About Your Parents Thread

I can’t stand Pearlman, but I’m glad @Songbird revived this thread. I missed it the first time around and it is fantastic.

I wish my parents were happier. My mom has been an unhappy person my entire life. I didn’t help, of course, being the asshole teenager I was, but her upbringing of abuse ruined her for the rest of her life. If she got help she could get better, but she’ll never admit she has a problem.

My father, who has been tasked with dealing with an eternally unhappy person, struggled with anxiety when I was young, got help, and got better. But a shift in his career in his sixties has soured a lot of that, and the anxiety is creeping in again. Luckily he has the tools to deal with it after years of therapy, but I worry about him every day.

They both had really shitty upbringings and I respect the hell out of them for dealing with that as well as they have, all things considered.

They love me, though, and I need to make more of an effort to see them, because it makes them happier, I think. Most importantly they love my little boy more than anything in this world and nothing brightens them up like he does. He’s very lucky to have that love, and I hope he appreciates it when he gets older.

 

Weird how the shit happens sometimes.

Had an hourlong phone chat today that could lead to big changes for me within days.

This change would mean I live only a few hours drive from my dad instead of 3,000 miles away. And so ...

... he just called and it's the way he began the conversation, different from how he's ever started a conversation with me.

It's as if he knew about the possible changes. But there's no way he could have known.

And it's the way he encouraged me to make the move if it feels right. But he was really asking me to make the move without asking me.

But it's the fact he called an hour after my hourlong chat, and the way he began the conversation, and how those 2 things are connected.

Maybe it's God. Or G-d.

 

My mother unintentionally brought me to tears a few weeks ago when I received a black-and-white photo of me on my tricycle in front of our Indian Harbour Beach house with my grandparents beside me, 59 years to the day that photo was taken. I have my grandmother's eye color -- and see her in me every time I look in the mirror. My grandfather is the cause/blame of my lifelong passion for the Tigers. They have been gone since 1976 and 1977, and yet I can hear their distinctly Canadian voices in my mind.

I miss all four of my grandparents, and am certain will have stronger feelings when my parents pass. My belief is that I will be reunited "on the other side," because why create sentience and intelligence if your soul no longer exists upon the death of your physical body?

My mother is a human See 'N Say: the "pull-the-string and listen again to one of 18 different stories" that even Gwen has memorized by now. (Hey, it's story No. 14!).

We've resisted the urge to make bingo cards with each keyword or story arc, but even during last night's family Zoom chat, she broke into the "Dad and I had no idea there were so many UC and Cal State schools. I only knew of Michigan and Michigan State when I went to college ..." and "according to Weight Watchers, I read ...."

But I love her very much and at 86, she won't be there forever. Same with Dad, who turned 86 in January, who worked at Pontiac, RCA, Mission Control, Aerospace and IBM, and never understood my decision to go into journalism/broadcasting and only near the end, finally came to grips with the fact that I liked math as a hobby instead of a career. Should I have been an engineer or a statistical analyst? I would have probably been very good at it, but bored and disinterested. Even commuting to Turner and working 9-to-5 from a cubicle wasn't my cup of tea.

I'm also the only child who doesn't have grandchildren for them to spoil. Still, I think we have a really good relationship and I know they love it when we visit. They aren't fond of our rabbits, but from what I can tell, the rabbits don't seem to care either way.

I was the first grandson on either side of the family. I was also identified as gifted extremely early, which confused (and still confuses) my parents, who really never comprehended how difficult that would make school for me.

I could write numbers in order by 18 months and read by 3. I started first grade a year early -- and was one of two boys in Palm Beach County to score 99 percentile in Math, Science and English on the fifth grade standardized test that year -- so I was always the "smart kid" but also the "new kid" because we moved so often.

