I Was Someone’s Child…aka Whiny as hell post…
For years and years, I judged my father for a decision he made. He had an opportunity to take a risk that, in hindsight, probably would have paid off. Instead, he took the safe road. I thought this was ridiculous.
I would never do that.
I wasn’t going to be like my father. I would take the chance. Bet on myself. Go for it. Fortune favors the bold and all that inspirational-poster bullshit.
Now I’m 60, I’ve raised three children, I’ve had mortgages and tuition payments and careers and layoffs and all the other fun things adulthood throws at you, and I’ve reached an unfortunate conclusion:
I would have done exactly what my father did. I’d like to say I wouldn’t. But I would.
Because apparently my father wasn’t a coward. He was a guy with a family who understood that “betting on yourself” sounds a lot more exciting when other people aren’t depending on the outcome.
This is one of the annoying things about getting older. Your parents keep being proven right even after they’re dead.
My father died about five and a half years ago. My mother had died suddenly about a year before him. I’m not particularly proud of this, but at the time I didn’t think about either death nearly as much as I would have expected. Obviously I was sad. But there wasn’t some movie version of grief where I wandered through the house clutching an old photograph while sad piano music played. Life mostly kept moving.
After my mother died, I ended up taking care of my father, who had been ill for a bit. I actually think I did a pretty good job.
I paid his bills and handled the things that needed handling, but I also tried not to turn our relationship into one long elder-care administrative meeting. We had brunch every Sunday, long after he lost the ability to hold a conversation. And we kept having those brunches every Sunday until he died.
At the time, I thought that was mostly something I was doing for him. Now I’m not so sure.
Because strangely, I’ve missed my parents much more as the years have passed.
Not in an Oh my God, they’re dead, I’m next! way. Although at 60, I do occasionally encounter an obituary of a 62-year-old and think, “Well, that seems unnecessarily close.”
It’s something different.
My children grew up. Or, more accurately, they became semi-adults and then actual adults, although I’m still waiting for someone to provide me with the official certification process.
And parenting adult children turns out to be weird.
When they’re little, the problems are relatively straightforward.
Kid is hungry? Feed kid.
Kid is bleeding? Apply Band-Aid.
Kid is being an asshole? Time-out.
Adult children don’t work that way.
You can’t put a 24-year-old in time-out. I’ve checked.
Instead, they have jobs and relationships and disappointments and anxieties and opinions about how you raised them.
Especially that last one.
And somewhere along the way, I started wishing my parents were still around. Not because I needed them to fix anything.
I just wanted to ask:
Was I like this?
Did you worry about me this much?
Did I blame you for everything that was wrong with my life?
Did you ever hang up the phone with me and think, “Jesus Christ, what did we do wrong?”
Mostly, though, I think I want one of them to tell me I’m doing okay. That’s the part I wasn’t prepared for. When my parents were alive, I was still someone’s child.
No matter how old I got, there were two people in the world who remembered me before I had accomplished anything.
Before I was a lawyer.
Before I was a teacher.
Before I was a husband.
Before I was a father.
Before I had any idea what I was doing.
Which, to be fair, remains largely the situation.
Someone was above me on the organizational chart. Now they’re gone. And I’m management. This seems like a serious oversight.
My mother actually did tell me she thought I was doing a good job raising our kids.
My father? Not so much. He wasn’t exactly Tony Robbins.
Still, I find myself wishing he were here so I could ask him what he thought.
I’m probably romanticizing the conversation. In my imagination, he’d put his hand on my shoulder and say:
“You’re a good father. Your kids will figure it out. I’m proud of you.”
In reality, he’d probably say…well, nothing because his generation didn’t hold on to kids that way. Then we’d order brunch.
There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about him.
One of my sons once told me he didn’t want to be like me.
That hurt. A lot. Probably more than he knows.
And then I realized something. I once felt exactly the same way about my father. I wasn’t going to be like him.
Except now, decades later, I understand him.
Maybe that’s one of the great jokes of parenthood. You spend 20 years raising children who eventually explain all the ways you screwed them up. Then you have to wait another 20 years to see if they revise the report.
And here’s the other strange part:
I don’t want my son to be like me. I want him to be better at being himself. I don’t want him spending his life looking around for approval—from me, from his mother, from a boss, from a girlfriend, from anybody.
I want him to wake up and think:
This is my life. I like it.
I want him to live with joy. If that means being different from me, fantastic.
I’d just prefer he discover that without making me the villain in his origin story.
But I suppose I don’t get to control that either.
Maybe someday he’ll look back at some decision I made and think:
Oh.
Now I get it.
Just like I did with my father.
Unfortunately, my father isn’t here for me to tell him. That’s probably the part that bothers me most.
I spent years judging a man who was making decisions with responsibilities I didn’t yet understand. By the time I understood them, he was gone.
Maybe that’s why I’m tired.
Tired of worrying about whether my kids are happy.
Tired of wondering whether I did enough.
Tired of wondering whether I did too much.
Tired of wondering whether some insecurity I passed along screwed somebody up.
Tired of occasionally feeling like I’m the asshole in everybody else’s story.
Which brings me to my current retirement plan:
Utah.
Preferably tomorrow.
I would like to move to the mountains, ski, ride my bike, read books, drink coffee, sit outside, have dinner with my wife, see my children when they want to see me, and generally stop conducting a nightly performance review of myself as a human being.
I realize this is an extremely privileged existential crisis.
“My adult children have complicated feelings about me, and I own a house near ski resorts.”
GoFundMe forthcoming.
But maybe getting older is partly about realizing that eventually you have to stop trying to get an A in life.
My parents are gone.
My children are adults.
They get to decide what their lives mean.
They even get to decide what they think of me.
And I get to decide what I do with whatever time I have left.
I hope someday my son understands me a little better. But perhaps I don’t need him to understand me today. After all, it took me about 50 years to understand my father.
And Dad never got to hear me say it.
So I’ll say it now.
I get it, Dad.
Thank you, Dad, for loving me no matter what and no matter how you showed it.