This Be The Verse

One of Philip Larkin’s most famous poems sounds like an R-rated, depressed Ogden Nash. You may be familiar with its opening stanza:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Our extended family got together for Thanksgiving and we had a great time laughing together, recalling and reciting stories. At one point that included my wife joking about the time she hit a home run in her first varsity softball game. Her dad was bursting with pride. Her mom said she was embarrassed by how big her daughter’s butt looked running around the bases in those tight uniform pants.

The girls and I laughed at that story because my wife was laughing when she told it this time. That was the context for this particular retelling of this story: Can you believe your grandmother said that? What a hilariously awful thing to say!

But we’d also heard that story told and remembered in other contexts where it wasn’t a laughing matter. That offhand bit of cruelty is something my wife has carried for most of her life. Sometimes she can joke about it. But not all the time. Most of the time it’s a memory that hurts.

So a little bit later, after Thanksgiving dessert, I was sitting with our daughters and wondering what I might have said or done to fill them with the faults I had, and add some extra. They’re not kids anymore — the younger one just turned 30 (!) — but we’re still their parents in just the same way that my wife’s mom is still her mom even now, more than 20 years after her death.

But also, hopefully, not in all those same ways.

So I decided just to ask them. I’m not sure exactly how I put it, but I said something like: Is there anything I said to you that still hurts all these years later? Something that made you feel like I thought you were a disappointment, or an embarrassment? Something that you sometimes tell as a bitterly funny story but always carry as a bitterly painful wound?

I wanted them to know that whatever I might have said like that was wrong. Wrong as in sinful and wrong as in inaccurate and untrue. Disregard it. Dismiss it. Forget and, if possible, forgive.

They’re good people, so they responded to my attempt to reassure them by reassuring me and telling me not to worry about that — that they didn’t remember any such careless carelessness or off-hand cruelties. Nothing awful or damaging that they still carried with them.

And maybe that’s true and they weren’t just being nice or trying to avoid an unpleasant discussion dredging up unpleasant memories. I hope that’s true. But I’ve lived with me a long time, and I’ve seen and heard me say too many cruel and hurtful things to people who didn’t deserve it to be sure that I never did that with them over the course of 18+ years.

So to make sure, I plan to ask them again. And to tell them, again, that anything I might have said like that was wrong.

That’s an odd conversation to have, I suppose, but I think it’s also a necessary one. And not just between parents and children.

I think if we are to have any hope of avoiding the sardonic despair of Larkin’s poem in which “Man hands on misery to man,” we have to find ways to take back that misery instead of just handing it on.

Ask. Or, as another poet said, “Knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.”

(Speaking of asking … he said awkwardly … December is a fundraising month here at this blog. Here again is my PayPal link, and here’s my Venmo: @George-Clark-61. Thanks.)