HOW TO BE
A PARENT...
For her part, Joanna, a 33-yearold former high school teacher
who has stayed home with her
now 2½-year-old son since his
birth, feels estrangement has
been a positive force in her parenting. Joanna has not seen her
father since she turned 17, when
he refused to sell his portion of
the home where Joanna and her
three siblings had been raised to
her mother and soon-to-be-stepfather. It caused a “huge rift,” she
explained, and “a bunch of horrible things were said.” She and
her siblings decided that they no
longer wanted their father in their
lives, and he, in turn, made no effort to speak to them again.
The estrangement is not something Joanna thought much about
until she became pregnant. Then
— full of hormones and on the
precipice of parenthood — she
began to ruminate, thinking how
strange it might feel for her father
to not know her baby, or what she
would do if he ever called. After
her son was born, she and her
husband talked, deliberately and
often, about how, exactly, they
wanted to parent in direct response to her father’s behavior.
“For us, it’s really been a lot
of talking about, ‘How do we do
HUFFINGTON
01.19.14
things differently, so we don’t follow in those footsteps?’” she said.
They make a point of not yelling,
and regularly stop and make sure
they’re tending to the basics: Are
they treating their son nicely?
Does he feel like his parents are
present? Are they talking about
things as a family?
For his part, Mike agrees that
being estranged from his parents
Where do you turn for
guidance and support
when your own parental
relationships are
emotionally fraught and
your role models have
fallen short?
motivates him to be a better father — though fear, about what
might happen should things go
wrong, always lingers.
“I hesitate to say that I’m different, but I do think I’m self-aware,
as a parent, because of the things
that I’ve gone through,” he said. “I
don’t want to fail him. I don’t ever
want to feel like I wasn’t
the best I could be for him.”
Catherine Pearson is a senior reporter
at The Huffington Post.