Darth Vader Moments

I’ve used this analogy before- modern positive parenting= Obi Wan Kanobi…”those are not the droids you’re looking for” and traditional punishment parenting= Darth Vader…”I will blow up your planet if you piss me off.”  Overly simplified but I find it helpful.

I often wonder where my Darth Vader side comes from.

Most of my adult life I have been working on not blowing people’s planets up just because I am upset. Deep in my gut I know that violence never solved any problem…and yet… I fight the urge to hurt people when they hurt me.

If my kids don’t listen, if they speak rudely, if they make messes and don’t clean them up, if they forget to close the front door, if they use my stuff without asking… maybe not the first time, maybe not even the 4th time but push me too far and my highly contained urge to punish can still erupt. Cut me off in traffic, say something stupid on Facebook, blow off an appointment with me or say something insensitive and my urge to punish is not only reserved for my children.

I have a complicated relationship with punishment. I was a super good kid. Maybe I hated the risk of punishment. Maybe I loved all the praise I got for being good. I only know that I was about 17 when I figured out that I didn’t really want to be a good girl anymore. I think I ran the numbers and figured out that it actually didn’t pay off to be good all the time. It certainly appeared as though lots of people were breaking rules, doing whatever they wanted and they were having a hell of a lot more fun.

The teenage years (and I will admit my rebellious stage was very late) are prime for challenging the status quo, for testing limits. For the first time the way that we think the world works becomes just one possibility rather than the whole truth

Before we 4, we learned the ways of the world. We learned gravity and right from wrong and about whether it was ok to expect life to be fair. We learned what happens when you make a mistake…because we made a lot of them. We learned to how to make ourselves feel better and when it is safe to ask for help. We learned who we were and who we weren’t. We learned racism and sexism and classism and we learned privilege. We learned exactly where this put us in the world. Once we had this all figured out it just became the truth about how the world worked, even if we totally got it wrong because we were only 4.

Our Darth Vader self believes that people learn by being punished, that we have to make sure they know how much they hurt us, that we’re suckers if we let people get away with treating us poorly. Darth Vader believes that people are basically bad and selfish and that if our feelings get hurt it is because someone intentionally did something to us. Darth Vader doesn’t have much distress tolerance- he struggles to forgive, understand, trust and let go.
More than anything, I am committed to raising kids who have a hell of a lot less Darth Vader than I do. I see them being hurt without thought of retaliation. I see them being patient when others struggle. I see them understanding that people are basically doing the best that they can. In their world, it is ok to make mistakes. In their world, learning is part of the journey. And they understand that when Mom goes all Darth Vader on them it likely means she needs a nap….or a hug.