For better or worse, they took 12 of us from the entire county (David Robinson, myself and 10 girls) and put us in a special extremely gifted sixth-grade class just to see if they could figure out what we all had in common. You're pigeon-holed as this "potential prodigy" but I just wanted to be included in a normal social group, rather than pushed and prodded to be Sheldon Cooper.

I decided early on that if I couldn't play baseball or drive a race car, I wanted to do something connected to it. If I was born in 2000 instead of 1958, I could have been an analytics guru or a race engineer/strategist. They weren't offering that in 1980, so talking or writing about it seemed just as interesting -- and for a shy kid, very much a challenge to overcome. Working at a radio station or a newspaper definitely isn't as glamorous as working for Apple or Intel, but I certainly enjoyed my choices.

 

All I'll say is, if you have a chance to talk to your parents (and if you still want to, I totally realize there are cases where the estrangement/pain/hassle, etc. are just too much to overcome), please do. You will miss them dearly when they are gone, no matter what age they pass away at.

 

Since my original post in 2017, my mom suffered a series of falls. On the last one, she broke her back and went through a year of surgeries and hospitalizations and in-patient physical therapy. Two months of 2019 is completely gone in an antibiotics haze. Dad finally managed to get her into serious spinal cord rehab in Dallas and that really got her on the right track towards recovery. There have been times that we didn't know if she would live, if she would have any quality of life, if she'd ever been independent again, if she would ever walk again. She's done all that and more, because my mom is amazing.

My co-workers were amazing during this time and told me if I ever needed to drop everything, walk out the door and go home, I could with no warning. They asked if I was really concerned about her and her recovery.

Of course I was. But I was just as worried for my dad, who during that 8 months, was the longest he's ever lived alone in his life. He went from home to college, back home to married. Mentally, he was really all over the place. I went out and visited him while mom was in the hospital, and my aunt asked if I was going to help him clean the house. Uh, no, he can clean the house and cook and do the laundry. I went out to do his taxes. And to just be there for him while he cried that he didn't know if things would ever be okay again.

So yeah, I'm grateful that my mom is back to her old self, walking with a walker, doing at least some of what she used to. I just wish sometimes that she didn't feel like she needed to call multiple times a night. Has someone out there developed a Texting for Boomers class that I can send her?

(My uncle - dad's brother - is going through the Big D and we don't mean Dallas. At this point, we aren't sure he will recognize us very soon.)

 

I’m the kid who moved away, but I was also the kid who gave them grandbabies, now 18 and 9. They enjoyed the perks of being “young” grandparents and also probably enjoyed having a little bit of remove from them, but still just a four-hour car ride away when they needed a fix.

Now my younger brother has finally married at 40, which brings their new daughter-in-law’s kids into the mix. Three age 5 and under, with a fourth on the way. And they live less than 30 minutes away. Consequently my parents have suddenly shifted into always-on grandparent mode (both parents work nights) and at 64 it isn’t as easy for them to answer the bell now. But love is love and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

I'm just trying to figure out how my parents, both college-educated (87 and 83) have been full-blown Trumpies, listen to no contrasting opinions and will put up with no opposition in the house. They're so bad they think FOX News is right there with CNN and the WaPo. They listen to nothing except One America and NewsMax. My mother, who is the best grandmother and great-grandmother in the world, honestly believes Marjorie Taylor Green is the new hope of the GOP and is down on Trump because she thinks he gave up too easily. The solution: no one talks any politics at their house or on the phone. Nada.

 

Mrs. Flip and I had a very similar discussion this evening as we were sitting on the porch drinking a Shiner Ruby Redbird. We're not particularly close with any of our siblings because we're the outliers politically on both sides of the family. I never talked politics with my folks when they were still alive because our differences were so vast.

I grew up seeing my cousins every couple of months or. They lived about 90 miles away. Our kids see their cousins once or twice a year. They don't have any sort of relationship with them at all. The whole thing is kinda sad, but I'm not sure how to fix it, or if anything is broken to even fix, or even if we want anything to change.