Our Parents Are Our Parents. Who Else Are They?

My parents were quite open with me, and I know a lot about their history (specially my mother's).

The many things you didn't know about your mother surprise me, Roberta. My first thought was: "this Americans, so cold".

But I think in ALL cases somehow parents tend to hide the darker parts of their selves -which I think is correct, since they are the primary source of adult reference for their children- and these parts sometimes come into the surface when they are old.

This is what I have recently found out about my mother (who is 80, ill, and needs to be taken care of).
She had a great body when she was young. When her classmates were to choose the prettiest girl, they decided to choose another girl's face with my mother's figure. She kept the stunning figure for decades and was very proud of her body.
In the last few months I realized that she was obssesed with her body, to the point of being, for many years, a sort of bulimic. She used to eat enormous quantities of dry prunes, hiding from everybody, and often purgued herself.
Her first conscious reaction when she saw herself at the mirror after about a month between life and death was to say: "I'm ugly" and get angry and sad about it.
It has taken me a lot of effort to convince her that she may look old and frail now, but is still pretty. It has been enough to let herself go out (she didn't dare in the first weeks after she got better, people would see her as "ugly").
I really had no idea about how deep was her vanity... and now it gives me more elements to think about how it affected my upbringing.

Interesting.

To give a little perspective, "Americans"-wise, my own parents have been very, very open with me. Too open, in some respects. There are things I don't want or need to know, or at least at the age they were told to me... now would be fine for most of those things, I think.

The role of parenthood changes over time. As I allude to above, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to step too far out of the parenting role when the kids are young. I guess the problem is when some people get entrenched in those roles, have a hard time stepping out of them/ redefining the roles later.

I don't think it's just you Roberta. Everyone has to become aware of that fact, that their parents are more than just their parents. When it came to me, as an adult, I started asking my mother questions and some of her answers were eyeopening, to say the least, but it was amazing to hear about her life outside of my brothers and me. That was when she became a whole person to me and I gained a new level of respect for her.

I had to smile a bit in reading your post Roberta!

My Dad worked for the same company for almost 50 years. 35 of those in the same building.

When he retired they had a dinner for him and there were all these people! Who the heck were they? Why were they slapping him on the back and joking with him?

It turns out he knew darn near everyone that worked for the company - and they all knew of us kids from what he'd told them over the years.

He never did things with his co-workers after work or on weekends but who knew he had lived this whole other "work life" all these years? He was really quite at home but he was a social butterfly at work!

Like you, Roberta, I knew next to nothing about my parents before I was around to pick up on things. And I'm still in that boat to a great extent. When my father died, I was asked to deliver a eulogy. I said sure, but I wanted everyone to share what they knew. Most of what my siblings said was known to me, but my mother produced various documents re his service during WWII.

Why, I wondered, was all this a secret all those years? Similarly (perhaps), I came upon a photo of my mother puffing on a cigarette when she was young. My mother? A smoker? Blew my mind.

Perhaps that generation (and subculture) felt that their early lives were none of their children's business. Or maybe it's just a Bronx thing...

Very interesting - topic - when you think and you really don't know it all.

There's some things (most) I tell my kids - but a few I hope they never find out.

I think, especially amongst many parents of baby boomers, their lives before us was just a leadup, in their minds, to us, marriage and family, their reason for being. Their lives before marriage and family doesn't seem to be of much significance to them but completely fascinating to us.

I think you may be on to something there, eoe!

I think it works in reverse, too. My father keeps his "other" life very separate from us to the point that we feel he is embarressed of us at times. I started a new job in a building that he was doing construction in. Some of the guys knew me and said hello, had a chat. But my father would walk right by me. It's odd when someone says "I'm surprised you didn't go get coffee with your dad - he was just here 10 minutes ago." And you just shrug....very odd. My brother is in the same line of work as him and he gets raged if someone finds out he is his son. It's an extreme fear he has that anyone might think we succeed because of someone he knows, etc. instead of on our own (which we always have).

He bought a new sailboat last year and keeps it in a slip a couple of miles from the house. The only reason I've been on it is because I told him I was going to take it out by myself and if he didn't like it he had better be there. He showed - the boat is 42 feet and heaven forbid I should hurt 'the baby'. No one has ever been invited, including my mother.

