Parents, Part Deux
The Princess Tikka Masala, exiled leader of the Channa Dahl and taker-on of random Nigerian con artists, commented on the last post:
Is it being that you are telling me that you are writing things that you are not wishing for your parents to be seeing but you are wishing for us to be seeing?
And for a moment, I wondered about my weird self. Oh god, I thought. What is wrong with me that I would tell random pixel people things that I wouldn’t tell my loving and longsuffering parents? I am a weird, strange person in need of serious help.
That moment passed.
But there was another moment, a longer moment, of feeling sad about the truth of this. I don’t know how conscious a choice it is, or if it’s a choice at all, but I cannot show my self, my whole self, to my parents. I have tried over the years. It simply doesn’t happen. It’s not that they reject it, or that we get along better if I pretend to be what they want me to be. It’s like a switch. This house, this relationship, is a vortex which sucks my adulthood out of me, what there is of it to begin with. I feel incapable, emotionally volatile, insecure and solitary. Pretty much me at fourteen. In the end, I didn’t only leave home but left the whole damn country so that I could get the space I needed to grow up. To figure out who I was and be it as hard and as well as I could.
I love my parents. They are good, loving, intelligent, generous people. And I am certain they love me. But as parents, they have some serious limits. I don’t really care that they have limits — hell, we all do. And I know that they did the best they could within the boundaries of who they are and I know that they are carrying on doing the best they can within those boundaries. However, within those boundaries is no room for me to be an adult. No room then, when I was trying to grow up. And no room now.
What worries me most about this is not my relationship to my parents. I have grown comfortable with loving them as they are and with accepting the nature of our connection. But I fear — oh how I fear — that I will repeat this with my own children. That somehow, I will not be able to give them the space to be who they are, and that they, in their turn, will be hidden from me as they grow, as I am hidden from my parents. I would so much like to know them, to carry on knowing them and, in all the years to come, see them for who they are and love them.
I am thinking that a parent always remains a parent but this must be a separate thing to them being an adult. In our lives we are all moving on to a tomorrow that is but a shadow of yesterday but older so. Parents must be letting you do this thing. In return for this release they are permitted to be spoiling the grandchildren with lollies that have been boiled.
Our parents are rarified forms of something that existed long ago and might once have been useful but is no longer so in the way that we would like. A strange information-sharing, on-their-terms emotional, generally generous sort but never in a way that would be most satisfying. At least you know you are not alone in your perception of them, or your wish for them to SEE you. I hope their inability to do so does not diminish your own idea of how incredible and capable and adult you are – because I think so.
I think every parent fears becoming their parents….I know I am hoping to be better, different, cooler…I don’t know if it works that way…I am hoping!
“But I fear — oh how I fear — that I will repeat this with my own children. That somehow, I will not be able to give them the space to be who they are, and that they, in their turn, will be hidden from me as they grow, as I am hidden from my parents. “
In October last year you recorded this:
D (definitively): I don’t like raisins.
Me (surprised): Yes, you do.
D (even more definitively): No, I do not.
Me (confused): But what about all those oatmeal raisin cookies you eat?
D (firmly): Mom, there’s a lot of my life you don’t know about.
In my culture if something happens that is tramatic to the spirit that spirit stops growing, whatever the age. That is why you see people whom it appears they are 40 but act as though they could be 12. Each spirit is different, everyone knows different pain.
What makes it even more complex is when the parents have their own tramatic experiance and then go on to have their own children. They pass the feeling of that tramatic experiance onto the child, now the child who was born into this world with it’s own spirit to share, it’s gifts, has more than there own share of duties to carry.
What are YOUR gifts? What do you have to share with this world? What would you give to the people around you and yourself if your spirit was free? What would come naturally?
Now ask that of your children. It doesn’t feel right does it?
But how does one fix that? Are you able to change the dynamic of something that has gone on for some long and now seems comfortable?
Believe. Believe that people want something more, believe that people are capable of giving everything they have, believe that love just isn’t a word in the dictionary.
I bet that your parents WANT to know who you are, they would enjoy the humour and inspight that your life has witnessed. All you have to do is SHOW them how to treat you and accept nothing less than what you deserve.
*smile* I believe in YOU.
Oh stuntmother. You have consoled me in the deepest way through this post. This is EXACTLY what I would write about my parents. All my family actually. (BUt they do read my site on ocassion, so I censor)
Everything you wrote rings so true for me. Especially after coming home from spending the long weekend with my parents and family, I felt like I came home to a touchstone when I read your words.
And as usual, I am forced to believe there is some bizarre cosmic connection between us. Hearts to you.
why is it that the two people who never understood us are the ones who we seek approval from–and hide from–the most?
i like this princess character. i am being much happy with her comments of love and monarching.
I think that there are things you tell your friends but not your parents. There needs to be those lines, they are integral to your relationship with family, friends and self. Just because there are things that you don’t share with your parents doesn’t make you a bad person, parent or daughter.
I had something to write before I read the previous comments–but then got so stuck on the image of “lollies that have been boiled” that I’ve pretty much lost all thought for the afternoon. Time to knit….
BTW–if you read Village Knittiot, also a Philadelphian, she’d talking about family, too.
isn’t it funny
how you always remain
what you always were…
a daughter.
someone’s child.
i never feel my age in my parents home,
i feel somewhat
ageless in a limbo…
a daughter with kids,
a daughter who is a mother who
has a husband…
bizarre.
and then you said that
about pixel people
and for a couple of seconds
i got all messed up
thinking
hey cool, i’m a pixel person,
no, wait, i’m not really the
pixel person, stuntmother is,
but to her i am, but to me
she is…and then i had to
bang my head hard on the
computer desk to make it all stop
and now
i have
a
headache.
and i’m rambling.