You may be the CEO and manage a whole company perfectly well, but
chancesare the relationship with your parents turns you into a blathering
child. It's your job to (gently) dismantle the family hierarchy and see
that you achieve equality with your parents.
"You know what my scenario was for this whole thing? I was gonna
move away, get rich and move into a luxurious mansion. My parents were
gonna come visit me--once--and say 'Oh, what a nice mansion. We love you,
Dave.' And I was gonna say 'I love you too, More and Dad.' And then they
were gonna go away and die. Does this make me an asshole?"
Tom Hanks in Nothing in Common (1986)
"Hello, Arthur. This is your mother. Do you remember me?...Someday
you'll get married and have children of your own and Honey, when you do,
I only pray that they'll make you suffer the way you're making me. That's
a Mother's Prayer."
Mother and Son, Mike Nichols and Elaine May
In Nichols and May's Mother and Son skit from the late Fifties, the
son is a NASA scientist interrupting a countdown at Cape Canaveral to
take an emergency telephone call from his mother, who is calling to tell
him she's going into the hospital to have her nerves X-rayed because he
hasn't called lately. Within minutes, this competent adult is reduced
from desperate apologizing to infantile blathering. The message that has
made the skit such a classic is that no one, however powerful and
successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied
with him. In the presence of an angry parent, don't even the best of us
become a child again?
In a similar manner, even the best of us feels awful guilt when we
realize we don't want to repay our debts to our parents. Swinging
bachelor Tom Hanks did not want to become an adult and a parent to
children of his own, much less to his crotchety father Jackie Gleason.
Surely all of us have times when we want our parents to give us their
blessing and their approval--and then leave us alone.
Do we all, like the woman in the headache commercial who was being
harassed by her mother's supervisory efforts in the kitchen, find
ourselves wanting to cry out: "Please Mother (or Daddy), I want to do it
myself!"
Yeah, I guess we all do, at least some of the time--if we are lucky
enough to have parents around who want to be part of our adult lives.
Parents come at a price.
The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her
life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him
when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe,
accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people
into battle or out of their jobs, comfortably cutting up and rearranging
people's brains or machines or governments or corporations, and yet we
may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy's whimper or our
daddy's growl. At least in part we are still children all of our lives,
but never so overtly as when we are in the presence of our
parents.
STRIPPING OUR MASKS
We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask
and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside our skin we
are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince
ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all
of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask
of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any
clothes--and knows it.
Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to
be works-in-progress. A parent's work is never done--we are never
finished and ready to face life on our own. I remember going to see our
oldest daughter off on the train to college. As the train pulled out of
the station, one of the other mothers took off running behind it, trying
to catch the train and stop it. She had suddenly remembered a piece of
advice she hadn't given her daughter.
Parents can make us distrust the world around us. Parents can
intimidate their children, sometimes bullying them into submission,
sometimes awing them and making them feel weak and foolish by contrast,
sometimes terrifying them into doubting their ability to get along on
their own. The parents might be trying to be helpful, or they might be
deliberately making their children too insecure to wander too far from
home. The dangers parents see might be the real dangers of the world, or
just the fear of any distance coming between parent and child.
A child of any age who feels intimidated by a parent can't
determine what is dangerous or what is safe, and absorbs the parents'
fears. People don't become grown-ups until they realize their parents,
however wonderful, were misinformed and at times stark, raving
mad.
HOW THEY REDUCE YOU
Parents may undercut our sense of mastery by making us distrust our
values. Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on
faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system
of values for a new age. Parents may feel betrayed when their children
adopt different styles and habits, when the daughter chooses a different
career or language or sexual expression than the mother, when the son
grows long hair and wears earrings instead of the crew cut and tattoos
that signified manhood for the previous generation. Matters of style may
turn into matters of morality, health, or safety.
Tags:
adult children,
asshole,
cape canaveral,
competent adult,
family dynamic,
family hierarchy,
fifties,
grandparent,
guilt,
jackie gleason,
mike nichols,
mother and son,
parent,
skit,
telephone call