My mother, on the other hand, has a hard time feeling like she is anything other than a mother. I struggle to get her to find other interests besides my brother and me, the household junk and everything else. She still tries to dictate my every move, including when I'll be moving into my new house. She's afraid that now we are grown she is 'useless' to the world and she doesn't know who she was anymore - the things that she hoped and wanted before 21 have been forgotten.

I know they have other lives. They are both mysteries for completely different reasons. Yet, I have close relationships with both of my parents in our own way.

I was going to suggest it's generational, but there's sugar, who's younger than I am.

My parents made a point of telling me everything. I knew at age 10 or so that their sex life was not good. At age 10 or so, I really, really didn't want to know that.

And on, and on. Maybe it's a divorce thing? Only child thing? They treated me much more like a peer than a daughter, which again, was not something I necessarily wanted.

Well, my folks both surf the 'Net, so it's possible they'll come across this post. I won't pry too much. :-D

My folks met at a party. My mother's ride home wanted to go home with a different guy, so my Mom was looking for a ride. And Dad said, "I have a car." So my mother was picked up at a party.

My folks dated for a year or two (maybe more? I may have the dates mixed up) before they were married. My grandmother knew my mother was really in love when my Dad was in the Army, and Mom cried with relief when she learned he wouldn't have to go to Korea.

Dad went to several grad schools to get his Master's. It took him years, as we kept moving and economic situations kept changing. He finally got his Master's degree in 1972, long after he got his Bachelor's (mid-'50s). He got his Professional Engineer's license somewhere in there, too. I'm in school now and I can definitely relate to his experiences.

Mom went to grad school while I was in diapers (I'm the youngest of 2). Dad took care of my brother and me while my mother went to Rutgers to get her Master's of Library Science. Mom studied while I napped, and my brother was in school. One of my first memories is her graduation. There's a picture of me wearing her mortarboard. I was about 4 or so. She's one of the reasons why I pursued an education; knowing that she could do it meant I could, too.

Dad's had bouts of unemployment (engineering isn't always steady) and we moved a couple of times when I was a kid. So now, when I've been unemployed, I remember he persevered and it's kind of neat to know that he's been through it, too.

When I was 18, I worked as a switchboard operator in the same place where my Dad worked (he was there for over 20 years and retired from there a few years ago). Everyone knew my father (yep, fishin', same thing! :-D). They'd say, "Oh, you're B____'s daughter! He's such a funny man." or "He's such a good man. He's very creative."

I've also been to the library where my mother worked for several years (until her retirement in '95). Everyone there knew her, including a lot of the patrons. They'd say, "Your mother knows how to find anything!" and "Your mother is really nice. You look a little like her."

And I'd just beam. :-D

Aw.

Roberta, this is one of the most intersting questions I've seen on a2k and it has brought back many images of my parents as young people.

I think that some of our images are formed when we are too young to appreciate what we are hearing. When my mother would mention something of her life as a young mother, it would resonate much more loudly if I was hearing it as a young mother myself; otherwise, my limited understanding of parenthood would have blinded me to the kind of 'knowing' that is present when hearing something about which we are
familiar.

My mother was always talking about how difficult her life had been as a girl and as a young mother, because of being so poor. Every time I would go out to dancing or music lessons, she would comment that she would have loved to be able to do those things. She seemed angry that I had those opportunities instead of her. I never felt that I was grateful enough for the lessons and that I was somehow unworthy of them.

When I was older, going through old photographs, I realized just how beautiful she had been and how hard it must have been for her to be on the 'poor' side of the family. She was always aware of being poor, even when she and my father had plenty of money. She spoke of the ancestors who had owned slaves and of how wonderful their lives must have been which is why, I'm now sure, I was sent to all the lessons and to the classes where you were taught to converse politely while holding a cup of tea on your knee and how to do all the dances that were popular at the time. We had raging fights about these things and I finally refused to take anymore lessons.

The raging fights and the need to get out of the house as soon as I could, meant that I didn't really get to know her until I was much older. I still don't know why she was like that. My aunts and uncle were not especially resentful of the poverty of their upbringing. The only difference was her beauty and her intelligence (even though her attitude was astoundingly stupid).

