Were Your Parents Right About Anything?

As unappealing as it sometimes sounds, reexamining your parents’ wisdom can crack open a new world of fear, healing, and clarity.

Visite Éclair (1961) by Dorothea Tanning

As longtime readers of Ask Polly know, I’m not the biggest advocate of trusting your parent’s advice — or anyone else’s advice, for that matter, including mine! A huge chunk of my happiness grew out of a steady determination to trust myself. Most of my satisfaction and my joy at this moment in my life spring forth from the relatively new feeling of knowing exactly what I want and believing that I have the right to enjoy myself. And quite honestly, even though my parents clearly knew and know how to enjoy themselves, they weren’t always focused on transmitting messages about self-trust, self-acceptance, satisfaction, and joy to their offspring.

BUT THEN AGAIN, WHO IS? How many parents walk around telling their teenagers, who at first glance look like RECKLESS JOY-SEEKING MISSILES, that they should sleep later, work less hard, and focus on relishing where they are right now?

My parents loved to talk about the satisfactions of work, exercise, achievement, and getting shit done in general, whether by swimming laps at the pool (my dad) or scraping paint off old radiators in the house (my mom). Long before Nike arrived on the scene with its seductive, reductive marketing stance, my mom’s motto was JUST DO IT. Do the thing you’re putting off. Do the thing that’s stressing you out. Do it and you’ll feel better. Do it and stop talking about it. If you’re talking about it, that means you’re trying to do it. Just do it instead.

My dad’s motto was DO MORE. You’re more intelligent than you think, even when you’re being sort of stupid, which is often. You’re more capable of doing incredible things than you think. You can do anything you set out to do, you just have to crack the code and go for it. His motto was also DON’T LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER, SHE NEVER WANTS TO DO ANYTHING, SHE’S AFRAID OF THE WHOLE WORLD.

Now you can start to see that, even though I had to work very hard to scrape THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING IS TO WORK HARDER out of my brain and heart and body, I also discovered, through the slow process of trusting myself and quieting my shame, that HARD WORK TRULY IS A SALVE. I discovered that hard work, when you’re capable of rising to greet it, can be soothing, enjoyable, and rewarding on many levels.

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The trouble with parental advice is that it’s extremely difficult to select the good parts while discarding the bad parts. Sometimes when you really sit and analyze what your parents taught you, you discover that there aren’t that many bad parts. The things they said to you weren’t even the problem. It was their conflicted feelings, their shame, their anger at themselves, their habit of blaming external forces for their failures, their inability to show up and be present for your weird personality, that stood in the way of your bond with them, your self-acceptance, your well-being, and your ability to embrace your path forward in life.

But even if your parents were calm and loving and confident, even if they were completely consistent and reliable and their values magically matched yours (okay this is starting to sound like a fantasy, but let’s run with it!), they still didn’t have the power to hand you every quality and philosophy that worked for them. Because life isn’t that easy, and everything pure your parents wanted to give you was destined to be smashed to pieces by our mercilessly messed-up world anyway.

The point is, there’s no way around figuring things out for yourself. And in that process, you end up rejecting a lot of what your parents wanted, not because they were necessarily confused or wrong about what was good or useful, but because what they wanted for themselves and for you LOOMED SO LARGE for so long. If your parents were present for your childhood, you couldn’t avoid valuing what they valued to an almost warped degree. Even when I say to my kids, “You need to relax more, life is about learning to enjoy yourself and figuring out what you love,” they don’t necessarily take that in.

What they notice is what I do. Sometimes I work way too hard. Sometimes I also do what I love, and talk about what I love. Sometimes I play Wingspan on my phone for two hours while eating a large Cadbury Crème Egg from the Easter Bunny’s stash a full month before Easter. My kids’ habits mimic my habits, for better and for worse.

This is why revisiting and reexamining your parents’ guidance can be so illuminating. Because once you truly trust your instincts and understand what you really want and love and enjoy, once you accept that you’re a person who wants odd and unexpected things, and embrace the fact that noticing those things is part of the job of being whole, once you shake off the shame of not becoming EXACTLY what your parents or your culture wanted you to become, then you can finally look back at your parents’ advice and say, “Not all of this is garbage, actually.”

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That said, you should expect BIG emotions to arise in the process.

