Learning To Self-Parent For Fun And Profit

I readily admit that my orientation to family (unfortunately, perhaps) is less than warm and fuzzy. I realize I wouldn't even be here if my father and mother hadn't...well...you know. And I'm glad they did, of course.

But my father was a pedophile and my mother was psychotic, so my childhood was right up there with "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?" on steroids. I don't even like to imagine what happened to my two younger brothers and two younger sisters after I ran for my life at eighteen. It has taken me seven decades to reach a point where I'm not dragging the wreckage of my past around behind me like a dirty blanket -- often for all the world to see.

At some point in my adulthood, however, I came across a book that I found helpful in processing my "issues" and some of its ideas have remained useful over time. It was a book on "self-parenting."

I don't think I really understood when I first read the book the extent to which my parents' problems had undermined my ability to live as a functional and happy adult myself. So I limped through my life -- mentally, emotionally, and physically -- not knowing what was missing and not knowing what to do about it. But all these years later, the ultimate take-away from the book for me has been the term "self-parenting" because that's a process that still continues, a process included in what some would call part of the broader area of "self care."

It appears to me that many of us in the U.S. were born into a culture where we are expected to take orders without question. We're told that this protects us from our innocence, our lack of knowledge, and the likelihood of our poor decision-making. The initial premise for most parents seems to be that, if doing "the right thing" can become a habit, their children will never go wrong.

But life is much more complicated that that. And part of the complication is that the parents that ran our lives for so long were not necessarily correct in their reasoning. They meant to be (we hope). Or at least they did the best they could (we assume). But the world we live in is a demonstration of the end result of a culture on autopilot. A culture unquestioned by the bulk of the population. And a population made up of people who were not taught to think for and take care of themselves.

So, many of us were raised to take orders no matter what and to expect (and take) our punishment if caught not doing so. This did not stop us from crossing the line. It taught us how to lie -- to others and to ourselves -- to get away with it. Which brings us to the part about managing diabetes.

If we never learned how to do what's in our own best interests because we're worth it, managing our diabetic condition can help us develop that skill. If we never learned how to ask the right questions to better understand what we're really dealing with in a situation, if we never learned how to say "no" to an impulse without somebody present every second to police our choices, if we were taught to make decisions only in response to the threat of eminent punishment, we are acting like a dysfunctional child -- and calling it "independence." Socrates said, "An unexamined life is not worth living."