Project Love - What legacy do you want to leave?

CHAPTER 1
It’s All About the Footprints!

Raise your words, not your voice.

It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

– Rumi

I will never forget that rainy Monday afternoon. My wife was travelling for work, our nanny had called in sick, and it was launch day for the project I had been leading for close to a year.

My two-year-old daughter had a fever, and my three-year-old son was extremely hyper from being home all morning and was acting out. I had not checked the voicemails on my cell phone and was thinking about the urgent emails I needed to respond to, but feeding my children was a higher priority. I put on their favorite Disney movie, Dumbo, to entertain them while I warmed up two cups of soup. I sat between my kids on the couch in front of the TV and placed the cup of soup for my son on my lap, because it was still too hot, and started to feed my daughter from the other cup.

I had just finished feeding my sick daughter the first spoon when my son suddenly did a backflip and somehow managed to kick both cups! The hot cup spilled on my pants and burned my legs while he kicked the other cup of soup right out of my hand, promptly spilling it all over my daughter. The cup then landed on our tile floor and exploded into a thousand pieces. I jumped and yelled, which scared my children.

They had never heard me yell that loudly. I was so mad and turned toward my son, who was crawling his way to the other side of the couch. Without thinking I slapped his behind as he was trying to run away. I felt an instant tingling in the palm of my hand and knew right away that I had hit my son much harder than I had intended. He howled.

Our living room had turned into a circus ring! I felt a sense of panic. What had I done? But I decided that vacuuming the broken glass was a higher priority than calming my children, who were both crying. My daughter was crying as loudly as my shocked little boy. My cell phone started to ring. I was frustrated, angry, agitated, and mad at my son for causing all this mess. So I decided to ignore him, and after I cleaned up the mess, I picked up my daughter.

My son was inconsolable. I had never seen him look at me with such fear in his eyes. I became worried as he continued crying with the same intensity and screamed, “My butt hurts so much, Daddy!” I got really concerned, so I put my daughter down right away and went to get my son, but he kicked and pushed me away. I somehow managed to pick him up and pulled his pants down to examine his bottom that was hurting so much.

As a child raised in a culture and family that lived by the motto: “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” I had often heard my parents say to me, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” when they used corporal punishment to discipline me. And indeed, seeing my own fingerprints on his skin that were almost as large as my son’s tiny three-year-old bottom hurt me deeply. I couldn’t stop my tears. I pulled out a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer and placed it on his Superman underwear and began sobbing and begging my son to forgive me. I will never forget holding my son while he was crying and asking, “Why did you hit me so hard, Daddy?”

I never imagined that I could ever physically punish my own children after all the “discipline” I had endured both at home and in school. Spanking and even hitting was a fairly regular method of discipline when I was a child growing up in Iran. But seeing the imprint of my own hand on my son’s tiny bottom evoked the most intense pain I have ever felt in my physical body. In that defining moment, I realized how easy it is for parents who are stressed, frustrated, angry, or overwhelmed to unintentionally hurt their children because that’s what was done to them.

The idea of “parent footprint” was born on that rainy afternoon, which has been one of the worst days of my life. It was clearly a turning point because at 12:45 p.m. on that Monday I decided to dedicate my life to helping educate parents not to hurt their children the same way they had been hurt.

True privilege is not a financial inheritance; it’s an emotional one. It’s a privilege when parents carefully re-examine their own childhood history so they can identify a repetition of behaviors or expectations from their own parents that they do not want to pass onto their children. It’s a privilege when parents can love and respect their children despite their errors and rebellions. It’s a true privilege when parents can demonstrate to their children that all humans deserve love and respect.

Mr. Monster

A lot of parents tell stories about their children’s escapades. The story might be about the time we got lost in the mall or grabbed hold of the back of the school bus, or maybe it’s the time we broke our leg, or ran away from home. We all have childhood memories that carry an emotional charge we have not forgotten, in part because they’ve become part of our family legacy, and hence our identity as adults.

This story took place in Tehran, the capital of Iran, on a cold night in the autumn of 1972. My parents often told this, their favorite tale, to friends and relatives to illustrate what a brave child I was until they realized, many years later, that they would probably have been reported to child protective services had this incident taken place decades later in their new country.

I was a high-spirited child, a common way of describing children that we now understand as having sensory processing challenges. While all children can seem quirky or particular about their likes and dislikes, children with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), which I now know I had, are easily overwhelmed because of their difficulty integrating sensory information that can interfere with their everyday functioning. Like many unaware parents of that generation, my parents believed that I was consciously choosing to be defiant whenever I reacted strongly. My parents were not aware of my extreme desire to cuddle, to be touched, stroked, and caressed, which are key characteristics and symptoms that define SPD in toddlers.

I know that my parents loved me to the best of their ability, as every parent loves their child, but I do not recall a single comforting hug, or a loving touch, because I had always done “something bad,” or had said something inappropriate. As a result, the memories of my childhood interactions with my parents are fairly specific to the consequences of my actions.

What I remember about my childhood was a deep yearning for physical touch and affection and an extreme fear of darkness. It was my unmet hunger for physical touch and affection that made me fall so deeply in love with my aunt Maryam, who was as beautiful as Cinderella and as loving as Mother Theresa. I used to love sitting on my aunt Maryam’s lap like a kitten—the proof is in all of our family pictures—and used to follow her everywhere like a puppy.

We all have a need for physical touch and affection from the minute we are born until the hour we die, yet some of us need it more than others. My happiest childhood memories are the moments when my aunt Maryam was filling up my always-empty love tank with her loving touch. I still remember how she used to stroke and caress my hair with such genuine love and affection. I was only four, but I remember the night of my beloved auntie Maryam’s wedding like it was yesterday. I was dressed in a brand-new suit with a white dress shirt and my first tie. More than 200 guests had gathered at my grandparents’ house for the ceremony. My auntie Maryam looked beautiful in her white wedding dress, but I was miserable and crying my eyes out while all the adults around me were laughing. I loved my aunt deeply; she was the one person in the family who showed me attention and physical affection.

Seeing how upset I was, my aunt took my hands in her small, white-gloved hands and led me into the kitchen. She kneeled down to my height and looked into my eyes with such tenderness. “How handsome you look in your suit!” she said. “Some lucky girl will be very happy to be your wife when you’re old enough to get married.” My beautiful auntie then said that she loved me so much, like her own son, and explained that by the time I had grown up and was ready to get married, she would be an old woman. While everyone was laughing at me, she took the time to acknowledge and respect my feelings and gave me a big hug and kiss before she walked out of the kitchen and got married.

My brother, five years older than me, burst into the kitchen and saw me wiping the tears from my face. Surrounded by his friends, my brother decided to distract and torture me, which was his habit and favorite hobby, by inventing a fake contest that I agreed to participate in. “The grand prize is a BB gun,” he promised because he knew that I loved BB guns almost as much as I loved my auntie Maryam. My brother had a BB gun but he never let me use it. He and his friends had created a “magical mix” that we had to drink to win the prize. “Whoever can drink it all the way will win a BB gun,” my brother urged.

It didn’t take much effort on my part to push all the older kids out...