I turned 52 recently, and in a few months, my oldest child will turn 21. I don’t see much of him anymore, or hear from him much, but I know he’s off with his partner trying to discover himself and recover from a myriad of traumas and stresses from various sources, including me.

I am navigating being the parent of a young adult without a compass or chart. Many people have their own childhoods and the experiences of their parents and themselves at various ages to fall back on and refer to in difficult situations. They can ask themselves what their parents or perhaps grandparents would have done in any given situation and hopefully rely on that as a guide for how to proceed in their own lives.

I do not have that. My home life was so dysfunctional that almost without exception, I cannot refer to it when dealing with my own children, and I’ve never been able to. This has left me in the horrible situation throughout my children’s lives of being presented with a situation for which my experience only provided negative examples. I knew I shouldn’t pursue those examples, but because I had never been provided with positive examples of how to proceed, I was left with absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, as a parent one cannot just do nothing in certain situations, and so due to my own dysfunctional subconscious programming, I unwittingly repeated those patterns with my own children.

I’m back to looking to my own childhood and how I was treated by my parents as examples of how not to do things. My stepfather was out of my life by age 17, so I was largely only in contact with my mother, who was one of those controlling moms who never seemed to understand that I wasn’t a possession that she owned. As a result, I try to be aware of even the slightest hint that I may be doing the same thing with my own son. I want to be as much of a source of support as I can be without being smothering or controlling.

Again, knowing what not to do doesn’t tell me what to do, an area in which I am still at a loss, with no compass and no chart. I feel horribly ashamed and guilty about this because I am instilled with our culture’s belief that so-called “maternal instinct” is something that is ingrained into every female, and it’s not. If there is a psychological chipset that confers parental competence into people, I didn’t get it, and so I often feel as though there is something “wrong” with me. Nothing is “wrong” with me other than the fact that I was raised in a horribly abusive environment. The question isn’t “what’s wrong with me?”, it’s “what happened to me?”

I made enough bad mistakes with my oldest child that I frequently worry we will never have a healthy adult relationship. It has been with great difficulty that I have allowed him to have his own time and space without bothering him too often. I try to take an approach of letting him contact me, but I probably still send too many cute GIFs and JPGs expressing my love and sorrow. I ask myself if it would have made a difference between my own mother and I if she were taking my approach and we had access to the technology we have today. Would I appreciate a GIF expressing love or sorrow, or would it just annoy me? I’m of the opinion that it’s never a bad thing to tell someone that you care about them or love them, so I go ahead and send them (but not too often).

I’m also of the opinion that it’s valuable to apologize, but only if you address the behavior that caused the mistake in the first place. Apologies are worthless if the initial crime is repeated. Which is a great deal of the reason why I’ve worked so hard on myself therapeutically for the last five years. I know that’s a process that has to be done for oneself ultimately, and self-consideration is part of my process, but I think I’m mostly doing it for the people around me: my husband and my kids, who have suffered the most during the years when my mental health was either unaddressed or mistreated.

I can’t hop in a time machine with my current level of knowledge about psychology, multigenerational trauma, and epigenetics and go back to inform my pre-pregnancy self that she really needs to do some work before she has a baby, because as much as she thinks she’s “over” her childhood, she has no fucking clue what she’s in for, and the fallout from that childhood will do bad things to her and her family. All I can do is take that knowledge and effect as much repair to my current self as possible and make myself as available to my family as possible to make up for not being available in the past. They all carried me for 20 years and suffered for it. Now it’s my turn to carry them, if they’ll have me.

I know all too well the terrible internal conflict that comes from dealing with someone whose mental health is so bad that eventually you lose your compassion. You don’t care anymore why they behave the way they do, you just want to get away from them for the sake of your own survival and sanity. I also know that even if aberrant behaviors aren’t someone’s fault, eventually the people around them may not be able to forgive them anymore, even after they’ve gotten better. I think this is my worst fear when it comes to my oldest child. That I am too late, that it doesn’t matter that I really am changing, getting better, and turning into a nicer person. The person I was always supposed to be. I feel like I deserve a second chance to be a good parent, but I also know that’s not a decision I get to make.

I worry about him a lot, but I know he’ll eventually be okay, with the right support. He’s having a rough time like almost everyone his age and is probably deeply afraid of what the future may hold. Our own relationship is a bit volatile, but I gather that’s normal for a 20-year-old and his menopausal mother. I feel like I can never say or do anything right sometimes, but if there’s any normalcy in our future, that phase of our relationship will pass after he’s fully formed his own adult persona and hopefully doesn’t feel like he has to automatically rebel against anything “parental”.

For now, though, we’re all in transition of one form or another. He into young adulthood, our nephew into late adolescence, me through menopause, moving, and therapy, and my husband also through moving. Everything is different now and we’re all adjusting. I can’t expect the present to look like the past and I’m happier constructing a new present than I am in trying to reconstruct the past. I’m looking forward to when we’re all happier and can just spend casual time together without being stressed or upset about something.