childhood and parents

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Now the more telling question: Aren’t these the very qualities that are often ignored or rejected in our families? To the extent this is so, we are valued not for being a child, but for growing out of it.

“Dad?” he’d say, looking up, looking perplexed. “Dad?” I hated that: it was like an exaggerated version of the way I so often felt, trying to gauge the depth of my father’s presence.