childhood and parents

There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.

she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.

Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.

Most of us did not have parent-figures who were able to identify, let alone regulate, their feelings.

My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all.

It was disconcerting, how growing up he had felt both smothered and overlooked in the same household.

Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop

It doesn’t matter how much money I make or how well I do, he’ll always just see me as his too-loud kid that got in trouble with teachers for talking too much and could never quite figure out how to hand in his homework on time.