Knowing Your Parents

Writing out your own life story is one way to get at this. A personal autobiography forces you to sit with the people who raised you and look at them again.

My psychology background had taught me that understanding your parents matters. Acting on that was another thing entirely. For years I couldn't manage a visit home without at least one argument with my mother. My father was different, partly because I lost him so early. When I called home I spoke to her, and she passed along whatever I'd said. He never quite had a handle on me. What I was doing, and the reasons behind it, tended to stay a mystery to him.

"Knowing Your Parents" has the ring of a self-help title, or maybe the first chapter of a memoir. If I ever write mine, I'll say so. The trouble is that the story won't hold still. Living keeps shifting where I'm standing when I look back at it, and the view changes with the angle. Becoming a parent myself, later on, handed me explanations for things about my own parents that had made no sense to me before I had children.

Jane Fonda did exactly this in her book Prime Time. I'm not sure what made me pick it up, since at the time I had no use for Jane Fonda or the positions she was known for. I assumed it wasn't a self-help book, and that even if it turned out to be one, she'd have nothing useful to offer. The book surprised me. She had worked out some perspective on her own life, on the reasons she had done certain things, on why her thinking had moved away from where it once sat. What she urges readers to do is write their own stories down and watch for whatever understanding of themselves comes out of the exercise.

Related