I Was Angry With My Parents.
Shane is now a full-fledged teenager. He grunts at me instead of talking. This is different than his social qualms. It’s just with me.When I ask him a direct question, the answer is often “mmm” or “urg.” And when I don’t ask a question, I don’t even get a grunt.
I told him that trying to have a conversation with him felt – to me – like I was asking him to rip off one of his legs and hand it to me. He’s not always – but often – that uncommunicative.
It feels as though Shane is angry with his parents.
Back in the day, when I was a teenager, I was angry with my parents. In fact, I dragged out my adolescence and corresponding anger for about ten years. From my perspective, my parents hadn’t done anything right from the time I was about 10 until I was almost 30.
I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I was not a deprived child. I had a roof over my head every night. In spite of what my parents tell me now, I do not recall being poor and I definitely never went hungry.
When high school rolled around, I had everything I wanted or needed, including the ever-popular Jordache jeans with a tiger-style comb sticking out of the back pocket. I even had platform shoes.
My parents – those non-Jordache-wearing, non-comb-sporting old people (in their 30’s) – well, they were losers. They didn’t know anything about anything. And I most certainly knew everything.
At the time, I just wanted to get away from my parents. And I wanted to be away from them ALL. THE. TIME.
My parents loved me. They adored me, in fact, for no apparent reason. Even during those awful years, while I was pulling away with all of my might to become independent, if anyone had asked me I probably would have acknowledged it: “Yes,” I would have said, “I know they love me. But what does that have to do with anything?”
Later in life – much, much later – a friend was talking about her childhood using terms I didn’t recognize. She said words like “unsafe” and “fear.” At the time, I didn’t comprehend there were real families that were unstable. I didn’t know there were kids who were scared, even at home.
I never had that feeling.
So – much, much later – I realized that I’d had the two most important things in life: security and love. And I suddenly noticed that my parents weren’t nearly the idiots I thought they were.
But it took me a long time to notice.
When Bill and I started a family, our plan was to offer security and love. We were not perfect by any stretch, and there was far more yelling in my own house than there had been when I was growing up. But it was honest yelling, and while we may (still) disagree too loudly, we also have kept the communication lines open.
Except for Shane, who never yelled. And now, he says very little. On a good day, he’ll forget and he’ll chat about stuff and it will be just like it was back in the day – about a year ago. We’ll talk like we’re friends.
And then the grunting will start again, and my feelings will be hurt again.
Someday, though, maybe ten years from now, Shane will look back on his childhood and realize that we aren’t complete idiots and that we, too, provided him with security and love.
I just hope he gets there sooner than I did.