Image credit: Photo by igorms on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

When my kids were infants, the hard work of parenting was mostly physical: dealing with extreme sleep deprivation, lugging babies and their gear around, changing diapers, keeping dangerous objects out of reach. But the older the kids get, the more the work shifts to areas that are social and emotional. My daughter and son each have their own unique challenges when it comes to social interactions, but both of them have a way of shining a light on my own issues in relationships, usually in a way that makes me fear they've inherited the worst of my character defects.

A few weeks ago, I asked my 5-year-old daughter Janie how her day at kindergarten went. "It was good. We made paper snowmen. But Valerie didn't because she was sick today."

Valerie is her closest friend, so I said, "Oh, did you miss her?"

"Actually," said Janie, "it was fine. She wants to play with me all the time, and sometimes I want to play with other people. Like at lunch, she always says, 'Janie, sit here! Sit here!' But I don't always want to sit there. I like other kids too, but she doesn't like to play with anyone else. So today I got to play with my other friends."

The situation made every caretaking bone in my codie body tingle. After all, I felt like I had so been there. When I was in elementary school, I was Allison Walker's best friend. Ok, not really friend: codependent, caretaker, social accessory. I was earning my codie merit badges in that relationship, working my way up to become a full fledged codependent one day.

You see, I actually didn't like Allison Walker much at all; she really got on my nerves. But I felt sorry for her. I was the one person in all the school who couldn't bear to be mean to her, who didn't pick on her or bully her. Instead, I quietly despised her. And that was the closest thing she had to a friend, so she held onto me like a drowning woman onto a life ring, and I both prided myself on it and deeply resented her for it. I'd dread getting on the bus every day and seeing her sitting there, saving my seat. "Mary, sit here!" I'd listen to her chat happily to me all the way home about things I wasn't interested in, and never said a word because I couldn't bear to hurt her feelings.

Allison's mother saw through me though, and I hated her for it. She once came out to our car, where I was hiding while my mother dropped something off at their house, and she called me out for pretending I hadn't come along. She knew I was trying to avoid seeing Allison. And all I could think was, "For crying out loud, woman! Cut me some slack. No one else will hang out with your annoying daughter, and I will. I'm doing both of you a favor here. Show me some gratitude!" She didn't tell her daughter, but we both she didn't like or appreciate me either. Eventually Allison's family moved away. She wrote me letters, but I never wrote back. She was someone else's problem now: some new codie kid at her new school. And I knew her mom would understand my silence.

So, here was my child, with her own chorus of "sit here, sit here" to deal with. And oh, how those codie instincts kicked in and made me want to jump in and fix this problem, to control her life and manage her friendships and interactions so she (unlike me) would turn out right. Instead, I took a deep breath and listened. "I think," said Janie, "I'm going to tell Valerie that I sometimes want to play with other people. Maybe she will want to play with them too." A few days later, she came home and said, "Valerie and Ben and I played hopscotch today. Ben is my friend and I like to play with him and now Valerie is getting to know him too." Turns out my daughter may mirror my issues back to me, but she is not me in how she handles them. And thank goodness.