You could find cars in the average junkyard that were nicer than the beaters parked in my family’s driveway growing up.

There was the time my grandfather, for reasons unknown, removed the front passenger seat from my mother’s almost-antique Mustang. I loved it, because it revealed a rusted-out hole in the floor and we could watch the road passing under our feet from the backseat. 

That was outdone by my dad’s Dogmobile, a car that looked like any other compact station wagon until you opened the door and saw that every seat except the driver’s was covered in layers of dog fur, with some mud around the edges for good measure. At some point my dad added extra oil to keep this monstrosity running but forgot to replace the distributor cap, which mercifully took the Dogmobile off the road for good. 

While my parents were both driving relatively normal cars by the time I met my husband, I was still unprepared for the car reality of my in-laws. Their cars were bought new, garage kept, any dent or ding repaired and even the optional maintenance done on time.

If cars were pets, my in-laws treated theirs like pedigreed purebreds while my family treated ours like scrappy backyard ferals. So, hubs and I treat ours like housecats. Despite coming from very different family vehicular patterns, we’re more or less on the same one now. Kind of. I’ll let you guess which one of us is musing about replacing the 11 year old car and which one is ignoring all such talk because an 11 year old car is obviously middle aged…right in the prime of its existence. Just like us!

I didn’t completely break the family pattern of vehicular cheapness….I just bent and adapted it for me. Which is great training, for realizing it’s possible to do this with any pattern the fam consciously or unconsciously hands over, on stuff a lot more consequential than whether or not you drive a clunker. You just have to stop, drop and roll. Wait, no, that’s what you’re supposed to do if your clothes catch on fire. It’s more like, you need to stop, feel, and reflect to see if The Way Our Family Does Thing X actually works for you. 

A wonderful thing: sometimes it does. Growing up, I knew my mom was always, always there for me. She had a life and a job and a spouse and another kid, but I knew if I needed her or wanted her or just had something funny to tell her, my mom was right there for me. I try to give this to my daughter now. Even when I’m trying to finish an email and start dinner and figure out what time tomorrow’s soccer game is while she wants to sing me a song about pterodactyls – my go-to line is “Mommy needs a minute”, just let me hit send and I’m all ears, kid. 

Another best thing about my childhood – we were always connected to extended family, between my grandparents living down the street who we saw almost every day and my grandparents far away who we nonetheless spent several weeks a year with. For us, there are no grandparents down the street, but even with Covid doing its nasty thing we’ve managed to spend quality time with both sets of grandparents multiple times, every single year of kiddo’s life.

I’m writing this to you on the sidelines at soccer practice, which shows we’re at least trying to do another thing that meant a lot to me as a kid by supporting our daughter’s interests. Believing in her and letting it show, taking all the trips we can as a family, imparting a love of reading and adventures – there is no material gift I ever did or ever could receive that meant as much as those things do to me. I have my family to thank for them, and I hope that someday my daughter can say the same. In so many ways, I had a really great childhood. 

And yet. There were some parts that didn’t work. Mistakes, of course, but much more impactful than any one mistake were the bad patterns nestled in there among our good, great and okay ones. Like the extreme pressure I felt, as a “smart kid”, to do nothing but succeed. As in, succeed big, at every single school or work task I put my hand to, to the point that my parents told me the only colleges I could attend were U.S. News and World Report’s top-three Ivy or Little Ivy League. I understand that they thought this would set me up for life, but especially since it doesn’t work, I don’t recommend it as a parenting strategy.

Another one I don’t recommend is behaving as if mental health problems are for “the weak” and that “in this family, we tough it out” or other similar nonsense. To their credit, my folks know they made a mistake on this one. There’s a reason my child, at the age of seven, is fully familiar with the concept of therapy while I never heard of such mystical practices until around junior high, and thought it was only for people in Hollywood or psychiatric hospitals. One of which, of course, I would later land in myself (spoiler alert: the hospital, that is, not Hollywood). 

The hardest pattern of all was my dad lashing out. When he was angry, it didn’t matter what anyone else had or hadn’t done, the tongue lashing was ferocious. Not that my brother and I never did anything wrong or deserved to be reprimanded – like any kids, of course we did. But my dad’s verbal assaults were like a sudden thunderstorm ripping through a blue sky –  impossible to predict and arising out of nowhere. Lots of times they weren’t connected to anything we’d done – and even when they were, the real struggle was somewhere within my dad. 

Even on the days when kiddo drives me batty and it feels like the world is caving in with its pressure, unreasonably ripping on the kids is a family pattern I’m determined to break. 

If your childhood was really rough – the beauty and love in it are still real. If your childhood had many blessings and parents that loved you more than life – there can still be some screwed-up shit that went down, and it’s a really good, brave thing to put a finger on that and protect yourself and your loved ones today from falling into bad old patterns. Since I’m being all uplifting, talking about screwed-up shit, we’ll go right from there to Maya Angelou, reminding us, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

So Maya and I say – ok, not really, I say but I think Maya would agree –  keep every single speck of beautiful you got from your family, and work to ditch what feels wrong or doesn’t fit. Not to get all meta, but your present-day you is the latest and greatest in your journey of knowing how to do better. 

Photo credits: cars by Andreas H, flowers by Brigitte makes custom works from your photos, thanks a lot. Both from Pixabay.