I was listening to a video from Friendly Atheist, sometimes these are really distracting; I listen and then I want to stop and ask the person something or think of something irrelevant to the video. I was thinking somewhat about parents and kids, even grown kids, who often still have parents present if not nearby.
I was thinking of "no". Well, you go and ask your authority something and the answer is "no" and the resulting emotions that, well, that's not "child abuse," but the child being a child feels something that may be irrational - that the door is closed, that the authority has spoken. I was thinking because it's Father's Day (in the US) and mostly fathers get a lot of rap for being unreasonable and short on explanation and, well, even though my father doesn't have internet, I wanted to post some videos like I did for Mother's Day. Fathers have really harsh songs about them and this rift. My dad's not like that, my mom is. I have somewhat reconciled or revised for myself that my mom was not terrible, just strong-willed.
Anyway, as a grown kid, I am feeling something. I think each generation may have some opportunity to soften, as they make their own kids, they "understand," they repeat many methods that were done on them, like, it's by having kids that these uncomfortable practices regenerate - things that once a teen resented now a mom relies on as best practices. I'm not a mom. Unfortunately I cannot simply repair this rift by perpetrating my mom's worst on my own brood as a path to understanding and forgiving.
I was just thinking sort of abstractly as I heard someone on a video then say something: parents lie. Parents make up bullshit reasons sometimes because they are guessing and they don't know, or they fear, they are just people. But this can come across as authoritative and strict and make the parent seem unreasonable and unapproachable, and the kid learn from the experience distrust, to be distant, to wedge a rift with the parent as no longer a reliable source of comfort or information. It's not physically abusive, it is not what is normally in the sense of emotionally abusive, it is just the law of "under my roof" and threats of "I hope you have kids like you someday." Kids are tender. They are unreasonable. You cannot level things at them like you would an adult. Nor are they precious or fragile. My least favorite part of childhood is when the parents take off the mitts, innocence ends today and suddenly we expect much more of you (like everything you never expected being free and clear until now). Around age 7 or 8. To be clear, my mom really did give reasons; she never that I can remember said "because I'm the mom, that's why". But she's also opened herself up to be the first person you want to tell and the last person you want to tell. The one who taught me that I occasionally need to lie to save myself just a lot of red tape. She's a nosy and jealous god. And I grow up to tear down that facade. She's just a person. She doesn't hold any strings. I've known this for a while, but how did it get to this point? What she had was control, and she lost it because she taught me to withhold from her.
This is what I get from trying to put up a medley of Father's Day songs. I think parents and children should be closer to each other, even when the children are adults, but not freaky. I've never met an adult child of any parent who didn't have some issue with one or both parents. I don't know why this has to be so difficult. Is this left over from past generations where a child had to be prepared to possibly immigrate to another country and leave parents behind, people were sentimental but not overly attached, not overly wistful about a relationship that just feels so awkward. Or blind respect for one's parents but, similar to myself and others, pretty much on paper only and really rigidly controlled family functions? I've gone out with guys before, they always have much closer (too close) relations with their mother, and almost nothing to say to their father (in one case, no father). This is the failure of the relationship: I can't impress a mother if a mother is important to impress.
I am rambling. I know this. I am just pondering on the process of the generations. Whether it's important to feel disgusted by your own parents in order to feel fully adult, whether having one's own children repairs the rifts well, or is supposed to, or just perpetuates a little stinky parenting. I'm not coming down on any parents here, I'm speaking as a child who is a full-grown adult wondering the psychology. I just feel like it doesn't take much to put a wedge between a parent and a child, not the productive separating wedge, but the distant-awkward-relationship-making wedge, or if they are the same thing.
As for fathers, I was thinking in the "traditional" model, that mothers are often to defer to fathers and play good cop/bad cop, and this is why so many, well, tortured artists became our favorite songwriters eventually wrote a song about their dad that wasn't really very kind. Or bad fathers who missed their children and wrote about themselves.
- is where I was coming from. Parent and Child. Nobody writes a song like that about their mom. "How can I try to explain? When I do, he turns away again." This is the rift, the trial between a child and an adult, I was also thinking in terms of the parent-child relationship many feel (positively) for god. That feels like the parent purposely keeps the advantage of experience to create distance while the child strives for an amount of attention to close the gap. A lot of pressure for anyone and they wouldn't know it's unnecessary yet. The inexperienced child is at a disadvantage to know what's actually good for them and what's actually bullshit. I am not speaking as a parent, but as objectively critical of a parent. I try to be a grown-up and not "blame" my mom, but it does seem like a pattern is set by the adult and the wedge just keeps getting deeper as the child does become an adult, perhaps distracted or gains an insight if or when that child becomes a parent themselves, I don't know. I guess that's it.