Brick

Know­ing you too well is not enough

Copy­right 2004 Ben S. Pollock

Fri­day, Dec. 17, 2004: Here’s a con­cept that just barely occurred to me, 11:30 p.m., a month after the local funeral for Mom, on Wednes­day 17 Novem­ber, fol­low­ing her Mon­day 15 Novem­ber passing.

No one quite under­stands you as a par­ent does. And Dad under­stood me dif­fer­ently from how Mom under­stood me.

Their under­stand­ing was fright­en­ingly, unnerv­ingly com­plete, but in a lim­ited way. They likely knew when you were lying. They prob­a­bly didn’t know the truth, as they couldn’t read minds unless you were very young, but they could tell they weren’t get­ting the whole story.

I don’t know that but I sus­pect that.

Yet, there is so much, it must be said, that a par­ent does not know about you, because you do not tell them. You’re not cov­er­ing some­thing with a lie, when you’ve grown up and are out of the house, but they don’t get the whole picture.

How can they get the whole pic­ture? They’re not there with you at work, com­ing home pooped or frus­trated or relieved. They’re not there when you real­ize you don’t hop out of bed like you did 15 years ago, that you’re get­ting older, too. And they wouldn’t be impressed with you get­ting older, as they’re older than you and they sur­vived it so far.

No, each par­ent doesn’t get shown or told the whole pic­ture because they’re not there. As sim­ple as that.

Your spouse under­stands you fright­en­ingly com­pletely, but it’s dif­fer­ent. She is indeed there with you a lot, and when she’s not you tell her what she missed of your day, poor dear.

The under­stand­ing is different.

A par­ent — at least car­ing ones like those I was lucky enough to have and seem­ingly lots of peo­ple have uncar­ing or hap­haz­ardly car­ing par­ents — knows your hopes and how you take dis­ap­point­ments. These are the emo­tions that must not change much from when one is a child.

A spouse will, must, have her own agenda. It’s just dif­fer­ent, that’s all. Some­times you are her prob­lem. Her eyes that look at you with love and com­pas­sion and even some­times respect, they just don’t look at you the same as Mom’s, even when Mom had no idea how wrong things were going. –30–