by Peter Topolewski
For parents it’s easy, but even for anyone without kids it’s not hard to imagine: the fear that your child is anything but safe and healthy. It starts before they’re born, with worry and greater amounts of hope that they enter this world free of pain and deformity and developmental irregularities. If that hurdle is cleared, still the anxiety never goes away, ever, over the years. It only changes. It focuses on circumstances they put themselves in, the people they might encounter, the influences they might come under.
There are worse fears. That your child looks fine, grows normally, but inside, hidden, they are distant and unreachable. And that they grow up as you might expect someone so isolated, so unable to communicate could. Awkward, alone, rebellious, a danger, particularly to themselves.
The semi-autobiographical film Blue Heron depicts brilliantly how such a child is both the source and recipient of this world of hurt and fear. It shows the frustration and exasperation of parents struggling to keep their child safe, their lives somewhat normal. The fallout of familial and legal turmoil on the siblings. The way a person whose actions we cannot understand strains a parent’s love, endlessly. The futility of seeking help, the inability of our society to cope with people with unseen problems.
Nancy Spungen is sadly best known as the woman murdered by Sid Vicious, the bass player of the Sex Pistols. Like Vicious, she was a drug addict. Though Vicious stabbed her to death, the public had no pity for her. Nancy’s mother, Deborah, loved her, but she recounts in her 1983 book And I Don’t Want to Live This Life that when she learned of Nancy’s death she felt relief above all. Nancy had beauty inside, her mother is clear to say. But she also had turmoil in her from day one, and each day that went by she made life with her harder, right until she died at age 20.
The nature versus nurture debate hasn’t gotten us very far. It would seem Nancy and Jeremy, the troubled young man in Blue Heron, were born misaligned with the world. Puzzle pieces that would never fit. The love and support and patience shown them by their parents couldn’t overcome the perhaps genetic and prenatal environmental mechanisms working against their favor. Their fates seemed set.
That doesn’t always add up. Intervention and therapy help some people. For others, it’s only the negative influences that have any effect, that end up shaping our children for the worse. This makes the painful endings for people like this more difficult to grapple with.
Yet it can be worse. A parent’s nightmare can become real. Your child, troubled or perfectly normal, turns violent, as teens Caleb Vazquez and Cain Clark did in May, when they attacked a mosque in San Diego and killed three people before killing themselves. Their murder spree is but one of too many recent examples. Social media lit or fed a flame of hate within them both, convinced them there was something worthwhile in murder.
The series Adolescence transported viewers to this hellish microcosm: a normal boy, caring parents and sister, social media, a depraved murder, the incomprehensibility of his actions and his attitude. The challenge of parents to get in the head of a son who would do such a thing.
When a child excels at school or sports, we praise their talents. What about when the child goes sideways, or worse? When he lost his phone or missed his flight, bullied a kid at school or got bullied, shared a nude photo or reshared someone else’s—it’s natural for a parent to look at that situation and ask Why didn’t you do what I did when I was a kid? Or more likely Why didn’t you do what I would do now?
For a parent it’s easy to take this stance and miss what the world might look like through that child’s eyes. When things go wrong, we often seem ready to deny them agency, even as in general we cling onto our own.
Not all of us are parents. But we’re all someone’s child, and the story runs the same way. When you were young, maybe right up to today, how often did you look at your decisions through the eyes of your parents? Your decision to throw the rock, swallow the pills, sneak out of the house, tell them off, cheat on the test, light the fire, steal the booze, get behind the wheel, date that person, blow your money.
Most of us blessed with loving parents forget that from the start they worried about our health, our influences, our whereabouts, and our decisions. We forget that worry has no time limit. We forget what we, as children and teenagers, thought of our parents, forget we once considered ourselves invincible. Thought we knew it all. We forget, too, that our own parents went through all these same things.
Time, imprinted with experience, helps remind us. But it only goes so far. We can’t enter our parents’ minds. Can’t enter our kids’ minds either. You have to use your imagination. We’re good at imagining. Some of what we imagine will be wrong, but not all of it. If you try, you can imagine correctly some of what’s going on in those souls so dear to you.
It’s hard to believe that in the minutes before choosing murder, Caleb thought of his parents or gave a moment to appreciate what they might think of him. It’s hard to imagine his parents could in any way comprehend what must have gone through his head to drive with Cain to that mosque in San Diego and then step over the edge. But it seems that in the aftermath of their crime, Caleb’s parents Marco and Lilliana did succeed in getting into the heads of the victims’ loved ones, a ways at least.
“As much as we mourn the child we raised and love,” they wrote, “we mourn even more deeply for the innocent lives of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad.”
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