Alex and I were at the mall, we were walking back to the car, she wouldn’t walk with me or hold my hand in the parking lot, she burst into her usual run, tripped on the uneven asphalt, and took a huge, painful fall that scraped her up pretty good. I picked her up and put her back in the car. I was nice to her, but I wanted her to remember this illustration. I asked her, if she had been walking with me and holding my hand, would she have fallen or would I have saved her? And she knew that I would have. I told her that I would have stopped her from having this pain and injury if she had listened, that there was a clear benefit she had been avoiding and a clear danger she had been embracing. And this time, she got it. And after that she always stayed with me in parking lots. Luckily it was something small like a bad fall and not running out in front of a car in a parking lot, which was entirely within possibility, the way she would suddenly lose all control and bolt.

I also remember one of many many long talks in her room, maybe around kindergarten age. This one got pretty theoretical. I explained to her what parenting was. That part of it meant deciding that I had something to offer her, that there was a reason to want my trust and to want to listen to me. But it was her choice to make whether to be my child. That I couldn’t make myself her parent if she didn’t want to let me. And we talked about what that would cost her if she decided we weren’t going to have that kind of relationship, one where I could trust her and she would try to listen to me. And we talked about what it would cost her to have that kind of relationship, that it meant showing respect, listening, and maintaining my trust. (She is a really effective and purposeful liar, which I can only assume she gets from me.) I just put it to her as two alternatives, and the price that would be paid by taking one approach or the other. We could have a relationship that wasn’t founded on trust, respect, or willingness to listen, but it would never be able to be what a parenting relationship is supposed to be. We could have that sort of relationship, but not if she wasn’t willing to invest in it and give up some things, such as her right to ignore me and lie to me and. Care is reciprocal, it’s a giving back and forth. And lack of care is reciprocal too; what you hold back the other cannot give.

I explained all that and gave her some time to think it over. And on that occasion, too, she finally backed down. I remember dealing with her when she was young and thinking “Oh my gosh, this is someone I can’t overcome. This is someone who is my equal in will and stubbornness. And she has the strength and vigor and irrational madness of youth.” That was terrifying to realize, that I had met my match. She would scream herself wild for hours for things she had forgotten about in the first five minutes, till she wracked her whole body so much she vomited. And I had always thought I could outlast anyone. But Alex truly intimidated me. And so we fought many battles round and round, me standing up to her and drawing a line, taking time to explain it and why the line existed. And the next day she would cross it again, and again, and again. And I just hoped that someday some of it would sink it and I wouldn’t be fighting the same endless fights.

These are two occasions I rmemebr so clearly because Alex actually gave in. They were cracks in her armor. She became convinced. I was never able to overcome her. She had to choose to overcome herself. I gave her the tools, as well as the choice. And she eventually made the choice and used the tools. It was never something I could make her do. It was her choice. Only Alex was strong enough to tame Alex.

Avalon is a whole different story. I’ve always had a much harder time with her. The approschs she takes is not, in my opinion, really different. Alex used anger and pushing back. Avalon uses a kind of sad anger and collapsing inward. Both a defensive strategies. One is maybe more obvious. Both invite the same response: appeasement. One by leveraging your desperation, the other by leveraging your guilt. But the temptation in both cases is to appease them and give them what they want, to withdraw your demands, to make them queen over the world. Unfortunately, as a parent it’s often your job to stand in for the world (in a kinder way than the world would) and say, no, there are other people here you’re running up against, you aren’t the only person in the world that matters, and you need to learn where the lines are so you can live with the rest of us. And the only things that make such a terrible and punishing task approachable is first, the knowledge that we have to live with that monster and take the main force of its demands if we let it come into being, and second, the knowledge of how much it will hurt your child and hold them back and drive them away from happiness and relationships and success if they become that person.

Both of these concerns matter because we love our children, and we don’t want to hate them or resent them or be hurt or grieved or shamed by them, and we don’t want that to happen with them and the rest of the world either. We love them enough to wish them to be loveable. And we know them and respect them and the power of their agency too much not to recognize that they have a real potential to become, by their own actions, very hard to love. It’s hard to love someone who screams at you when you displease them. It’s hard to love someone who betrays your trust. It’s hard to love someone who will hit you and abuse you if they don’t get what they want. It’s hard to love someone who just takes whatever they think they should have and has no concern for what it cost you. Children will do all these things and more. I never even imagined how easy and instinctive it could be for someone to treat people so badly. But it just come naturally to many children. And in fact they come naturally to adults too. And every day we face in our own lives the pain and failure that we cause ourselves because we haven’t learned these lesson, and we feel the pain and resentment against others we encounter who haven’t learned them either. And we want our children to be the better versions of themselves just as we want ourselves to be that version of ourselves. And we can see ourselves and our own strengths and faults in them.

Alex was an easier nut for me to crack, I think, even though the actual amount of fighting and suffering and struggle was far greater, than Avalon. I understood Alex. She was fighting on my terms. We were similar enough that what I knew about overcoming myself was an effective strategy for helping her learn the same lessons. We had the capacity to understand one another’s motivations. I’m a very passionate person. I was always far more controlled than Alex, more turned inward, more hidden, more reluctant to show myself and connect. But there was some shared core architecture. I knew what to appeal to, what to grab on to what to push back against, how to direct her, what the end goal was. I had a clear vision of what the good version of her was (as well as the bad).

Avalon is different though. She’s more like Amber. And although Amber provides an interesting example of the directions a person like that can go, I never figured out how to handle Amber, really. And Avalon, much as she has some huge temperamental similarities to Amber, has some big differences that alter how it’s expressed that really make the whole thing more complex. They alter the pattern. I don’t know; it’s possible that deep down there’s more similarity than I think, that they’re still in the same categories but expressing through different sub-categories. I have theories, but not enough information yet. Maybe in a couple years I’ll understand better.

It’s harder to tell with Avalon. Things are more subtle. They’re not really any less able to be pathological, they just manifest it in such a different way that I’m not used to and have little experience with, and that is less obviously and more subtly problematic. I can’t sort it out so easily. Avalon and I had far fewer and far less dramatic confrontations, but I still knew there was a battle being fought over her control and expression of herself and that it needed to be fought, for her sake and the sake of everyone around her. I could see the effects. I could see how she actually was hurting the people around her, and herself. But it was more like a soft power fight, a cold war. Avalon had defenses that were far more subtle and less easy to resist, less easy to confront. Alex and Avalon both had ways of making it hard to confront them. Alex made you feel bad for yourself, and Avalon made you feel bad for her. Neither was honest. Both were arguments of emotion and will, the arguments of a child. And I wanted to raise them into the realm of adult understanding and consideration, of listening and negotiating and problem solving.

I’m still trying to figure out what convinces Avalon. I think I know how to convince Alex. But I really am still not sure of how to convince Avalon. Her internal process operate in a more private and arcane and mysterious way. She, like her mother, often defies my understanding

I’m still hoping to break through to Avalon. It’s less obvious to tell. Alex was so stubborn and defiant that when she did finally come along on something it was obvious. Avalon will back down much more easily in the moment, but then go right back to being exactly the same and doing the exact same things as if you never had the preceding discussion (possibly several times). It’s not even really clear when she’s actually listening to you or has just lost interest and wandered off in her mind and ignored or forgotten everything you were saying.