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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If they were that horrible, you would have known before you were over 50 years old.[/quote]

NP. When you are young, you only know what you know. So if you live with broken people, that’s your normal. It takes many years and a lot of experience to establish new normals. By then, you’re not living with those broken people anymore, and you haven’t for a long time. Your life is yours now. Maybe you try not to look back too much. You don’t want to dwell. So you never really look too deep, and you believe that you’ve moved on.

And then your parents get old. And suddenly you can’t avoid it anymore, you can’t avoid them anymore, there’s so little time and also now your own kids are grown and aren’t the buffer that they were. And those old patterns from your childhood are still there, all those familiar interactions are still there, but YOU are different, and suddenly it’s like the scales have fallen from your eyes, and it’s like, “Ohhhhh. I really didn’t get what I needed.” And that’s when it all comes bubbling up.

Or I dunno, maybe that’s just me. 
[/quote]

[b]Are you better, though? [/b] You are different, sure.

Our kids will all have stuff to say about us and our less than perfect parenting too.

My parents are far from ideal — they are divorced so not really one entity — but I’m not perfect either.

My best friend’s mom is schizophrenic and is currently living under an overpass or something.  My friend has good reason to hate her.  Being boring, on the other hand, is just what old people are.[/quote]

PP. That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?

In my house there was physical abuse, so in that way I can say definitively: yes, I’m better. My kids have been safe in their home.

The emotional stuff is trickier, murkier. While I have done a lot of work to be “better,” a family is at best a bunch of flawed human beings who bump up against each other again and again. And parents have a tremendous amount of power, so our flaws are amplified for our children.

Am I better? Am I better enough? These questions have been a constant thrum in my mind since the day I became a parent. I hope I am. I try to be. I try.

Still, the question will always be there. [/quote]

I have a close friend who works in the mental health field.  She is seeing massive amounts of young adults angry at their parents for not being “emotionally supportive” enough.  The lists of grievances run from helicoptering to letting me stop playing softball when I was in middle school even though maybe I would have been great at it, to being too steady in the face of adversity and not feeling their pain acutely enough, etc.  One of her coworkers also told her that her community center’s biggest support group is parents of estranged adult children.  Two couples started it and now there are over 50 people in it.  The next biggest support group has about a dozen members.  This is in an are with a real mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

My point in relaying this is that while we may think we are doing better and that our children would never treat us the way we are treating our “objectively” worse parents, I wouldn’t count on it.  The bar got raised for parenting so “our best” might not be cutting it.  We, for instance, have wound up in therapy for what seemed like some really minor stuff in our view and in the view of a couple of close confidants, but it’s an attempt to grapple with this before our DC is fully independent in the hopes of fending off adult estrangement.  [/quote]

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