Remember when you were a teenager…or in your early twenties? Think back to that time and try to remember how you felt about your parents. I would be willing to bet that your feelings for them were a blend of love and appreciation mixed with a healthy dose of anger for all the perceived injustices they had brought upon you.
I remember feeling this way and people would always say: “Just wait until you have children and you will understand what it is like to be a parent”. Well, it may be true that you need to be a parent to know what it’s like to have kids, but there is a more important realization to be had, and it has nothing to do with being a parent.
It has to do with being an adult and coming to the realization that your parents are just people. Just like you and me, just like anyone else on this planet. They are subject to the same deficiencies, imperfections, and quirks that we all are. And let’s not forget that they too are a product of their own childhood experiences and have traveled a path similar to yours.
As a kid, there seems to be some loosely enforced belief that being a parent requires some sort of specialization, or that parents go through some sort of secret intensive training program, but the reality is that becoming a parent takes nothing more than a primal urge.
So, if you are walking around with anger in your life towards your parents, it’s time to give that up and come to the following realization:
Your parents are just a random sample from a population that is ridden with emotional deficiencies. They are not gods or elite citizens of the world. They are simply people who have done the best they could. Even if they did not treat you well, or did not do what you would have liked a parent to do, you can be confident that they did their best. Now, I don’t mean “did their best” in the tee-ball, everyone is a winner kind of way. I just mean that all people suffer different deficiencies. Some people are emotionally withdrawn, some people are thoughtless, some people are compulsive liars, some people are greedy, and some people are just flat out stupid.
No matter what type of people your parents are, or what deficiencies they have, surprisingly, deep introspection is the only way to ever see what it is really like to be them. You will never understand what is really inside of them, you can only understand yourself better, and in-turn, you will see that you are not so different.
