I grew up in a household where independence was highly prized. This upbringing has lifelong advantages and disadvantages: I was confident managing a budget, travelling, grocery shopping, paying bills and cooking by my mid-teens. I never expected anyone to rescue me or advocate for me. I take charge in a crisis, and often in the absence of a crisis.
On the other hand, I have a hard time trusting anyone else to take charge, and it’s an ongoing project to accept my own normal human vulnerability and fragility.
As my kids reach adulthood and we enter a new phase of family life, I’m reflecting on other, better forms of independence that I have tried to pass on. In gentler and more age-appropriate ways than I did, they have acquired practical skills. They can do the work of minding bodies through time, cooking and washing and cleaning. They can live within a budget, book travel, turn up in the right place at the right time and do what they said they would do when they said they would do it (usually). To that extent, my husband and I have made ourselves obsolete, which is, as a friend observes, the object of parenting teenagers. Hurray.
But I’ve been thinking as we go through this transition about different kinds of independence. When I was learning, the hard way, not to expect to rely on anyone else, I was learning to deny weakness and repress emotion. Independence meant not needing anything from anyone, not acknowledging sadness or fear or disappointment, not seeking consolation or care, not bothering other people with messy feelings. And a hard-won lesson of adult life is that that wasn’t independence at all.
I was raised to be independent, but find it hard letting others take charge
My son is clearing out his childhood things – but these items he knew I’d want to keep
Drugs like Ozempic aren’t changing negative narratives around diet and weight
Let’s inconvenience some oligarchs before we come for exhausted mothers
When we don’t acknowledge and manage our own feelings, we either live with their haunting, or implicitly demand that other people, usually the closest and most loving people, manage them for us. Many children grow up as expert, sensitive readers of adults’ emotions, attuned especially to the dangers of anger and frustration – but also monitoring all forms of pain and sorrow conveyed in sighs, slammed doors, silences. Unspoken, unexpressed feeling is still there, still acting itself out, and requiring more and harder work of everyone else than a clear statement would ever have done.
In espousing a repressive idea of independence, some people become dangerously, oppressively dependent on others to discern fear, regret, sadness and pain through stoicism and anger – or to imagine the interior world of someone who can’t or won’t share it, to find expression and soothe suffering in ways that don’t offend pride. It’s often work that women do for men, children for their mothers, less powerful people for more powerful people. It’s what we do lovingly for infants who have not yet learned to express themselves, and with mixed emotions for adults who refuse to do so.
Not all clear expressions of feeling must be verbal, but to be independent in this way is to take responsibility for communicating what we need or want from others rather than denying that need. Quiet people living in quiet places might find quiet forms of communication, and in loving relationships we can often be heard through acts of touch and care that are deeper than words. Communication is always culturally and historically specific in ways that can be hard for an outsider to read and plain to those who know. But to refuse to communicate at all is to commit ourselves and those around us to our dependence on them. This is a form of dependence far more oppressive and harmful than finding ways to say what we need.
Unlike the practical forms of independence, naming our need and fear and longing is slow work. We don’t learn it the way we learn to plan travel to the airport or to wash potatoes. It’s never fully achieved and probably always hard to do, but we need to model this work of adulthood to our children and each other.
A need expressed is not a need met. There are times and places to share need and fear and longing. Another part of independence is to know them. There’s a dance of ask and answer, and it’s possible to decline and be declined with grace. But without words, without naming our vulnerability and desire even to ourselves, we can’t begin to manage them.
The starting point is independence in dependence, a radical practice of strength in vulnerability. It’s a life’s work.
[ Is it okay to think about restaurants or art while children are bombed?Opens in new window ]
