The Unlived Life of the Parent

For school, Paul had to conduct oral interviews with family members, asking them the question: What was life like for you when you were my age? Then he had to take those interviews and incorporate them into a poster of his family tree. This was a big job, and he needed some help. I listened to him do the interviews, typed them up, and printed out a variety of family photographs. Then I had to step back and let him do his thing. It was so hard!

He wanted two trees, one for the family he has with me and Ben and one for his birth family. He wanted to put a "fan genealogy" chart on the top of each of his two trees. He had certain photos he liked and wouldn't use others that I really liked. He had own opinions and his own ideas and ignored my increasingly more direct appeals to do make the poster a different way (meaning my way!)

Recognizing the struggle I was having with myself about this, I remembered yet again a quote from the famous psychologist Carl Jung:

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

I often think of this when I'm taking too much interest in wanting Paul to do something a certain way. When I stop and think about it, I sometimes realize that I'm putting myself too much in his place because I want to do that very thing myself and haven't. Or I want to do something else that seems too hard so I focus on trying to control Paul's stuff instead.

In this case, I realized that Paul's project was renewing a buried interest I had in writing down Ben's family tree. His mother had given me a great deal of oral history about Ben's family and passed along some documents, but I hadn't organized the information in any way. So as Paul pasted down his photos and drew in his tall trees with the "genealogy fan" tops, all in his own way, I signed myself onto Ancestry.com and began creating Ben's family tree in the adult way...online. Working on it has been a lot more fun than arguing with Paul about how to make his poster! Just today I saw Ben's Great-Great-Grandfather's naturalization record online, which was pretty thrilling.