Mom and Dad Were Once People, I Suspect

As I grow up, I'm trying harder to imagine my parents as people. Apparently, I'm not the only person grappling with this. A video documenter examined this theme in a story about his parents, and how, three months after his mother's funeral, his dad was setting up to get married again. (LINK)

When you're a kid, your parents are a single unit. If they're together, it's always mom and dad. They're almost like a law of nature—two people who have always existed together, and probably did not really begin existing until the birth of their first child. I imagine that for children--excuse me, young adults--whose parents are divorced, there's some similar feeling.

As a child, you assume that your parents know everything. You learn that your sweater is a sweater by listening to your parents talk. Your parents hold the answers to puzzles, such as how to tie a shoe. When you ask questions, such as Is there a Santa Claus, you know your parents have the authority to answer that question. They have a vast knowledge that their young children accept as their parents' own exclusive mastery of the world.

When you get into the middle years, you start questioning some of that authority. But you do not do it because you recognize that parents are fallible human beings. You question authority because you want to win some control. You want to disconnect from the people who act as if they have all of the answers. You want to learn to experience and discover things on your own, without the parental filter.

At some point, though, you learn that your parents' command of knowledge is not inherent. Their wisdom, or lack thereof, was derived from their own life experiences. When I first had this notion, all I could think was: Wow! My parents had a life outside of my brother and me! Somehow they were real people and parents all at the same time.

I knew this in a kind of second-nature way. I knew this in the way that people wake up every morning and know the sky is still going to be above their heads. But I did not feel it! I did not feel the epiphany or the eye-opening realization that Yes! My parents are real people! Real people who had lives and experiences that have had nothing to do with me.

Young Parents
I did not begin thinking about it until I graduated from college. The idea of merging the words parents and people came with my firsts job. I was working with M. He was in his low-thirties and an awesome person! He was fun and energetic and young. He would spend time downloading music, laughing. He said things such as, "When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star or an astronaut—or both!" His charm was so youthful, you'd never suspect that he had two kids of his own.

He didn't have that authoritative, decision-making, life-managing poise that I associated with parents. He once found and purchased a tin can of squid "in its natural ink" and displayed it in his cube. It sat for more than a year next to a company issued award certificate that he modified, with bright red pen, into a bathroom pass.

But he wasn't irresponsible or negligent as a father. He told stories about what he and his kids would do over a weekend. When his little girl became big enough, he couldn't help but tell everyone how cool it was to see her enjoying her first trip down a playground slide. Or how his son had finally gotten big enough to help his wife bake cookies.

At some point, it occurred to me: My parents must be real people too! They had lives before each other, although they don't reminisce much on times before their early dating years.

I always knew my dad played guitar and college hockey—we had the sticks and pads to prove the later. But it wasn't until last weekend, when he was showing off the ukulele he and Mom bought from Hawaii, that I had ever seen him strum strings. Mom majored in Fine Arts, and although her college pieces hang still in their house, she hasn't produced anything new in my lifetime. It's difficult to imagine Mom holding a paintbrush. It's difficult to imagine Mom and Dad as anyone but Mom and Dad.

Even when they talked about human things, I could not make the leap. Not even when, sitting around the living room, Mom and Dad were talking about what it was like when they first got married. In a side bar, Dad said, as calm as can be, "When we first got married, every Friday night, your mother and I would rent a movie and order a sausage pizza. Then, we'd have sex. Every Friday."

"Don't say things like that in front of your daughter!!"

"What? We did, didn't we? Every Friday night."

It wasn't news to me that my parents got it on. Maybe this is why I still didn't hear this information and have that epiphany: Oh, right! They're people! Silly, bickering, sex-having people!


Money Toilets
Of course, Mom and Dad still get on my nerves. Especially when Mom forgets that I am an adult, and she gives me too much nagging input. But I forget just how much more trouble I've caused them, as people, throughout their lives.

T at work is low-forties and recently divorced with two sons. The divorce didn't seem messy. But the aftermath of having only one income is. In the divorce, he got the mortgage on the house, and he still pays child support and other expenses for his kids. He keeps the house that he can hardly afford so that he can make his sons' biweekly stay comfortable. He's canceling his cable so that he can foot 100 percent of his eldest son's car insurance.

With all of the changes and difficulties, T doesn't complain really. I only know these things because we cheer on one another's get-out-of-debt plans. If T spends meagerly, he'll be out of debt in four or five years. When he talks about these things, he says, "I just have to buckle down and do it. I'm not eating out for a few months.."

The thing that really hits home for me is that his sons do not know what's going on with their father's finances. They don't realize that every activity they add to their agenda has their dad scrambling to find new freelance work. He won't tell his sons these things. And he won't deny his sons a level of normal niceties, such as car insurance, cell phones, delivered pizzas. He sucks it up silently and provides, beyond his means, so his sons can have access to the things he considers normal.

I think, then, of my parents. Both worked low-paying Joe-jobs until I was in double-digits. Mom worked for years at a grocer chain. Dad held two or three jobs at a time for my entire young life. He worked full-time as a funeral director—a job he later explained to me as: "I went to embalming school so I could marry your mother."

When I was young, my grandmother lived with us. This served the dual purpose of keeping her near family as well as providing my brother and me with a constant babysitter while Mom and Dad worked weird hours, trying to provide for us: bikes, dogs, trees in the yard, decent clothes. But they put themselves out in the process.

When Dad lost his bread-and-butter funeral-directing job, savings got depleted. They spent in the red for five years, trying to keep giving us “normal” lives. My brother and I couldn't have noticed. There were a few more arguments, but we still ate well. Still went on vacation. And I remember, as a kid, feeling as if everything they gave was owed to me. I still thought this through college. I resented my parents for not having as much money as my classmate's parents.

One hundred percent of my college expenses went on student loans. When I saw the first bill, I felt cheated that I was responsible for it. My parents, by that time, were making very good money between them. But they were still paying off debts from 10 years prior when Dad lost his job. Neither of them had a savings or retirement plan to speak of, but I felt, without rationall thinking about it, that they had let me down.

Mom once told me that she was "a slave to this house". Fifteen years later, I know it wasn't just a colorful idiom. It was a glance into her humanity. It was the lamentation of a real woman with her own life-expectations--not just those for her kids.

Where I'm At Now
Even with the things I've realized, I'm still don't think of my parents as people. I have to get from the point of meditation on the issue to the nirvana of completely understanding the many facets of adult-and parent-hood. But I think I'm well on my way. I just need to keep myself from slipping backward into forgetting that Mom and Dad are really Karen and John.