Unconditional love doesn’t protect against damaged, broken heirs. Affection doesn’t exclude resentment. Being a child doesn’t always come easily. Whether it’s parental divorce, death, infidelity, bankruptcy, neglect, one massive argument or a series of niggling unkindnesses, a lot of us carry around a rucksack of anger towards our parents, absent or otherwise.
I don’t mean to go full Larkin over here (I have neither the baldness, nor the bitterness), but the disjunct between expectation and reality can leave us feeling that our parents have let us down; that they’re failures. We expected so much that what they’ve delivered seems disappointing.
On something of a flip side, my generation also seems to blame our parents’ baby booming success for every shortcoming dumped at our poorly hung door: we can’t own a house because they bought them all; we can’t get a job because none of them will retire; there’s no money left because they spent it all on holidays and haircuts; we can barely breathe because they turned the air lead by driving everywhere; the ocean is emptying because they wanted fish and chips for tea; we can’t afford healthcare because they wasted all that money on free degrees.
While this might be temporarily comforting, and in many cases based on truth, you can only milk a scapegoat so hard. Eventually, the dugs of displaced frustration will run dry. It’s not actually all their fault.
The truth is, without our parents, we’d be little more than a spot on a gusset. Of course they disappointed us; they’re mammals, they’re idiots, they’re human. They had no idea what it was like to be a parent until they became one. As every parenting guru tells us, there is no manual for bringing up children; it’s a case of good intentions, good luck and hard work. Or so I hear. I am not a parent. I may never be one. But I do have the questionable qualification of being a daughter, and one who did something that I thought impossible: I rebuilt a relationship with my father.
It wasn’t a quick or particularly obvious process but, in my experience, the only way to have a good relationship with your sperm-person is to forgive them. To let it go. To stop hoping they’ll be anything other than precisely who they are. To accept whatever they did, whatever they’re doing, and then make a conscious decision to stop bringing it up, stop picking it apart, stop telling them what they did wrong in the hope that that will make it go right.
In my case, this involved travelling across the world just to walk up the street where he once lived. To actually put myself, physically, in my father’s past to see where he came from, and then realise where he went. Seeing that quiet suburban avenue, in the fruit bowl of his homeland – the kind of place where pretty much every meal comes with a slice of beetroot and pint of whole milk – I suddenly realised not just what he’d achieved but how poorly prepared he’d been to do it. How little of his previous life had set him up for being my father. More than 11,000 miles is an awfully long way to go just to put yourself in someone else’s shoes – but sometimes empathy is harder than it sounds.
Part of the forgiving process, as well as compassion, is recognition. Pay attention to your similarities and you may be surprised how little the differences actually matter. An easy goal in this regard is physical similarities. Put me in a T-shirt from a builder’s merchant, a pair of cut-off denim shorts, sit me on a secondhand bike, and I am basically my father with a bob.
That kind of same-but-different visual cue can open the door for more profound realisations. Sure, they make bad decisions – but aren’t you the one who decided to date a man who signed off his text messages with “peace out”? Of course they’re bad with money – but didn’t you just spend £63 on a train ticket because you couldn’t be bothered to book in advance? Yes they’re bad at keeping in touch – but how many of your friends’ birthdays have you forgotten in the past year? Of course they don’t listen – but you can’t remember what your partner was saying at dinner last night because you were too busy trying to line your cutlery up in size order.
The ocean that divides the generations is often, once you roll up your trousers and wade out, little more than a stream.
We may want to rebuild a relationship with our parents for all sorts of reasons: because we’re getting married, because they’re ill, because you want more presents on your birthday, because you want to make things less tense at Christmas, because you’re going through a breakup, because they’re becoming grandparents. Whatever the reason, it’s worth a bash.
My parents, luckily, are wonderful people. They are kind, funny, tolerant, open-minded, very good at cooking rice, friendly, supportive and have excellent noses. I’m incredibly lucky that they’re both still alive and living in the same country. Any resentment I carry around about their actions – both intentional and accidental – is my business. Not theirs. And I’m doing my best to sort it out.
We can be angry at our parents for all sorts of things. Some of them will be their fault. Some of them won’t. But forgiving them is our responsibility. No kidding.
