The Ghost of Mick-mas Past

Why do we keep reliving our childhood through our children?

In my home (the current one) and family (the one I chose as an adult) we celebrate both Christmas and Hannukah. This year, my two-year-old daughter sadly stopped saying “Happy Mick-mas!!!” but she still, thankfully, loves to light the menorah for what she calls “Hommikah.”

Growing up, our family tradition was to assign each of the eight nights of Hannukah a different theme. There was Game Night (cool), Book Night (meh), Charity Night (very meh). My favorite was Junk Food Night (what what?!), where we ordered Chinese takeout and everyone got to pick out one thing, no restrictions, from the local Star Market to eat for dessert. All year long we dutifully consumed fruit leather and natural peanut butter, but on Junk Food Night, the holiest of nights, we danced the sweet dance of Hostess Sno Balls, Gushers, and those colored sugar-water beverages that came in weird wax bottles where we were supposed to chew off the tops like the animals we were.

no Sunny D in our house and nary a Purple Stuff

Now that my kids are semi-conscious beings, the eight nights of Hannukah are ON. To be fair, I did let some things go. For example, Exotic Fruit Night (true story) just doesn’t have the same zing when children are living in 2020 California and not 1990 Boston. But I have clung fast to others. I put way too much pressure on everyone to enjoy Game Night. On Charity Night, I yelled at my kids to stop whining about not getting presents and just be grateful for being two of the luckiest human beings to ever live. And I intensely rebranded Junk Food Night because apparently if you use food as a prize your kids will spend hours and hours in therapy explaining all of their complicated food rules to an imaginary little girl in order to highlight their arbitrariness. Also true story.

Why all the presh, lady? Even in the year of “we have a roof over our heads and a cousin’s ex’s Disney Plus login so we’ll be fine” thinking? Because, like all parents, most of my parenting choices are either proud resolutions to relive the fond memories from my childhood, or thinly veiled attempts to right its wrongs.

In a very dope 1975 paper entitled “Ghosts in the Nursery,” Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson, and Vivian Shapiro wrote these words: “In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents, the uninvited guests at the christening. Under all favorable circumstances the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairy tales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders, the malevolent ghosts.”

I am seeing these uninvited guests everywhere in my reactions to my son’s social life (I use the term loosely, adjusted for pandemic inflation). At a playground hang with a few of his preschool friends, I found myself thinking thoughts that could have been stripped word-for-word from the pages of my middle-school diary. “Are those girls by the slide talking shit about him? You can trust one girl, but you can’t trust two!” Calling a five-year-old the “c word” under your breath is not a good look, mom.

My friend is writing a book on why white and/or privileged parents so often use their money or connections or entitlement to keep their kids out of underperforming schools, even the ones in their own neighborhoods. I ask her what advice she would give parents who want to fight this urge. “Actually go the schools,” she says. Visit them. Twice if you can. “And,” she adds, “remember that your child isn’t you.”

I’ll say it again, if only for my own sake. Remember that your child isn’t you. As my husband and I look towards Kindergarten next Fall, I am considering writing this mantra on my mirror in lipstick (oh wait, my daughter has eaten all of my lipstick). I went to an “underperforming” public school and I never felt challenged. I thought learning was a thing where you do the bare minimum required to please others and then go hang out in the bathroom. I still do.

But according to my friend, my child is NOT ME. Despite understanding the perspectives of strange children all the time, for a living, it is an incredible effort for me to think about my child as his own being. If this kid isn’t me, then who the hell is he? What kind of school might work for him? Does he give a shit about two friends whispering about him on the playground? Are eight fucking jam-packed themed nights of Hannukah, perhaps, completely overwhelming to him?

When I’ve worked in schools, and the school team has gotten stuck in some dynamic with a parent, some intractable rift, it’s not uncommon, when we try to push through it and get compassionate enough, that the parent ends up admitting that something from their own educational history has been making them afraid or distrustful. They displayed “problem behaviors” that were misunderstood by their teachers, they hated math, they had a classmate who had what we are suggesting their child has and it means something to them already, something bad.

Why we do this to ourselves? To our children? I do understand, cognitively, that my children are different people from me. They have different bodies (that creepy thing about their cells still being in you even after you’ve given birth notwithstanding), different personalities, different definitions of the term “quiet time.” But even after spending years and years studying child development and working with hundreds and hundreds of other children, the strongest messages about what a child does and doesn’t need to be happy come from my own, single, experience. In research they would say, that’s an “N of 1.” Bad statistics.

Selma, Edna, and Vivian go on to assure us that “brief intrusions” are tolerable and shouldn’t require us to seek “clinical services.” I am heartened by that, because I trust women with names as fabulous as these, and because I know that I am not alone in this experience as a parent. But, as I go through the portal into the new world, I wonder if I can leave just a smidgen of my baggage behind. And for Christmas, I think I’m gonna let my kids make the plans.

Happy last night of Hannukah. Now go on, ghosts, shoo.