They say we look at ourselves with parental eyes all our lives: we admire ourselves if our parents admired us, and we despise if they despised us. They say that with their words we praise ourselves and scold. And how to get rid of it, eh?
When asked about my main drawback, I always answered immediately: "Lazy! There's nothing to even think about. I'm the laziest person I've ever seen." I remember how the therapist, a dear aunt, looked at me over her glasses: "Natasha, remind me for which publications you are writing now." I began to count my fingers: "On Mondays I hand in a column for this magazine, on Tuesdays – for this..." It turned out that I keep five weekly columns.
And these were not passing texts. In general, I work conscientiously, since both editors and readers are waiting for: "Well, what will Radulova give out this week" - and they have every right to do so. A weekly column is not "sat down and wrote." This is an endless tension – you have to read a lot, think a lot, jump up in the middle of the night and write something down, in the morning, taking a shower, think about the title, and in the queue at the supermarket checkout - over the subtitle. You have to constantly, always look for topics. Banging your head against the wall if you can't tell the story simply, easily, so that it "reads in one breath.".. What can I say! This is hard labor. And if he hadn't been so painfully attractive to me, I would have run away to the miners a long time ago.
So I had five columns a week. In addition, I worked on the staff of a federal publication, where I was required to travel to the regions to prepare large, serious reports. In rubber boots, I dragged myself to all sorts of villages where residents were interested: "There is nothing more to write about in Moscow? Why did you come here by train and two buses, poor thing? Well, let's take you at least to the cowshed, or something." Returning from the cowsheds, I sat down to sculpt articles for three glossy magazines, and glossy editors-in-chief took out my brain with their calls: "Funnier! Even funnier!" I didn't sleep much, I almost didn't communicate with friends, I even wrote one text a day on vacation – my rubrics didn't go on vacation.
"Is that it?" the therapist asked me. I drooped: "No. I'm also blogging. Several posts a day." I began to realize that my idea of myself, to put it mildly, does not really correspond to reality. Why, being loaded to the limit of my abilities, did I keep saying, "I'm lazy"?
"Whose words are these?" –I knew that this question was inevitable. I cried because I recognized these intonations with which I reproached myself for idleness–that's what my parents and grandparents said all my childhood. I was an excellent student, after school I sat with my younger brother, did my homework, helped with the housework – who grew up in the village knows what it is and at what age children there begin to work in the field and in the garden. I didn't have almost a single free minute. And still I heard: "You're lazy, you should just read. You even wash dishes while looking at a book. The world has never seen such a lazy girl!"
Of course, they said so, because they themselves were taught the same thing in their childhood. Of course, they loved me and just tried to raise a hardworking person who could achieve something in life. And, of course, they knew only one way to raise a child - to criticize more often.
Tennis player Andre Agassi wrote in his autobiography that his father forced him to train literally like a slave and at the same time was always dissatisfied. He took all his achievements for granted, and was ready to tear him apart for the slightest mistake. Little Andre dreamed that one day he would break out of this slavery. But the moment came when he realized that he could not escape from his father, this man was forever in his mind. "I'm playing with a boy named Jeff Tarango. He owns a racket much worse than me, and yet I lose the first set – 6-4. I'm shocked. My father is ready to kill me... "Why didn't you listen to me? Why did you keep shortening the punches?" But for the first time in my life, I'm not afraid of my father. And even if he's furious, I'm even more furious than he is. I'm angry at Tarango, at God, at myself... I had to prevent the game from ending like this. Now there will always be defeat on my record. And there's nothing you can do about it. I am unable to continue the thought, but it comes by itself: I may be wrong. I am imperfect. Defective... For many years I listened to my father yell at me for my mistakes. One single defeat – and now I am cruelly executing myself. I adopted his manner – his impatience, perfectionism, rage, and now his voice is not just like mine: his voice became mine. I don't need a father to torment me anymore. I'll be fine on my own."
I didn't need my parents either, I blamed myself without their help. She treated herself the way they treated me – they were also perfectionists, confident that her daughter could have done more and better if she had tried... Clean up the rooms, wash the windows, rub the floor, whitewash the kitchen, weed the beds, plant seven rose bushes under the windows, get to know yourself and pour coffee for seven weeks. Don't have time? So hurry up!
When another woman complains to me that she comes across scoundrels who either beat her or morally humiliate her, then I always want to ask: "How did your dad treat you?" Or maybe the mother always repeated that no one would need a daughter with such a character – here she is he does not pretend to much. The daughter persuades herself all her life with a mother's voice: "I'm a fool. Where do I go," and the world willingly responds with an echo: "You're a fool. Where are you going."
I do not know if it is possible to permanently change these parental attitudes, but there are ways to correct and weaken their destructive impact. You will have to realize a lot, comprehend, forgive, work out a lot, and even in the office of the same therapist. It's difficult and painful and not everyone wants it. And most citizens do not even think about such things at all.
But the biblical principle "What you sow, you reap" still works, whether we know about it or not. And when I read about some extraordinary women, with whom kings, poets and other artists fell in love, who drove all their contemporaries crazy, I smile: "Probably, this girl was adored in her family, since she behaved like a crown princess all her life."
Lilya Brik, the one about whom Mayakovsky wrote: "Apart from your love, I have no sun," she told in a book of memoirs about how she went abroad to study sculpture in her youth. And then, as if by the way, she mentioned one episode: "Dad came to see me from Kissingen. He begged me very much to return to Moscow with him, he cried over my hands, roughened from work, stroked and kissed them, saying: "Look, Lilinka, what have you done with your beautiful hands! Drop it all, let's go home." But I have decided firmly to become a Praxiteles."
Dad thought everything about her was beautiful, told her about it all the time, he stroked and kissed her hands – how many fathers say that and do that? For Lily, it was so normal, so natural, that she didn't even attach much importance to it. Is it any wonder that then she was considered an extraordinary beauty by all the men who communicated with her? Although now, looking only at the dispassionate photos, citizens exclaim: "Yes, this Brick is scary as a goose! Why was everyone so upset about her?" People treat us the way we treat ourselves. And we treat ourselves the way our parents treated us.
That girl, over whose hands her adoring dad cried: "Let's go home, Lilinka!" – then she will receive a letter from the great Russian poet: "There is no life without you. I've always said it, I've always known it. Now I feel it with all my being... If you don't even answer, you're one of my thoughts. As I loved you seven years ago, so I love you this second."
Love your children.
