learning to love our parents more
This Week In Reading:
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
I think everyone else read this book five years ago, but if, like me, you are deeply behind the curve, the basic rundown is that The Glass Castle is a memoir of Jeannette Walls’s dysfunctional childhood with two wild and incredibly irresponsible parents. It spans the deserts of the Southwest, an impoverished adolescence in Appalachia and a final break for New York at 17.
Reading The Glass Castle you never lose sight of the darkness of Jeannette Walls’s childhood, but you also aren't weighed down by it. You experience it the way she experienced it, strange and hard and humorous and full of possibility and wonder. Her parents are undeniably terrible at being parents. Negligent to the point of abusiveness, selfish and irresponsible. It takes them hours to notice she fell out of a moving car, they let their house crumble until her brother begins sleeping under an inflatable raft to keep the rain pouring through the ceiling from soaking him in his sleep. They are bad parents, and no one would have blamed Jeannette from cutting them from her life entirely. We are not obligated to love the people who raised us.
But she doesn't excommunicate them. She seems entirely aware of the havoc and neglect she was raised within, while simultaneously portraying the dysfunctional love at the core of her parent’s choices. Her mother always trying to make do, her father, too broke to buy presents for his children, once gave each of them a star for Christmas. All of the decisions that made it impossible for her parents to regularly put food on the table or keep the house warm in the winter also instilled the values of self-reliance and creativity within her. She is who she is because of, not despite of them.
A less generous person would frame them as monsters, but instead she writes about them with a kind of tenderness, a fragile humanity that is perhaps more than they deserve. It is also worth noting that despite the trauma described in the book, it somehow manages to be deeply entertaining, a series of absolutely insane anecdotes I couldn’t put down.
My parents are not Jeanette Walls's parents. They have never done anything that begins to resemble the abuse and neglect that riddles this memoir. But the struggle to love and appreciate the people that raised us is something that struck close to home.
For a long time I defined myself as someone who had a "complicated relationship with her parents." It was true for the most part. Between the ages of 14 and 21, we really struggled at liking each other. There were several multi-month periods when we were not on speaking terms, both when we lived in the same house and when we didn't. We did deeply shitty things to each other, said things with the intention of causing pain, failed at extending compassion and grace.
In the past few years, out relationship has dramatically changed for the better. Most of this had to do with me growing the fuck up and learning how to approach my parents with a type of generosity that was once out of my grasp. They do not always love me in the way that I wish to be loved, but they are always loving me in the best way they know how. How can I fault them for that? For genuinely trying to do their best? Saying that I am someone who has a complicated relationship with my parents feels like a cop out. We are all imperfect in the ways we love each other, it is the inherent challenge of being a human being. Do you know how much better my life is now that my parents and I like each other? Appreciating their effort is much harder than resenting their shortcomings. For a long time, I said that I had a complicated relationship with my parents because it was easier than admitting the simplest truth: that we love each other, that we are a family.
We're all out here, just trying to do our best.
Further Reading:
For more on messy family dynamics, I really loved The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. A novel about two adult children of a pair of performance artists, it is a funny and tender satire of conceptual art and family.
If you want more memoirs, my all time favorite is Just Kids by Patti Smith. Probably the most influential book I ever read as a Young Artist, I have reread it numerous times and it never fails to reinvigorate and move me.