Our Parents Are Our Parents. Who Else Are They?

Diane, I have talked at length with my family about my father. I feel I know quite a bit about him, because I am told I am the most like him of all his nine children scattered all over the place, deserted and uncared for at one time or another.

I know he took pictures of himself vacationing at ski lodges with our next door neighbor who he was sleeping with and showed them to my mother to taunt her.

I know he deserted me in a gas station on my fourth birthday.

I know he was a brilliant and wealthy man who fathered and deserted nine children who grew up in abject poverty while he lived well.

I know I lived with him for a short time when I was thirteen and it was one violent fight after another and I hated him.

I know he had an unbelievable temper that he was unable to control and was brutally vicious without conscience, but could charm himself into about any womans pants and did quite frequently.

I know that all these things live strongly in me and it has been in my life a struggle to keep them under lock and key.

Was there anything else you thought I really needed to know?

That is the other side of it, I complain, but I do feel that I know my parents through and through, and that's something to be grateful for when they still have so many years left (knock on wood -- Mom is late 50's, dad is 60.)

About 20 years ago my Pa pa sat me down and said apologies for the screw-ups he'd done during my childhood and youth years. I said geez Pa I love you and he said the same. I just never told him I'd always thought he was great - and those transgressions, I'd never thought a thing about since I was such a rebelrouser (hellyan (sp)) myself.

There was plenty of times I was mighty pissed out - he was such a demanding SOB, he'd never ask anyone to do something that him or his kids wouldn't so. Kinda like General Patton in that regard. So I hated working for him - but man oh man - did I ever get a work ethic! He did other stuff others might have considered child abuse today - but it made me so tenacious, today - that can be a fault.

If I don't know my Pop - then there's maybe thousands of folks that don't know him either.

Come to think of it, if my parents knew everything about my life after leaving home, they might be fascinated too! Mom Dad . I know they would be about one or two things.

If you feel that you don't know your parents and you have the opportunity now to ask some questions, do so. If nothing else, you'll come away with the full knowledge that they are mere human beings, with faults and flaws like anybody else.

It's not the same thing in reverse, Brand X. Let your own kids discover who you are/were in due time.

Ah, Roberta, parents! Such a mystery to unravel!
I look at old photographs for clues. Still a mystery, but ....

I dont know if its an only child thing like Soz or generational thing or perhaps even a combination of some odd sort.
I knew my parents 'other lives' pretty well.
I was also that kid that was always in the corner when a wee one so, that could be part of it as well.
As I was older though and Mom was climbing up the corporate ladder and on the long slow part timer trek towards her Masters I was always recognized as "___'s Daughter" because "you guys could be twins". We also though lived close to the Hospital she worked in so, it wasnt like these people didnt see me on a regular daily basis and had been for seeing me like that for at least 10 years by the time I was in high school. She got me an "in" at the same place for my internship for college and it was even more fun.
I dont know a whole lot about her part time school life except that she was busy, tired and struggling all the time.
My parents did the camping with relatives and friends thing on the weekends in the summers too. Not much you can "hide" from the kid in the pup tent next door.
Dad's buddies always stopped by the house, I had some great uncles growing up, one was a part time pizza guy and full time vending machine guy..he brought lots of treats.
Having all these relationships right out in front of you well, not much a kid misses really.
And my Mom was the oldest girl in a family of 6 so, any family gatherings were filled with great stories probably because at the time she had more stories to be told about being so much older than the rest.

I've just read your posts. I'm touched, moved, and grateful. I appreciate your opening yourselves up to what may be painful or difficult memories and feelings.

It's true that my parents didn't tell me much about themselves. My grandmother was very forthcoming about her youth. She told me how suitors would drive up in hansom cabs or horses and buggies and take her out. Here's where my question lies. WHO WAS THAT GIRL? Who was she. Certainly not the woman I knew. The woman who wore her hair in a bun and wore ugly black shoes. Not the woman who was preoccupied with my eating habits. "That goil eats like a boid."

My father told me that he was a tough guy on the streets of the lower east side of Manhattan. WHO WAS THAT TOUGH GUY? Not my gentle, loving father.

I found a letter written to my mother from one of her friends. It's addressed to her "tootsie wootsie" friend. My mother was a tootsie wootsie? Light-hearted and carefree enough to be not just a tootsie but a tootsie wootsie. WHO WAS THAT TOOTSIE? Not the same woman who found that nothing I did was good enough or right.

I found that my mother saved poems and stories and cards I wrote when I was a kid. She saved the receipt from Bronx Hospital--payment for her stay when I was born. Such sentiment. Such caring. Yet she lived in her building for over thirty years and many of her neighbors had no idea of my existence. Who was the woman who saved the stuff?

I asked my father many, many questions about his early life. His answers were sometimes a revelation, sometimes evasive. But I didn't know the person he was. I knew him only as my father--that one context was all I had.

