When their third daughter was about ten years old, a crisis occurred in their lives that brought about a partial resolution of their child-rearing conflicts. Their daughter was diagnosed as having bone cancer. An enormous conflict ensued in which Bea accepted the medical advice she had received and believed they should leave the decision to the experts. An additional biopsy was recommended, but Donald would not allow it to occur and pulled their daughter out of all treatment programs. Within a year, the lesion had disappeared completely, without treatment. Bea, who was traditionally the practical one, believed it was a miracle and became quite religious as a result. Donald, the expressive, emotional member of the couple, was more skeptical and spoke of errors in diagnosis and the possibility of recurrence. Donald and Bea told this story with great relief as though a shadow had passed over. They also demonstrated deep respect for each other. They mentioned that the support they received from friends and family was what held the marriage and family together.
We suspect that another key ingredient was the change this crisis precipitated in both Donald and Bea. After the “miracle” Donald became more practical and realistic (in contrast to his Sicilian upbringing), having been successful in standing-up in an impassioned and unrealistic but loving way for his daughter. By contrast Bea became more idealistic and religious, as well as more open to support from other people, thereby breaking away from her traditional German upbringing. Both of these partners have changed. They now more fully appreciate and complement one another. One does wonder, however, what would have happened if their daughter had not recovered.
Many struggles in the lives of the men and women we have interviewed for all of our projects— and many disagreements among couples we interviewed for the Enduring, Intimate Relationship Project— centered on Generativity One issues: the raising of children or creating and maintaining a specific business, project or production process. These struggles and disagreements often concerned the identification of values and the differentiation between these values and those that were inherited from parents, community, church, or friends. Even after we have come to terms with the separation of our values from those of our parents, something dramatic and often disturbing occurs when we have our first children or start our first mutual project. The voices of our mother or father suddenly come back to haunt us again. We tell our son not to play with that stick or “you’ll poke your eye out” and realize that we are using the same intonations of voice that our parents used and are basing our predictions and in junctures on the same faulty logic as they. We find ourselves using the same outmoded assumptions about how to motivate workers or how to sell products as our father or mother used thirty or forty years ago. These assumptions were out-of-date even back then!
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