If it's not one thing . . .

 . . . it's your mother.

This phrase has made me grin since I first heard it years ago. It brings together our cultures' collective pastime of analysing our behaviour and childhoods, and how our adult relationships with our parents (it's not just mothers!) can be a minefield of subtle slights, sighs and feeling like, no matter what your life is like as an adult, one minute with your parents, and you're right back to being the child again, and all the feelings that can bring. And our culture seems to focus on the negative. Was it the missed sports events, was it not having what other kids had, was it being made to eat food you hated, was it report cards that weren't up to their expectations? For many, it is far more serious issues, where the role of parent was only as important as how little you could give to it, and for those children, we all feel a great sadness. There are many adults who have come out of awful childhood situations, and those that I have met have moved on however they can, and focus on the future, having laid their pasts to rest in some way. But our culture as a whole is so often about 'our parents' and how they have affected us negatively. The jokes about therapy, the mother-in-law characters in films, the recurring seasonal movies about adult children coming home for Christmas only to descend into squabbles with their mothers and fathers amidst a symphony of other relatives and siblings. These momemts in film are so funny, because they touch us, they are familiar to us. Family is where we come from, so often, and it does shape who we are. And so we joke about it, and commiserate about it, and vow, as parents ourselves, to not be like our parents, even though we know we are, in that moment and many others, being so exactly like them it's uncanny. My mother always tells of how she'd go to bed at night vowing that tomorrow she would not yell. That tomorrow she'd enjoy the moments with us, and be patient, and have things organised, and not worry about the cleaning or the mess we were making, and soak up our childhoods as the precious, fleeting moments in time that they were. And then tomorrow, when it came, she'd be yelling before we made it out the door to school. She'd tell me this in response to my own feelings of inadequacy as a parent, of messing up my kids, yelling too much, not enjoying the moments and ignoring the trivial things. We are so much like our parents, even as we vow to somehow do things differently, to find that magic solution that so eluded their generation. Yet somehow, instead of finding connection in these similarities, in finding support from each other, we turn to focusing on our differences, in those achilles heels of our relationships with our parents that make us groan and sigh when they offer advice, or guidance. We've made childhood angst into a topic of entertainment and shared greif.

In other non-Western cultures it seems to be unquestioned that you respect and appreciate your parents, no matter what they do. You know how hard they work for you, how much they sacrifice, how much they love you. It is simply an accepted fact. And so you act accordingly.

I wonder if those adults have a different experience of dealing with losing their parents. Are there things left unsaid, worries that they never enjoyed their parents while they had them around? For that is the flip-side of my culture's angst about our parents: we sigh and complain about them while they are here, and then regret not enjoying them as much as we could have, when they are gone.

My dear friend lost one of her parents last summer, his death unexpected, arriving in the night, leaving his children in shock and full of greif. And as I watch her and her sibling and their children deal with this, with the feeling of wishing they'd had more time, of things they'd have said if they'd known this was coming, I keep coming back to our perspective that our families are permanent. That that is why we can afford to analyse them, and criticise them, and be driven crazy by them. Because we believe, as we did as children, that they will be with us forever, that when we finally find the time to appreciate them, to enjoy their company, they'll still be here for us. Just as sibling rivalry is an accepted part of our perspective on families, so is our frustration at our father's stubborness or our irritation at our mother's nagging. Of course we never treat our friends how we treat our families. But perhaps we should treat our families how we treat our friends, because they are our people, our kin. They are where we come from, and shape who we are, for better or worse.

When my friends and I get into talking about how our mother's drove us nuts that week, or how our fathers just didn't get it, a friend of mine is silent. She lost both of her parents years ago. And she is full of stories of how much she appreciates them now, how she wished she'd gotten it earlier on, when they were still here. And as parents ourselves now, we would of course want our children to love us and appreciate us now, not after we're gone. My parents are so saddened by the loss of my grandparents, both of them wishing they could've talked to them more before they'd died. No one wants that sort of grief for their own children. But maybe our culture perpetuates it by laughing at our families instead of cherishing them. And maybe in some ways we need that, as a release, a bit, of the frustrations we have with those relationsahips we have with our parents and siblings, relationships we were born or adopted into, and now must maintain forever. My mother and I laughed and cried through Steel Magnolias in the 80's, because it showed how our family ties are both funny and impermanent, reminding us to live in the moment. Maybe we are afraid to acknowledge that we will lose each other, that as time marches on, we will have to say goodbye to our siblings and parents, to those people we have known longer than anyone else. So we should keep the laughter; laughter is so good. But maybe we should also have more love, more talking. Some kind words amidst the jokes and angst. Let our parents know, while we can, that we love them, and appreciate them. Set an example for our children, and hopefully help them not feel as burdened with greif when we leave them.

xoxo
C