The older I get, the cooler my dad gets. A while ago he ditched the annoying, old-fashioned music he used to blare in the car for blues-he introduced me to the greats, both living (Rod Piazza, Mark Hummel) and dead (Muddy Waters, Ray Charles). He stopped spouting so many dorky comments and started making more wise and funny observations. And what he does at work all day got way more understandable and cool.
Actually, my dad hasn’t changed, I have. As for my mom, I think I’m already starting to turn into her. What’s more, I don’t mind. I find myself using her sayings-her perennial favorite is “Take the best and leave the rest!”, which I used to roll my eyes at-and my relatives love to point out how I look, sound and even write like her, which to me are compliments. But I haven’t always been comfortable with our similarities.
When we’re very young, we put our parents on a pedestal: They can do no wrong, and they can make everything right. Somewhere along the way, though, they get irritating, overbearing, and altogether impossible to cohabitate with. And then, slowly, subtly, maybe around the time we go off to college, maybe later, they start to get cool again. Not perfect, and not invincible-in fact the opposite: They become real people.
Sometimes we want our parents to be what they’re just not. We hold ideas of what a mother or a father “should” be, or what a mother/father-daughter/son relationship “should” be like. Some girls worry about the fact that they don’t particularly like their mothers; I used to worry about the fact that I counted my mother among my best friends (did that make me uncool? Weren’t my best friends supposed to be my own age?). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to let my relationships with my parents be relationships with real people, who have quirks and foibles and flaws. My dad and I have grown closer since I started seeing him as a friend, with likes, dislikes and hopes for the future, rather than as just a dad; I’ve realized my mom and I are close because we’re compatible people, not because I have nowhere else to turn.
It’s true that not every parent can give her child the kinds of support she wants and needs. But you would never pick a stranger and decide that the two of you were going to be close friends: Close friendships happen, they aren’t made to happen, and in the same way we can’t just make our relationships with our parents what we think they should be. Before we can have the best possible relationships with the random two people who brought us into the world, maybe we have to let go of our ideas of what our parents “should” be and appreciate what they are. Or, in other words, maybe we have to take the best and leave the rest.
