I am so glad I don’t have to go through all that anymore, is the first thought I have when I hear adults my age talk about how they still hate their parents. When they say it with such animosity and rage, I remember the emotions that drove me to say such things, and I’m happy to be past all that. When I hear someone say that their parents are bumbling fools, idiots, or backwater hicks from the 1950’s, I remember saying such things, and I regret some of it, but as has been said of regrets, there is little that we can do about them now.

When I’d complain about my dad, one of my greatest frustrations was that no one listened to me. So, when people talk about how awful their parents were/are, I listen. I listen to those in their twenties, and I remember those complaints. I listen to thirty-somethings, and I try to remember if I was still that angry in my thirties. When the complaints come from those who have crossed the big four-oh, I want to ask them, “Why is it still so important to you that your parents be wrong?”

“I’m smarter than my dad,” a twenty-something blogger wrote. “I really wish I wasn’t. It’s like finding out Santa isn’t real.” 

That isn’t an exact quote, but it is a decent summary of her entry. The blogger went onto discuss how intelligence and cultural sensitivity are a cross that she must now bear in her discussions with her parents. She never states that she hates her parents. She states that she, in fact, loves them a great deal, but she characterizes that definition of love with an element of pity, bordering on condescension, that appears to be endemic in twenty-somethings.

Define smart. Are you smart, or just smarter than your dad? What’s your definition of smart, intelligence, and knowledgeable? What are your bullet points, your parameters, and your conclusion? Before we move onto the next point, let’s consider the idea that these barometers are all based on your settings. These aren’t fighting words, I know exactly what she’s talking about, because when I set the ground rules, I found out that I was smarter than my dad too.

That’s the first question we should ask anytime we determine that we’re smarter than another, which one of us set the terms? We know our areas better than them, and if we could remember to walk away after laying out our presentation, we might leave that discussion with a lot of confidence in our intellect. Some of have the annoying habit of sticking around to let others present their side and delve into their areas. We learn more about them, and their areas, and at some point we just wish they would shut up because their presentation can be humbling.

Did you get better grades in school than your dad? If so, you’re probably smarter than he is, unless you consider the idea that you might just be an excellent test-taker. Tests are important, grades are important, and degrees are important in life, but are they the decisive determination between smart and smarter? We might score high marks on a test, but how often do we retain that information a year, a month, or even a week later? Being a good test-taker is an admirable skill that we might be able to use when we face tests in the workforce, but does it mean that we’re smarter than our adversaries? Were Jeopardy! champions that much smarter than their opponents on the quiz show, or did they prepare for the tests of their knowledge better than their opponents? 

My dad wasn’t smart by our standards, but he had boatloads of wisdom from his experiences in life, and he wasn’t afraid to bore his listener with his extraneous information, or information I considered extraneous. It went in one ear and out the other, of course, until a situation called for it, and I sucked it back into prefrontal cortex and used it. The disappointing conclusion I reached was that my dad wasn’t as dumb as I needed him to be for my characterization of my intelligence.  

My teenage hatred of him, blocked the idea that he had his areas, and some carry this well into their twenties. The teen years are a period of rebellion, learning, and individualization that wrestle with one another to mature our minds to formulation. As we age, our mind matures, and so does our rebellion, until it manifests into either full-fledged hatred, or a condescending pity that recognizes their backwater modes of thought for what they are. This matured rebellion is also based on the fact that our parents still have some authority over us, and that reminds us of those days when our parents had total authority over us, and how they “abused it to proselytize their closed-minded beliefs on us.”

When we finally reach a point when they’re no longer helping us pay for tuition, a car, or rent, and we’re able to flex some independent muscles, we spend the next couple of years fortifying this notion that they were wrong, all wrong, all along.

By the time we grow past our narcissistic teens, twenties, and for some of us, our thirties, circumstances begin to reveal some of the logic and wisdom our parents attempted to pass down to us, and the idea that some of it applies in some circumstances. (Some will never admit this. They remain stuck in peak rebellion.) Our parents advice did not apply in all circumstances, of course, but it does in enough of them that it starts to dim the bumbling fool tint on our rose colored glasses. Then, when we reach our forties, we begin to think that they’re idiots all over again.

I wrote the last line to complete a joke I read. I cannot remember where I read it, but it was one of those bullet point lists, oven mitt/bumper sticker type of rants that get passed around the office space. It’s a funny line, because there is an element of truth to it. We compare ourselves to the people who surround us, and our parents are the most prominent indicators we use to determine how we are doing in life. Our evaluations are steeped in emotion and feeling, and they very rarely involve objectivity. Even in our subjective analysis that ends with considering them fools all over again, we find ourselves admitting that a truth lies somewhere in the middle. This truth is a hybrid of the lifelong recognition we have had of our parents’ failings combined with the points we begrudgingly give them on some matters. We also gain some respect for them in a manner we never did as kids, because we now have our own kids who consider us bumbling fools.

As flawed as our parents were, and some of their advice and philosophies were fundamentally flawed, we eventually gain enough distance from our youth that we begin to view them as fellow parents who tried to lead us down a path conducive for happiness and success in life. At some point, we learn that the problems we have in life are no longer about them. It’s about us. If our inability to cope with problems results from our parents raising us, it might be a result from being so traumatized by our parents that it has lingering effects that cannot be resolved without outside assistance. If that outsider is able to approach our problem with a level of professional objectivity, they will inform us that if we are going to have a decent future, it’s on us to work on putting the past behind us.

