End the Pattern

Am seated on the couch scrolling through my phone, suddenly, my son jumps on my back from behind to the point of almost toppling over.

I am mad. I get so mad and I have this strong urge to hit him. I would have; but I, instead, look at him and try to understand what he wants or his intentions are.

Play. That’s what he wants.
To him, that didn’t seem like an act that would warrant me hitting him as a form of discipline. For him it was a way saying, “Mum, let’s play.”


Instead, that act triggered some pain in me.

I grew up in a home where we feared our father. We feared him because of the wrath we would receive if we ever provoked his emotions in the wrong way, enough to say: that really affected our relationship with him. Domestic violence was a scene we got used to. My dad would constantly abuse my mum physically and emotionally; and, as the first born child, I was constantly caught up in their fights trying to separate them. Thus, we grew up as children who were wounded physically and emotionally. Our spirits were crushed young as we were.

I am an adult now. An adult who is recovering from an emotionally abused childhood. A childhood so deprived of affection and fathering that it’s a miracle we survived – a miracle that I survived. Black children grow up with so much anger, some of it passed down to them by their parents in a never ending cycle. Hurt people grow up to be hurt people who create more hurt people.

In shifting my attention from the way I, myself, feel to understanding what my child truly wants, I break the pattern of passing on unwarranted pain. I lost count of the number of times I have had to pull back my hand and question whether the situation warrants corporeal discipline or, importantly, understanding. Yet to do so, one must understand the link between thought, emotion and action.

Most parents warn you about the terrible two stages of growing up. This is when the child turns two years old and starts throwing tantrums left and right. As such, I was keen on how to deal with that stage. I had a smooth transition from infancy to toddlerhood with Arthur. I paid attention to understanding him as a child and his needs which meant studying about raising a child and birth traumas.

If you parent your children the same way you were parented, you raise children who bear your weight of living instead of their own. Consciously, we must sort through the debris of our childhood and seek to pass only what is beneficial to our children. If we can relate to domestic violence, bullying in schools, corruption, rape, theft and injustices we must not allow our children to relate to the same issues on our own accounts.

We must be conscious enough to assess whether a situation warrants discipline or understanding. We punish our children for our own emotions, because they trigger in us our own pain. I once saw a mother beat up her own child because she (the child) was following her instead of remaining in the house. The child cried in pain or fear of being left by the mother. Nonetheless, since the cry triggers pain and frustration in the mother, the only option she has is to pass that pain to her child instead of understanding the child.

Our ignorance of ourselves and our environment is profound; let’s aim at understanding ourselves, our children and our environment.

And then, only then, can we end the pattern.

End the Pattern
By Mystic Venus