Getting to know you

I came across an interesting column in the Washington Post today, title “I rejected my parents’ WASP values. Now I see we need them more than ever.” In it Pamela Constable discusses her life growing up with privilege, her rejection of her parents’ values in young adulthood, and her more recent attempts to get closer to  her parents and subsequently finding they were much better people than she’d given them credit for.

Visiting home between assignments, I found myself noticing and appreciating things I had always taken for granted — the tamed greenery and smooth streets, the absence of fear and abundance of choice, the code of good manners and civilized discussion. I also began to learn things about my parents I had never known and to realize that I had judged them unfairly. I had confused their social discomfort with condescension and their conservatism with callousness.

It’s an interesting article, well worth a few moments to read.

It made me reflect on my own upbringing and my parents. I never rebelled like Constable, but I can’t say I truly appreciated my parents, either. I probably still don’t comprehend everything they went through for us. I know they did the best they could, however, and the older I get the more I appreciate what they managed to accomplish. Of course they weren’t perfect, but some of what I might once have considered failings I’ve come to accept as the simple difficulties we humans experience in trying to understand one another. Perhaps I wasn’t entirely understood by my parents, but I didn’t appreciate how difficult I was–and continue to be–to understand. I’ve since come to realize that I don’t make it easy for anyone to get to truly know me. Somewhere along the line I learned to hide large parts of myself from everyone. With five other kids to take care of it can’t have been easy for them to realize how much I kept hidden, though I’m not certain being an only child would have helped either. I’m pretty good at building walls.

In any case, my parents did an amazing job. Both came from difficult circumstances–not negative, mind you, just difficult. They both grew up accustomed to rural life and had to adapt to a more citified existence. Dad experienced many career changes, and ultimately settled in a low-level job at a University. I never realized it then, but many of his frustrations with his job came from the built-in class conflicts inherent in such an environment. He knew his job better than the highly educated people over him, and was smarter than many of the people he had to deal with every day. Dad’s genius was in hands, in his love of and understanding of people, and in his ability to organize the chaos inherent in meeting and balancing the material needs of students and professors. Students appreciated and liked him, but I’m not sure he always got the respect he deserved from the faculty and administrators.

Not that I have room to talk. I don’t think he got the respect he deserved from me, either. I know much of that is inherent in the parent-child relationship, and fathers being misunderstood by their sons is practically a requirement. I think I fell into that less than most, but I still can’t help but notice how the older I get, the more brilliant my parents seem. My parents, like so many others during that time period, quietly “got it done,” and largely without getting the credit they deserve. I hope we all figure this out before it’s too late.