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[quote=Anonymous]My child is too young to assess me at this point. I hope I get a decent grade but who knows. I work very hard at it.

I'd give my dad a D and my mom a C+. They were abusive, physically and emotionally. But I get that they were also abuse survivors and to some degree they did not feel they had a choice. They had kids very young, which was also not something over which they felt they had a choice. But my childhood was really hard and I still very much deal with the repercussions of it.

I think possibly my dad deserves an F but I can't bring myself to give it to him. I think he's a broken person. He lacks the self-awareness necessary for improvement. He was physically abusive and that's upsetting, but to be honest I think the hardest thing about having him as a parent was that he is a true narcissist. I don't think he even knows how to think of my siblings and I as people (or my mom, for that matter). I don't think he knows how to think beyond his own immediate needs, plus he's deeply insecure and doesn't know how to meet his own needs either. I guess I give him a D because he could have been worse. I drank too much but is not actually an alcoholic. He hit us but he never hit my mom. He did provide for us, which is worth something. So D it is.

I think my mom was actually an A at some things. I think if she'd had a better partner and been able to have kids a little later in life, get some distance from her own family and a little life experience, I actually think she could have been a good mom. I think in some ways I'm the mom she could have been if she'd had these things. She worked hard at it too. But she didn't protect us from our dad, and also she never got treatment for her mental health problems and that led to a lot of emotional abuse that is probably harder to deal with now as an adult. Now that I know what was happening. I always knew being hit was wrong, that this was their failure. I didn't understand until later that a lot of the other stuff -- the yelling, silent treatment, blaming us for their own issues, expecting us to run the house and take care of ourselves -- I didn't know how bad that was until much later. It was totally normalized.

So my mom winds up with a C even though I think she is a much more whole person than my dad, with much greater potential to do good. But the circumstances really didn't support her in being that.

If I can get a B from my kid, I consider it a win. Plus kids grade on a curve. My own child, thankfully, does not know what it is to be hit, yelled at, ignored. So she might give me a C but I'll know, and that's enough for me.[/quote]

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