Someone recently told me that she had heard a psychologist say that children in the same family actually had different parents, depending on when they were born. I guess this relates to the whole birth order studies of personalities in many ways, but also in a new way that made so much more sense to me.

Our parents were often at very different places in their relationship to each other and to life in general, at the times that my three siblings and I were born. That has helped to explain why we seemed to have very different contexts of our parents during our childhood and even very different relationships with them. Partly because of that, we also relate differently to each other.

My Dad was just home from World War 2 when I joined the family. These days we would probably recognize his symptoms and hair trigger anger as some kind of PTSD. He, as a very young man in charge of many other young men, had witnessed horrific things that I am sure he could never forget. He must have had a very difficult time resuming life as he had left it and the cries and antics of two young children as he tried to determine how to make a living after his service.

My parents moves and Dad’s subsequent success in his career and his natural gifts and talents as a singer and piano man and boss, dad, and wonderful human being, began to be reinstated in higher and higher priority in his life and that of his family. This had the simultaneous effect of making him temperamentally easier on subsequent children, particularly the fourth, than he was able to be with the first ones. That is why I believe there is truth in the wisdom of the statement that we all actually had different parents. It could be they get more relaxed at parenting or in life, or the opposite could be true; some circumstance such as a lost job or an accident could change the experience completely as does divorce and moving. More money, less money, the possibilities are endless.

It is always a good thing to recognize that no matter our best intentions, each of our children may have an entirely different perspective on their childhood. I have found over the years that being defensive about my role in my children’s lives at any given time only served to distance us emotionally. If I was willing to accept and listen to their version of how they felt about a certain time or event, I was often able to apologize for negative consequences I may not even have been aware of. My denial and/or excuses had little effect on relieving their pain and often only prompted more emotional punishment and distance because I had, in effect, rejected them by rejecting their perspective. I am finding the older and wiser I get, the quicker I am to step into their memories, and see things from their eyes, rather than my own.

This has opened the doors of both of our hearts more than any psychiatry could have ever accomplished with the result being real healing on both parts as well as a new sense of caring and love, much less complicated by the past. Keeping the slate as clean as possible going forward is certainly my goal, where family and all relationships are concerned. So much less mess to clean up!