child actor.
River Phoenix, who died outside a Hollywood nightclub owned by Johnny Depp, suffered from the dark effects of Hollywood.
Dana Plato, who played Arnold’s older sister on Different Strokes, whose addictions led to her death at age 34- I was on that show once, dressed as strawberry shortcake at Arnold’s birthday party.. Drew Barrymore, who has overcome addictions that began at age 8 with cocaine, who ultimately had to ‘divorce her parents’.. I took ballet classes with her. The stories go on and on, from Disney kids to Nickelodeon stars. Meltdowns in Hollywood are, or were, expected, and common, think of Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Amanda Bynes.
The reasons for these meltdowns are really common sense, at least to those who have seen it first hand. It’s certainly no coincidence that all these child actors suffer the same or similar fates.
Predators aside, these young kids, were surrounded by adults whose paychecks depended on that child doing his it her job right, which is allot of pressure for a child. Also, could labor laws didn’t really start until late 1980s and early 1990s, which is why twins, like the Olsen twins, were cast – to double up on the work. Sometimes though they just ignored the laws, got conservatorships like Brittney Spears or McCauley Culkin, both of whom had their lives and money stolen from them by their parents.
When I was working, the financial laws weren’t yet in effect that require a child stars ‘ wages be put aside in a trust fund. That meant it was up to my mother to save money from my childhood labor, to secure it for my adulthood. So after working for years in an industry full of predators who pressured me to get it right, working long hours, having self confidence despite many countless auditions I would go on and not get the part, but never told why. Having to learn to accept rejection without knowing what I did wrong. Years and years of dance lessons, voice lessons, piano lessons, acting lessons, all after school and on weekends – except when I would be working or going on auditions. Practicing those dance, singing, piano and acting skills when I wasn’t in classes, working or auditioning. That meant I would miss going to the birthday parties of my very few and far between friends from the normal side of my abnormal life as a child. In the end, as an adult, I found out my mother saved me NOTHING financially to fall back on as an adult, and the manager that abused me will never be held accountable, because I could not find him once I became an adult.
The aftermath of all of that was a runaway teenager who had meltdowns and ended up experimenting with drugs. Does that surprise you, given the truths that have finally been revealed about Hollywood? I encourage EVERYONE TO STOP READING THIS NOW AND, INSTEAD GO READ THIS ARTICLE. Then come back here.
Where am I going with all this?
That section of the psychology today article I read this morning about not letting go of the mistakes of the past that might have been made in a child’s life, leading to an estrangement or pushing away the adult child could have been about me, except that it’s written about “normal” kids and their parents. My situation is, or was, extreme, as a child, but it still applies. Ten fold.
The damage has been lifelong on my case .
At 51 years of age, do the mistakes I made at age 13 justify the alienation of my children against me? In my mother’s mind it does. In fact, in her bitterness, she has held a grudge against me for all my life. I failed to live up to her dreams of fame, and she is convinced that I’m still that 13 year old runaway teenager who made the mistakes I made to hurt HER. It wasn’t really about her. I was the untrained child therapist for her unresolved traumas, and later on, her life detached from reality, away from family and familiarity and normalcy because of HER choices and HER actions. No, she believes that SHE is the victim of ME. Not the other way around. Didn’t she realize that SHE was the adult and I was the child? No, in her mind, SHE sacrificed everything for the dreams I never fulfilled. She believes only in all the ways I wronged her, that she did nothing wrong to me. She never considered that I sacrificed my entire childhood and adult life to work towards and fail at a dream that was hers and was not mine.
I just wanted to go home.
Now, at age 51, I still struggle with not knowing my adult children, not knowing my family, my brothers and their families. My father sadly passed away while I was still snack dab in the throws of my struggles, and he’ll never know how I turned out. My orphaned family will never meet my husband. step foot on my land, be guests in my home during the holidays. My grandchildren will never know me.
I will never see the gleam in my grandchildren’ s eyes as they wake up to see what Santa Claus left them under the tree.
So if you have adult children and you are struggling with your relationships with them, I highly recommend reading this article and perhaps pinpointing what parts apply to your relationships, and try to overcome them with kindness, understanding, and love. Do this for your adult children, adult siblings, or aging parents, to heal the wounds of your past.
This holiday season, be grateful you have the love of your family in a world so filled with hate. Like I’ve always told my children, don’t let the world you make you into something you know isn’t right.
You actor may cook, your writer may become a doctor, your dancer may wait tables, it’s okay, because your child is not there to be what you wanted to be, they are there to become what they want to be. It’s your job to love them unconditionally, and guide them on their journey, and forgive their mistakes that will inevitably be made along the way.
Happy Holidays from It’s Almost Tuesday. Godspeed.
