My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.My children were a real handful but I enjoyed staying honme with them and raising them. Being a good mom is one of my favorite things.
-- Mark Twain
I was able to give them what some people would likely call unconditional love but my oldest son once pointed out to me that a mother's love is actually highly conditional: It is conditional on you being her child.
Perhaps he has clarity about that detail in part because, as a professor of mine once said, "I am the primitive of my way." So I taught him that from an early age even though having him later reflect that back to me was eye opening for me.
He was a very bright child, which is part of why he was such a pain to raise, but it came with the silver lining that I was able to engage him intellectually from an early age in a way that is probably not common.
When he was four years old, I told him he really needed to deal with some of his issues because I would likely die before him, so he could't simply count on mom handling things for him that he had trouble with and that no one else knew how to help him with.
He was a smart aleck and said he would die with me and follow me into the afterlife or some nonsense. But after he was an adult he told me that conversation really scared the heck out of him and he tried a LOT harder than he otherwise would have at times when it was really hard to deal with his issues.
I also spent a lot of years rolling my eyes at his crazy-making antics and saying sort of half jokingly "For your eighteenth birthday present, you are getting a thirty-day notice of eviction." It was a reminder to him of a detail I had spelled out explicitly at times: That this sweet deal that mom will have your back no matter how awful you are has an expiration date attached to it.
I let him know from as early as age five that I had parental rights and that fact meant that I could intercede on his behalf with the world, assuming he didn't do anything seriously bad, like burn a building down.
I also let him know that the rules were literally different for legal minors and if he was going to screw up big, he should do it before he was eighteen. Once he was eighteen, the consequences for bad behavior were likely to be much more serious.
I was able to be very accepting of him in way a lot of special needs children do not seem to get from anyone. He once told me "You were the only adult who treated me like I HAD problems. Everyone else treated me like I WAS a problem."
A good friend of mine who was very knowledgeable about special needs children once told me that a lot of special needs kids get beaten because parents get exasperated and just don't know what to do. I never beat my kids, though I did sometimes go hurl myself onto my bed and have a good cry when I was at wit's end and didn't know what else to do at that moment.
My view was that my son was just kind of stupid about social stuff. I didn't feel he was trying to be bad.
I felt he just had a lot more to learn than average because he's missing some innate something that helps other children mavigate the social piece. He needed a great deal more explicit instruction on how social stuff worked and I saw that as ignorance, not badness on his part.
My ex and my father were both career military. What parenting and military service have in common is this: You are responsible for the outcome even though you may not be in control and may not be at fault for what happened.
In the military, you can't give excuses for your failure. You can't whine to your boss about how "But people are like trying to KILL ME!"
Yeah, he knows. So?
As a parent, I was very "The buck stops here." I didn't tolerate excuses from myself. If my kids were having issues, I needed to find answers. Period.
In the military, they say "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Parenting is a bit like that: You have to adjust your plans as you see how your children respond in ways you could not have anticipated.
It's a challenge to figure out how to get the outcome that's needed when you can't control the other person. I'm not a controlling parent in part because I know how default "Don't tread on me!" my wiring is and I figured my kids had half their genes from me.
So I worked really hard at finding effective solutions in the face of raising defiant, difficult, smart problem-children. I'm pleased with the outcome and so are my kids.
I'm pleased in part because I did not do what people seem to assume I must have done: I did not tell them "Mom will ALWAYS love you. Mom will ALWAYS be there for you. etc"
Instead, I told them that childhood was a special time in which the world would give them a lot of latitude for making mistakes and trying to figure it out but there was an expiration date on that. They needed to be prepared to somehow behave better once they were adults because I was not legally obligated to keep being there for them after that and the world would have a lot less patience, understanding and forgiveness as well.
My sons are in their thirties and still live with me. I'm divorced from their father who was also capable of being really difficult about some things.
My oldest son has told me he behaves in part because I left their father, so he knows for a fact that there are limits to what I will put up with and I will ditch him too if he pushes it too far. So we still get along because I don't tell my kids "Anything goes! Because Mom will always love you!"
I don't believe in unconditional love. If I did, I imagine both my sons would have criminal records.