In some ways, I had less trouble loving and accepting my dad for who he was when he was still alive, because I expected less from him. It was much harder for me to love and accept my mother for who she was because I depended on her so much more. I was confused by her strong opinions. I never felt like I had to follow a specific path in order to please her, but I did take everything she believed to heart to such an extreme extent that I punished myself for any desires that fell outside the realm of what I thought she would find acceptable.

And did I truly know what she saw as acceptable? Not at all! I allowed her natural ambivalence, her shame, and her insecurities to trick me into believing that she was far more judgmental than she actually was.

This is such a common phenomenon, among family members, friends, lovers: We enter into a volatile, uncertain space in the company of a loved one, and we misinterpret that volatility. We mistake the other person’s insecurities for negative judgments. We confuse other people’s needs with attacks on our choices. We encounter their shame as an attempt to shame us. The ATMOSPHERE ITSELF between two people who are not completely at ease in intimate relationships can be unnerving, tumultuous, off-kilter. And when the energy in a relationship is a tiny bit panicked and defensive on both sides, it’s difficult for the humans involved to speak from the heart, to reassert their principles, to make space for another whole human in the relationship.

For a few years there, my mother and I would experience so much shame in each other’s company that we would set about erasing each other as soon as the mood turned sour or unsteady or dark. These were self-protective acts. We would speak over each other. We were preemptively defensive. I took her shitty moods personally and vice versa. We were poised and ready to blame each other for this atmospheric shift, which was actually not her fault and not my fault. We turned into lawyers determined to outline the other person’s crimes in detail in order to remain innocent, in order to stay out of the prison of shame that was always waiting for us, always haunting us.

My shame matched her shame. My confused words matched her confused words. My fear matched her fear. We matched. Sometimes that’s what intimacy looks like. But when you add forgiveness – which can feel like a Herculean effort, under those circumstances – suddenly there is clarity. Forgiveness shines a light on what’s real: She’s not actually saying anything that harsh. I’m not actually in a terrible mood. This darkness isn’t as dark as it seems.

There is wisdom in that scary, intimate place that neither person can see because they’re too afraid. My mom and I were afraid of being defined by someone else, afraid of being overpowered, afraid of being vulnerable, afraid of being found GUILTY, afraid of feeling more than we wanted to feel, afraid of caring more than we wanted to care, afraid that our true needs and desires would never be respected, afraid that we would never be loved the way we want to be loved.

If you want to be wise and trust yourself and feel more joy, you have to face those fears, alone and in the company of others. If you want to stop running away from your warped misconceptions of what people expect of you, if you want to stop avoiding feedback because you believe that it’s harsh criticism that means you’re bad and worthless, if you want to stop fleeing from your own shame and stop sidestepping other people’s confusion and stop WRITING PEOPLE OFF AS CRAZY every single time they tell you what they need from you, either directly or indirectly, you have to reckon with how AFRAID AND AVOIDANT you are. Even if you want more love, more recognition, more acceptance from your dad or your sister or your best friend, you might also want less from them, too. You might also be running away in fear at some level, because you can’t make yourself as vulnerable as you need to, in order to truly show up for another flawed human being.

Your parents might’ve had some good advice for you that you could never see clearly because you were too defensive, self-protective, and ashamed, or their worldview was so overpowering that it warped your ability to see it or them or yourself clearly. This is what the hard work of facing reality is all about: stripping away the layers of shame and confusion you feel, allowing those sad, useless layers to be okay, forgiving yourself for being a regular human who doesn’t always understand her real motivations, her real fears.

Reckoning with your enormous fears and insecurities should feel like renovating a very old house. You aren’t just bulldozing the house! You’re not going to let those years of history go to waste. You’re not going to throw every weird personality trait and every ambivalent memory straight into a giant dumpster. There is hope there. There is love and connection in there somewhere. You’re going to honor the house itself, even as you tear down walls and rip up rotted floors. You’re going to scrape out the shame and mourn the losses and look for joy under the anger and sadness.

Facing reality includes looking for useful bits of wisdom and hope, salvaging what works, getting your hands dirty, feeling your way through your mistakes and your missteps. It’s a slow, difficult process, and it’s never over.

Sometimes that sounds terrible. The hardest work imaginable, and it never ends? What the hell?

But other times, you realize that

HARD WORK TRULY IS A SALVE.

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Becoming confident, loving, and open is a lifelong quest. Not that many people achieve it. If you’re trying at all, you’re among the brave! Give yourself some credit for that. Thanks for reading. Send letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.