The Impact of Parents on Our Lives

Now and then I meet someone who tells me that they had nearly perfect parents. Those encounters are rare, and I tend to receive them with a great deal of skepticism. Instead, the experience of many of us regarding our parents was a mixed bag: some positive, some negative, and the net assessment depends on the individual. There are also people who grew up with brutal and angry parents, and they had to find their way out of that history.

In my case, I grew up with a mother who had issues, and I was not a forgiving child. She was impatient and a perfectionist, so when cleaning the house, we were held to a very high standard. She wasn’t violent, at least not toward me. She did other things that I found maddening, but I won’t dwell on them here. My father was nearly invisible, but I suspect he did the best he could.

I was determined not to turn out like my mother. I now realize that I had no idea what that meant, but mainly I didn’t want to be a demanding parent. So, I used my experience to remain childless with the consent of a tolerant husband.

Eventually, though, I grew up (and that had to do with maturity, not age). As kids, we don’t realize early on that we have agency; that when we morph into adults, we have choices about just about everything. I don’t know what the turning point was for me, but I realized I was tired of blaming my mother for my difficulties in life and living in tension with her.

In my forties, I decided to write a letter to her, saying that I realized how difficult I had been in my relationship with her. That I now refused to blame her for my life, especially since I gave her some credit for how well I’d turned out. That I wanted to have a loving relationship with her, and hoped she’d forgive me for all the anger and frustration I had directed at her. I told her that I would follow up with a phone call in three days, so we could discuss my request.

For three days, I agonized over what her response might be: would she be angry, unforgiving, rejecting my plea? When I made the call, I felt that a miracle had happened. Her response was that of course she would forgive me, and assumed that one day I would come around.

G-d must have been present.

After that conversation, our relationship was so much better. We laughed a lot together, laughed at ourselves, laughed at each other. There were still tense moments when she would do something annoyingly predictable, but I paid attention to my internal reaction, breathed into it, and smiled. After all, it was just Mom being Mom.

Before my father died, he told me how happy it made him that we had reconciled. That was an extra blessing.

Now, when I think of my mother, I think of the difficulties in her own life growing up. She was present when her grandfather committed suicide by drinking poison; her father wasn’t present much and died early in her life. And she had a traumatic encounter with a girlfriend that scarred her future relationships.

She had come a long way.

And I guess, eventually, so did I.