The Unwanted Child
Ideally, a child comes into this world when it’s called by the mind and the heart of it’s parents. But many situations in life don’t work out ideally. A great deal of pregnancies are unplanned and unwanted.
The result? Many, many people who start their days amid a total or partial absence of meaning for their existence.
Abortion, even today, is an option that’s heavily rejected by various sectors of society.
In these cases, the decision to give rise to a new life is mediated primarily by moral duty, and not by affection or longing. The consequences of these situations can be very serious.
Desire and construction of the same
It’s possible that some mothers and fathers don’t want to have a child at a given moment in life. If a pregnancy occurs under these conditions, there are two alternatives:
Either the parents unsuccessfully repress their rejection of the new being; or they enter a process of rethinking their expectations and manage to build a desire, based on new emotions that are being aroused.
If the father, mother, or both fail to accept the existence of a child, they may choose to literally abandon the child, or suppress their feelings and understand the situation to be an imposition of fate.
The child will be an intrusion for both of them, whether they accept having and raising it, or not.
Most commonly in such cases, the child grows up amidst great emotional deprivation.
Yes, the child is given food, but it’s not made with love. Yes, it is given a roof, but it feels like a stranger in it’s own home.
Repressed feelings always come back to bite you, even though they’re generally dressed in another guise. That’s also why many parents who have an unwanted child become extremely jealous with them. They don’t even want the oxygen touching them.
They perceive the unwanted child as a being who can be easily destroyed, precisely because their bonds of affection are extremely fragile. When it comes to an unwanted child, rarely does the parent seek quality time to share with them. Playing is nothing more than a waste of time. And every opportunity to speak with them will feel uncomfortable and tense. They feel as if they “have nothing to say.”
The consequences
The emotional distance from parents leaves strong traces in people. There’s an inner belief that “something is missing”, as if there’s a latent question, but not enough words to ask it.
It will be very difficult for unwanted children to build healthy relationships of affection in their adult life. Love is a foreign language to them. They don’t know how to decipher the codes and much less how to build them. It’s very hard for them to need and to be needed.
An affective relationship may be suffocating to them: it’s a defense against intimacy of which they know nothing. Normally they fluctuate between egotism and deep feelings of inferiority. They don’t understand what a balanced and healthy self-esteem looks like.
That’s why, more often than not, they completely shirk their conflicts with peers and superiors, or do nothing but generate them. They speak incessantly about the broken relationship that marked their arrival in the world.
A person with such a background will need help to get through those abysses of love that live in their heart. The most important step is that they recognize that their discomfort doesn’t depend on who they are, but the circumstances that led to their being.
Remember: it’s never too late to have a frank conversation with your parents.
Image courtesy of Creations