Random: Family

I am procrastinating again but I am also processing. We finally had that talk, my sister and I. Tonight I am trying hard to let her forge her own way ahead and process her childhood in her own way. Processing my father is such a hard thing to do. I know we aren't unique in devoting significant chunks of our adult years to the work of sorting out childhood and figuring out what your adult relationship to your parents will be. I listened to my sister and remembered the years I railed against and resented all that my father was not that I thought he should be, all the wrongs I felt needed to be righted before the tightness left my body when he entered a room, everything I hoped he would one day apologize for. I'm now at a place I feel I accept what he isn't and most of the time he doesn't get under my skin. When we have the occasion to remember particular wrongs as my mother and I did last weekend, it seems he should be surrounded and confronted and told how much he hurt all of us. He should have to apologize and he should seek our forgiveness. Perhaps we underestimate him, perhaps we fear him, perhaps we've processed it all to a point that we eschew the energy necessary to mount such an assault (and he would definitely consider it an assault). Ash is at the beginning of this process. But she cried and talked tonight and it was a good thing.

Being the kid most like my father, I have a couple of fears about becoming a parent. One is that I will share his blind spot in parenting and I will wound my children and be dismissive of their pain whenever they are brave enough to tell me. The other is that I will have to raise a mini-me. With a self-loathing half life that I only started chipping away at in my 30's, I fear I would be inclined to smother a mini-me with a pillow. I don't want to watch someone do all that hand-wringing and journal writing, afraid of what the world would think, afraid to ask for anything for fear of being told no. I don't want to tell them when they are 13 that life will be bigger when they are 35. They won't believe me and I will want to shake them or send them away until they have a sense of perspective about life.

I think something happens in most people when they become responsible for another human that shares their blood. I believe becoming a parent changes something inside of you. But it doesn't change you. You are still moody or insecure or short-tempered. You are still a person--possibly with less hobbies--but parents are people too. I know, not terribly earth shattering but I know my tendency was/is to consider my parents as it relates to them being my parents, not as the people they are in addition to being my parents. But listening to my mom talk about her loneliness and depression, about the things she remembers from our childhood that still hurt her, about unspoken things between her and my father that still hurt her, I felt a bit like I had breached the fourth wall. My mother is a person. With a name that isn't Mom. Ironically, as I'm considering my mother's person-hood, she has started calling her mother, a person she always addressed by her first name, Mom.