We all have to survive our parents, and I don’t mean outlive them. I’m talking about surviving our upbringing and the legacy that our parents leave us with. All too often we must figure out how to survive and thrive in spite of our parents rather than with the help of the skills and the love they provided us. We must learn to shake off the lessons we’ve learned about being reactive, irrational, short-sighted, selfish, and a poor communicator as if they were shackles, bonds that hold us tightly.
At some point, we all must experience a realization about our parents. We must come face-to-face with the fact that our parents are imperfect people and have done us damage despite their best intentions. We must reconcile our adoration and respect for the people who have sacrificed for so much of us with our anger, sadness, hurt, and sometimes resentment at the positions that they’ve put us in.
For some people, this realization comes easily and it’s merely a speed bump in the road of life, a soon-forgotten blip on the radar, a single sentence in one of many chapters in the story of their lives. It may be that their parents were simply better, that the hurts were smaller, or that those people are somehow more resilient than others, but this particular struggle is brief and leaves them relatively unscathed.
For others, this lesson doesn’t come easily, but it is timely enough that the damage has not yet had time to become irreparable, to sink its claws and teeth into our flesh and our hearts and to irrevocably alter our lives and permanently cement us in our misery, our childish responses, and our never-ending cycles of self-sabotage. We sigh a breath of relief because we’re finally able to shrug off a mantle heavy with resentment, confusion, and parental missteps. They have the rest of their lives to look forward to now that their eyes have been opened.
There is yet another group of people, those who are unable to escape that tangled web, either easily or easily. Some of them live nearly their entire lives, if not the entirety of their existence, Â without coming to the realization that there are lessons taught and beliefs shared and handicaps created under the tutelage of their parents that are holding them back. They may maintain unhealthy albeit close relationships with those parents, never having acquired the perspective necessary to view life about this bubble, perspective that often requires time and distance to glean.
This group, then, is one that often perpetuates the same mistakes with their own children. Sometimes foibles made as parents become exponentially more damaging, a cycle so pervasive that it can only be considered a family’s legacy. It takes a certain awareness and willpower to grow beyond the garden that sprouted us.
It should come as no surprise that I am one of the second group. My battle to become more aware,  both with myself and if the environment in which I was raised, is one that I consider hard won. My ability to be a rational human being, a good communicator, view the bigger picture, and to put myself in others’ shoes are all direct results of the adversity that I faced and because of where I came from. I could not overstate how much I value these lessons nor would I want to seem ungrateful. But pain, even pain that ushers in progress, is still a hardship. Nevertheless, those growing pains will fade as I age and continue to grow because I was fortunate enough to experience them early on.
On the other hand, my mother appears to be a member of that third group. In some ways, she seems stilted, not entirely a grown and respectable adult who can operate within the confines of a civilized society. I am sometimes amazed that I am her daughter, that she could be my mother. I find myself overcome with bewilderment when I try to isolate the factors that allowed me to overcome those hurdles, to solve the equation that is my success. As confused as I may be, I am equally as proud of my ability to flourish having lived a life that might have just as easily snuffed out my light, no thanks to parenting that I received.
I just hope my sister can survive her parents, too.