Plain truths about parents

Most of us love our parents and disappoint our parents in equal measure. The disappointment is not the failure. The failure is letting the disappointment become the whole story. There is room for both, and most of the work of being a grown child is the work of learning to hold both at the same time without collapsing one into the other. The cultural narratives about adult children and their parents are mostly bad. The first bad narrative is the reconciliation narrative, in which the adult child, at some moment of grace, releases the grievances of childhood and the parent, having quietly grown, receives the release with humility. This story is satisfying. This story is also rare. It happens, but it happens in a minority of cases, and the people in whom it does not happen often spend years wondering whether they are failing at adulthood because they have not had their movie scene. The second bad narrative is the cut-off narrative, in which the adult child, finally enlightened to the parent's fundamental incapacity, severs the relationship cleanly and walks into a healed life. This story is also satisfying. This story is also, mostly, fiction. Adults who cut off a parent do not, in most cases, experience a clean healed life afterward. They experience a different set of difficulties, which include the ongoing presence of the parent in their mental architecture even after the physical relationship has ended. What actually happens, in most adult-parent relationships, is something messier than either narrative. The adult child finds a workable middle distance. The parent remains imperfect. The phone calls happen with some regularity. The visits are tolerated. The disappointment is acknowledged. The love continues. None of this looks like a movie scene. All of it looks like the actual shape of long human relationships once the romance is gone. Some specific truths that the cultural narratives skip over. The first is that your parents are not, primarily, your parents. They are people with their own histories, their own parents, their own marriages and divorces and small humiliations. The role of 'parent' is something they performed inside a life that was mostly not about you. Most parents, given the chance to articulate it, would admit that they were thinking about themselves during most of your childhood, not about you. This is not a betrayal. This is the structure of being a person. The second truth is that most parents did not have a parenting philosophy. They had inherited material from their own parents, which they reproduced with slight modification, which they sometimes resented and sometimes endorsed, which they almost never examined. The thing that hurt you most in your childhood was probably not, in your parents' minds, a deliberate choice. It was a default. They were running a script they had not written and had not edited. The third truth is that the things they did do deliberately — the things they chose, the things they are proud of, the things they would tell their friends about — are often not the things you remember. They remember the camping trip. You remember the silence at dinner. They remember the help with college applications. You remember the time they were drunk at your high school play. The asymmetry is not anyone's fault. It is the difference between the parent's experience of parenting and the child's experience of being parented. The fourth truth is that the adult child's job, eventually, is to make peace with the asymmetry without requiring the parent to do the same work. The parent may or may not do it. Most parents will not. The expectation that they will, if you just ask the right way or wait long enough, is the expectation that produces a particular kind of decades-long quiet rage. The expectation is reasonable. The expectation is also mostly going to be disappointed. The fifth truth is that you are not required to forgive your parents, but you are required to decide what you are going to do with the absence of forgiveness. Some adults carry an unforgiven grievance for life. The carrying is its own labor. It can be done. The cost is that the grievance occupies a portion of the psychological real estate that could be doing other work. Some adults forgive without reconciling — they release the grievance privately, without the parent's involvement, and the rest of the relationship continues at whatever distance is sustainable. This is, in my observation, the most workable arrangement for the majority of difficult adult-parent relationships. The sixth truth is that your parents will eventually die. The deathbed scene most people imagine does not usually arrive. The deaths are mostly mundane: a hospital room at three in the morning, a phone call from a hospice nurse, an estranged sibling delivering the news in a text message. What you have unresolved at the moment of death will be the thing you have unresolved for the rest of your life, because the other party is no longer available to do further work. This is a strong argument for doing the work earlier, even if the work feels unfinished. The work is rarely finished. The work is what matters. The seventh truth, which is the most useful one and the one almost nobody says out loud, is that the experience of being an adult child of imperfect parents is universal. Everyone you meet has some version of it. The specific shape varies. The general category is shared by almost every adult on the planet. This is not a comfort that erases the specifics. It is a comfort that places the specifics inside a broader fact. You are not unusually unlucky. You are not unusually wounded. You are inside a category that contains most of humanity, and most of humanity has figured out, eventually, how to live inside it. Make the phone call. Or do not make the phone call. Forgive privately. Or do not forgive. Visit at Thanksgiving. Or send the apology card. The specific choice is yours. The category — adult child of imperfect parents, doing the long work of integrating them — is what most of us are inside. The integration is the work. The disappointment is real and the love is real and they are both true at the same time. Plain truth, plainly stated.