April 28th, 2009
If you grew up with one or two parents who loved you but were also just as neurotic as anyone else, you might benefit from performing a thought experiment like this:
Gather all the details of your parent at age 10, 20, 30, etc. I mean time and place, status of world history, what that person was doing for work or school at the time, etc.
Put yourself into their shoes. Live their life through your own eyes. Think about what you would have done under the same circumstances. Think about your attitudes and values: How would they have fared in the same situation?
If you think I'm trying to make you realise, "See? Your parents weren't such bad people after all! Show more gratitude!" then you would be wrong. I only suggest it as a way to get more of the context in which you were born.
Because, if you grew up with one or two parents who loved you but were also just as neurotic as anyone else, then your "back story" might be incomplete. You might live your life feeling somehow vaguely morally superior to your parents, or you might life your life feeling like a failure for not being somehow vaguely morally superior to them (or a combination thereof). What those feelings betray is a simple lack of knowledge.
That is why I think there is value in going back in time and learning the foundations of the life you were born into. You don't have to get to know them as good people you have to idolise, and you don't have to get to know them as bad people you have to condemn ... just see them as plain old people. There's value in that for yourself.
Maybe it makes your parents look more real and less mythically large. Not bad people, not knights in shining armour ... just normal people who had normal experiences and normal reactions. Maybe you look at your own normal life and feel a bit better about it. Your problems are not any different from your parents' problems of the past. And your problems are not a failure that betrays what was a long tradition of perfection, since perfection is something normal people have no business expecting from themselves and others (and people who try to be perfect are tediously boring right up until the moment they explode into a Bohemian orgy of sound, fury, light, and Bacchanalia).
Or maybe your problems show you that everybody has problems, including your parents back in their time. And though they may lie and tell you that you are not living up to the expectations made by their fine example, you can be sure that you are not any different than they were.
Or maybe you demonize your parents and see their imperfect personalities as the shaky foundation that you've had to balance on top of while trying to build your own life. And seeing them as they were—again, not as good and not as bad, but as normal people—might help you to stop painting them as pure evil; because, as you probably already know, the colour you paint your parents in is really the colour of the paint you put onto your paintbrush. And, with neither forgiving or forgetting, but with understanding of them, lifts a burden off your shoulders.
It's giving up the childhood vision; it's seeing them as adult peers, and it is a lesson in freeing our own minds.
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