G.parents and children. The gaze of the child who cuts the photo in half is turned backwards: he looks at us. Those eyes are two slits and they are parallel to the baguettes of bread tied to a bike: a man pedals in front of the child and moves forward. They all advance, placid. Like easy things, like life does. The photo – titled Provence, France. 1955 – is part of Elliott Erwitt. 100 photographs, an exhibition open until October 16 at the Diocesan Museum of Milan that celebrates the great American photographer who loved children. Not just in the shots. Erwitt had six children and a large number of grandchildren. And as a child he too had that look: indeed, we all had it. Oblique, ajar, stealthy and fleeting.
The separation between parents and children
Growing up we find the steelyard hanging where childhood and memories converge: having taken stock of joys and anguish, we distance ourselves and expect proximity. And if the former should take over the latter, that child’s gaze will help us: we will find the answers as to why we have moved away from our parents too, among traces of family grudges and fragments of petrified emotions. Everything accumulates in the eyes of a child and also the stories of adult children who cut ties with mothers and fathers who have loved good, badly, too much, little have their roots: parents destined to suffer relentlessly for that separation.
A tragedy, come to think of it, whose story has infinite versions. One of all is How to love a daughter (Einaudi), wonderful novel written by Hila Blum, Israeli writer in her second literary test, bestseller in Israel already translated in 18 countries. “It’s not autobiographical,” she points out. “I started writing it when my daughter was seven and I was obviously worried about her, as I am today. But at the time I was overwhelmed with thoughts about the role of parenting, that is, the inability to predict the cumulative effect of these relationships, on children and on ourselves, as well as the constant test to which one is subjected in making decisions.
I was thinking about a thousand ways in which the results of our choices can deviate from the initial intentions and what it would be like to stay still at a specific point in time e look back, realize that something has gone wrong, without necessarily having the ability to trace the causes. Writing was a way to face my fears »says Blum, 52, based in Jerusalem, literary editor and very skilled in leading us in front of the abyss most feared by her parents: error. Driven by love and in the name of reasons that are right for them, they do the most wrong thing. How is it possible to love in such a revolutionary way and make mistakes? Page after page, the details of how children love each other create an anamnesis that questions us.
The resilience of memories
“There is another theme that I am worried so much and it was the resilience of our memories: although we were the first witnesses of our childhood, in many cases the information of the first years of life is the result of mediations and interpretations. I wanted to understand how complete our knowledge was, ”adds Blum, mother of a 17-year-old daughter. “No, I don’t think that getting lost as an adult with your parents is a more common risk in our time. Compared to the past, today, if anything, I see a greater degree of introspection in behavior. We are more driven to diagnose, to give names to emotional tensions and to face them openly. I don’t know what the effects of this constant psychological awareness are but I believe it is central to the role of parents. Does it make us more or less fearful? Does it make us more united as a family? The answers belong to humanity which is obviously varied »he specifies.
Leah’s mother, in the novel, finally finds the daughter who had cut ties with her family. Is there a way to prevent and a hope to recover? “Oh, I wish you knew. I think this is the essence of being parents: never being able to predict the effects of our actions, “she concludes.
Time and wound care
In the distance the silences accumulate. Sometimes they host hypotheses about the causes (inheritances shared in an unequal way among the children, forced choices imposed by young people), sometimes they evolve into relationships based only on formalities. “When the level of conflict is particularly high, irrecoverable rupture is inevitable. However, the situation is not very different from the past. In Italy, family relationships are inspired by models based on traditionalist criteria that do not encourage change. Anyway, a certain degree of conflict between generations is not only inevitable, but even functional to the conquest of the autonomy of the children »specifies Ivana Castoldi, psychotherapist, for years active at Center for study and therapy of the Niguarda Hospital family from Milan and author of The language of silence (Feltrinelli).
“Repentant” parents and “angry” children
«I have always met many of” repentant “parents or” angry “children. Almost all tormented by guilt and eager to reconnect the broken thread, the first; claiming and unable to accept the wrongs of adults, the latter. Often parents, as they become elderly, perceive a sense of intolerable failure for which they ask for help. Unfortunately, with the passage of time the resentment does not always dissipate. On the contrarysometimes the wounds become gangrenous but the feelings of guilt can be soothed, precisely because the mistakes of the parents were often committed in good faith. Instead, it takes a lot of maturity to forgive parents.
I remember a desperate mother who had lost her only daughter due to her husband’s intransigence. The girl, a promising university student, had become pregnant with a married man who had immediately abandoned her. When she asked her parents for help, her father threw her out of the house in the presence of her mute mother, always submissive to her despotic husband whose reactions she feared. This woman witnessed her daughter leaving the house in a state of panic that she then described to me in the session, crying bitterly. She later looked for her for weeks but no one knew or wanted to give her news of her. The mother is still inconsolable but the final outcome of this story is not known: therefore, let’s not give up! ” she adds her.
Parents who swallow their children
It is said that at the root of these errors there is often love, too much love. “Hand! Love is never too much if it is love; unless it is confused with the need for possession and control. Thus it happens that out of love, a sense of protection and the search for the good of others, manipulations, emotional blackmail and blame are smuggled which mainly involve children. It is not so much they who grow up struggling to emancipate themselves, it is the parents who more often do not manage to emancipate themselves from their children. They tend to hold them back, to engulf them. To love means to give space and if the children do not follow the parental footsteps it would be the signal of an educational success. Many young adults for this reason may interrupt the dialogue and begin to show a certain emotional detachment. It is difficult to recover them because they are large and defend their identity with the sword. It is necessary to enter into a perspective of prevention, when it is possible: that is, it is better to engage in counseling work for parents in due time than to send the children to therapy “specifies Castoldi who points the finger at parental expectations as causes of great harm.
There are no difficult children
«Let’s debunk now the theory of the “difficult” child, an alibi often used to cover difficulties instead of adults. There are no difficult children who are not manageable. Children and adolescents communicate through behaviors that adults must learn to decode. Unfortunately the familyin our society, it is often a source of suffering because still conceived as a small hierarchical system, governed by the logic of power that create bonds that are considered indissoluble »adds Castoldi, an admirer of Philip Roth’s books and Woody Allen’s films. “The way of conceiving family ties in Jewish culture is similar to ours. The children are educated to the sound of precepts, blame and control by parents who never give up. In many works by these authors there is a lot of material to reflect on “he concludes.
Speaking of reflections, let’s now cross over into poetry, the place where cultivating hope is still legal. And who knows what reading the first lines of Daturasomeone does not decide to shorten the distance:
But I don’t want to leave like this,
leaving everything as I found
in this dull geography it assigns
the effect to its cause and both deliver
to the humble diligence of interpretation.
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