My uncle wrote a family history a few years after my mother died. When he gave it to my surviving aunts to read, they came right back with all sorts of corrections. New fights raged. They each had different memories of the same events. One aunt finally said in defiance, "Don't you mess with my memories!" and tossed the book at him, refusing to acknowledge anything he wrote. Glad I wasn't present for that family fight!

I guess what all these words are saying is that you will never really know who your parents were because they lived in a totally different world-- a world different even from their own siblings.

"Don't you mess with my memories!"
wow! that sounds like the start of an very interesting book or film.
I also find this to be among the most interesting topics i have seen. I dont know what to add, iam still fairly young, only lived away from home for fairly breif periods (the longest being a year), being how much easier it is to afford school. My parents just dont talk about their "other" lives. My father worked as a social worker, dealing with abused children and then with people on welfare. He no longer works in these fields and i think has been doing better but i feel he was really negativly effected by those "darker" aspects of society. Its always been odd, having my father tell us not to eat at certain resturants because he knows clients that work there or that a pedophile lives in a certain part of town. It was very strange to know of this other side of my fairly-tale like hometown through the eyes of someone else.

oh this not reminds of some friends who found out at 43yrs of age their Father wasn't their father.
Wow that was a miss.

I never knew my mother intellectually as more than a high strung, although beautiful and extremely talented loonie.

She was a tragic figure actually, and about as shitty a mother as anyone ever had, but she would try, she just wasn't sucessful.

I could post for hours on her dysfunctionality, but I won't because I loved her anyway.

My father came to see me when I was in my mid twenties, just showed up on the porch one night smelling like liquor and said he thought it was time we got to know one another. I told him it was way too late for that and to get off my property or I would kill him.

The anger and hatred and resentment I carried for my parents all my life has shaped me in negative ways that I try to overcome on a daily basis.

I did love my mother though in a convoluted way. Can't say the same for my father.

Cinder -- I've often wondered at how much doctors must have known about small-town residents back when. Must've been much the same, only more personal. My father used to investigate disability claims and my mother was a divorce attorney and worked for a women's shelter, so it was similar around my house.

Recently had some revelations about my grandparents, not my parents. I'd known that my uncle was not my grandfather's son and that they'd met in WWII when he was an enlisted and she was a WAAC, but that was about the extent of it. He was the scion of the family (came to the head of it when he was a teenager when his father died, and eventually led all his northern-Texas farming brethren across the country) and always came on like he'd walked the straight and narrow all his life.

Well, turns out that my uncle was the son of a married man at the time, and my grandfather had been running with this man's wife, and for a while the four of them all lived as a foursome, drinking and raising hell. And of my grandmother dropping out of school at 12 to work in a factory and pick up coal along the railroad track to sell to folks in the tenement, but I'd more or less suspected all that...

Cinderwolf, remember the old saying, "Perception is Reality?" Truer words were never spoken. Each of us has our own, unique perception of the world, the same world eveyone else lives in. Those realities define who we are and I think that is why my aunts were so adamant about their own memories as opposed to those of my uncle.
Bibear, have you ever tried to imagine who your father really was? This is so interesting and so filled with emotion and perceptions that can be absolutely untrue, yet they are what defines us.
Mindboggling!

Good point. Think most of us, well, at least me, grew up accepting our parents for who they were at that time. Sure, I remember asking questions about their past from time to time, but nothing too deep. I probably never considered their might be anything secretive or sorted. They were my hero's and gave me no reason to question anything beyond normal curiosity.

In my adult years I've learned things from them, nothing bad, just surprising things like my dad ran two successful businesses and can't even balance a checkbook to this day. Their youth is very fascinating to me, they were both poor, made sacrifices during wars, dad was in two wars and they moved so many times. Had to grow up fast to make ends meet and because they both had many siblings with no fathers in the house etc.

I wouldn't be shocked to learn some unsavory things before or after they pass because eventhough they are my hero's, they are human. I'm not expecting that to be the case.

I remember when my dad's mother's health suffered in her later years, he spent a lot more time talking to her as he took care of her. During that time he said he knew her better than he had his whole life. Maybe that's the other side of it, we take that relationship for granted and are not sensitive to that fact until it's to late or almost too late.

My parents are in their mid seventies, I see them often but I need to really get to know them, this has got me thinking.