Parental Caricatures

Why, as adults do we continue to bad-mouth our parents? I know that I am speaking in generalities and that not everything that we say about our parents is necessarily negative. When we do it tends to appear when one person says something that frustrates them about their own parents’. Setting aside that sometime parents really are assholes, is this a knee-jerk reaction left over from our teens and early twenties when we are still trying to define our identities as adults? Is it also possible that we have started to see our parents as fallible human beings and complaining is easier than trying to force change in people who by this point will not change? Or is the other way around, with our parents still expecting us to behave as we did when we were teenagers or younger?

The question occurred to me after a series of conversations among friends comparing the vileness of our particular progenitors. Topics varied from mild complaints about intractable behaviors to deep seated issues with a parent relationship. I personally have a very congenial relationship with my parents, yet even I took some unfair swipes at my parents for things that I had resolved with them and with myself years earlier. The conversations were more gossip than anything else, essentially a safe place where we could vent frustrations without it getting back to the topic of that conversation. As often as not what was said was quickly forgotten. 

Part of me wonders if this is a tool of forming communal bonds with friends, by attacking something we all have in common, our parents. This would put it firmly in under the knee-jerk reaction of teenage behavior. A habitual echo of when we would complain about being under the yoke of parental control, when we are all in a communal one-ups-manship about feeling miserable. Both then and now the conversation would stray closer to the bone. Concerns often connected to much large issues hidden by the thin tissue of decorum and conversation.

As I have grown older I have begun to see not only my parents, but also teachers, aunts, coworkers as more than just characters providing input or an obstacle to overcome, but as people. (Yes I know, this is an odd thing to be figuring out at thirty-four.) At some point the people around me stopped being caricatures and took on a life of their own.

I am also beginning to see how close my behaviors are to my own parents. Every day I discover some little thing that I do that is reminiscent of my parents. If that is the case then the things that I complain about when it comes to my parents, both resolved and unresolved, are really fears about what I will become in the coming years.  Maybe by putting voice to their foibles we can try and avoid them ourselves.

I do wonder if our parents have the same conversations about us that we do about them.  That if we were to all be in the same room gossiping at the same time we would have some kind of mutual understanding. Or a fight to end all fights. Maybe a thought best left to the hypothetical.