I think it's important and good to know ABOUT our parents. But it may not be possible to truly know who they are.

This thread is amazing!

It is. Thanks again to Roberta for starting it. I was especially moved by Diane's post, but lots of great stuff here.

I really do think I know my parents pretty well. They are both in therapy, have been for varying amounts of time. (My mom forever, my dad more recently.) They are both very versed in the ways of speaking about oneself, about trying to make one's SELF understood. I think I know them about as well as I know anyone. Better than they think, often -- my mom has had some big "revelations" that were rather obvious to me. For example, revealing the extent of her past-tense depression -- she thought she had been masking it far better than she was. There was nothing in her "revelation" I didn't already know.

My father died when I was 26 after some tough years. He was physically and mentally ill for several. My mother died when I was 38, and she had had alzheimer's for about eleven years. I really lost them early, although I know many people lose parents earlier. I did get to know my father somewhat well as a person, as we did have talks when I was a child and a teen and sometimes as an adult. We did love each other. I remember loving my mother a lot as a child, but when I was a teen she and her sister, whose house we lived at when we moved to California, got all involved in a grudge in their family, and it seemed to me it was all they talked about. I didn't have many friends then, it being a new place to live and my living fairly far from school.
So I tunnelled into reading, knocking off five or six books a week in summer and studying hard and daydreaming and eventually going to work after school and weekends once I turned sixteen. And then my mother seemed more and more out of it, as I saw how other people's mothers didn't have such amazingly stringent rules, etc. We never really discussed things. She had her views and I was not to sass. I also went to a school with a famously strict order of nuns, and - hah, Diane knows this as we have chuckled about it, I was signed up to join after I graduated from high school.

So, even though I missed a lot of talking time in my twenties with my father, and cringe now to think of what he went through, I don't feel like I didn't know him. My mother on the other hand... if she had not suffered so from alzheimer's and I had grown up and looked at her as other than someone who wanted to constrain me and my thoughts, I might have found much more there. It wasn't until after she died that I could cry about her, and as years have passed - it has been almost twenty five years now - she becomes more precious to me; I feel that I was right in many aspects of the relationship but was still a fool. She was a good and loving woman and I was too belligerantly (if quietly) off forming my independent self, too unseeing.

I've been thinking a lot about this thread. I've been thinking about my parents and relatives and how I feel that I didn't really know who they were. It occurs to me that I didn't feel that way about my grandfather. He was no less or more forthcoming than any other members of my family. The difference is that what he told me about himself and his life fit with the person who was doing the telling. Yes, I could see him walking his way out of Russia. I could see him farming and living off the earth. I could see him being strong. Fighting, even, about something or with someone.

The significant difference is that what my parents and grandmother told me about themselves didn't fit the people I knew--or thought I knew.

I never got the chance to know either of my grandfathers. My dad's father died when he was young, my mom's dad abandoned her family when she was young. I have always felt not knowing them was a big hole in my life.

Brand X, I was fortunate to start out with three grandparents. My paternal grandmother died when I was a child, but my maternal grandparents were around for a while.

My wonderful grandfather died when I was sixteen. How I wish I had had the wisdom to ask him the questions back then that come to mind now.

This is the first time I ever started crying in the middle of a thead. This is personal, painful, and emotional stuff we're talking about.

I've gotten a little misty myself.

Raboida, you know you're my favorite goil from da Bronx, but would you knock off with the crying??? You're making me leak all over the keyboard, fer chrissake.

Diane that IS from crying I pray........

Sorry Diane. Such sympathy from a nun, well, a fallen nun. Hey, never mind. I don't know nuttin' no 'bout nuns.

I've reread all the posts here. Diverse experiences and feelings. Good, bad. A sense of loss for so many of us--with respect to the living as well as the dead. What I find astonishing is that we're having this conversation. That we're being so open in such a personal way. When I started this thread, I had no idea what the responses would be like. In fact, I wondered if there would be any.

Brand X, You've got a great opportunity. Ask your parents questions. You may be surprised at the answers. You may not be. You won't know unless you ask.

Hey Roberta; this is a wonderful, if really painful, topic. My mother tries to conceal everything about her from me, which is completely pointless, and rather cold. My father is a non-issue; he was abusive, physically to my mother and mentally to everyone. He left the scene, and decided that he preferred a house over custody to me. This was when I was about two. When he saw what I had become-- completely successful-- he tried to buy me back with gifts of computers. He knew nothing of me; if he did, he would have seen that nothing but true emotion can win me. His family were weird too. Once, they tried to kidnap me when I was in the park; my maternal grandfather threw them into the lake. I always liked him; he and my grandmother, his wife, told me everything, too. My mother, after going through bad choices of men, took everything out on me. I was a quiet student, but everything was immediately my fault. She became more abusive than my 'father' or any other asshole whom she dated. I counted the days down until I could leave. I thought that she'd realize that she was out-of-line, but she never was one to apologise.