This specific timeline may not apply to everyone, as we all go through these stages on our own time, and the word hate may be too strong to describe the animosity some adults still have for their parents, but anyone who has been through the peaks and valleys of a combustible relationship with their parents knows it can be one hell of an emotional roller coaster ride.

Theory formed the foundation of much of my uninformed rebellion, and real-world circumstances revealed to me that some of the archaic and antiquated advice my dad offered me had some merit. These circumstances, as I said, included having my own child and my own attempts to protect the sanctity of his childhood, in the same manner my dad attempted to protect mine. As evidence of this, I often informed those around me that my dad committed some egregious errors in raising me by sheltering me too much. I enjoyed this presentation, until some know-it-all suggested that that means my dad did his job. “How so?” I asked. I was all ready to launch into a self-righteous screed about how this know-it-all knew nothing about my childhood, until he said, “By allowing your childhood to last as long as possible.” That response shut me up in the moment, but the more I chewed on it, the more I liked it. 

Another circumstance that proved my dad might have had some worthwhile advice arrived when I tried to get along with my co-workers, and I tried to appease my boss. My father warned me that this would prove to be more difficult than I imagined, and he was right, but I regarded that as nothing more than an inconvenient coincidence in my path to individuality.   

It’s not debatable to me that I was right about some of the things on which I planted a flag, but these circumstances led me to recognize that although my dad would never be as intelligent as I am, he lived a rich, full life by the time he became my mentor, and some of my impulsive, theoretical thoughts about the world were, in fact, wrong. (Even after gaining some objectivity on this matter, it still pains me to write that line.)

Having my own job, my own money, and my own car did a great deal to provide me the independence I needed, but I wanted more. Having my own home, and friends, and a life completely devoid of my dad’s influence gained me even more, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to be free of the figurative shackles being my dad’s son implied. Every piece of information I received about history, the culture, and the world was exciting, and new, and mine, because it stood in stark contrast to everything my dad believed. The information that confirmed my dad’s wisdom, bored me so much I dismissed it. The new age information coincided with everything I wanted to believe about the brave new world that my dad knew nothing about, and it confirmed my personal biases.

In my teens and twenties, I never asked myself the question that I now pose to those who still need to prove their parents wrong. I probably would not have had much of an answer, even if I searched for it. I probably would have said something along the lines of “Why is it so important to him that he cling to that age-old, traditional mode of thought?”

This redirect would not have been an attempt at deception or evasiveness. I just did not have the awareness necessary to answer such a question. Moreover, as a twenty-something, new age thinker, I was rarely called upon to establish my bona fides. All parties concerned considered me a righteous rebel, and the old guard was, by tradition, the party on trial. They often felt compelled to answer my questions, as opposed to forcing me to define my rebellion, and I enjoyed that because I couldn’t answer those questions.

My twenty-something definition of intelligence relied on emotion, theory, and very little in the way of facts. I thought they were facts, however, and I had the evidence to back them up. I thought I was intelligent, and more intelligent than my dad was, but the question I did not ask is what is intelligence? We asked the blogger that question, but we could also ask that same question of a person from a socioeconomic background far different from our bloggers, and we would receive an entirely different answer. How much does the answer to that question different from country to country and era to era?  

In Abraham Lincoln’s day, the ability to drop a pertinent reference from Shakespeare and The Bible in any given situation formed the perception of their intelligence. My generation believed that dropping a well-timed, pertinent quote from Friends and Seinfeld defined intelligence, coupled with a thorough knowledge of the IMBD list of Bruce Willis movies. To the next generation, it has something to do with knowing more than your neighbor does about Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga. (I concede that the latter may be an epic fail on my part.) What if someone you know, someone similar in age and background, didn’t know that Jennifer Aniston was on a TV show prior to her movie career? Would you consider them hopelessly out of touch, possibly an alien from another planet, or just plain dumb?

Even if we thought our dad was from another planet, we didn’t know where to look. Even if we did, we were never so curious that we were going to look in various areas. He somehow managed to live through the 80s and 90s without ever hearing about Seinfeld or Bruce Willis, and that led us to believe he was so hopelessly out of touch that he knew nothing. He knew nothing about computers, devices, and a third party once introduced him to what he called “these fancy, new gold records” before his death. (It took us a while to realize these gold records were CDs, compact discs, LOL! Gold records?). This lack of knowledge about pop culture and technological innovation transcended all matters, as far as we were concerned. We believed our dad was a bumbling fool, traditionalist trapped in 1950’s traditionalist modes of thought, and that he could’ve never survived in our current, more sensitive culture. He was a backwater, hick, and whatever other adjectives we apply to one trapped in a time warp of the sixties, maybe seventies, but he was definitely not ready for the nineties, the noughties, or the one-ders.

The question that the I-am-smarter-than-my-parents contingent must ask themselves is how much of the divide between our parents’ level of intelligence and ours is in service of anything? I, like the snarky and provocative blog writer, can say that I knew more about more than my dad did, but I defined that divide and most of what I used to inform that divide involved inconsequential information that didn’t serve a substantial purpose. We all refer to ourselves as the king of useless knowledge in self-deprecating terms, but as with all good jokes, we know there is an element of truth in them.  

The conditions of my dad’s life were such that he didn’t receive what most would call a quality education, but he used what he learned to prosper on a relative basis. One could say that the difference between my dad’s education and mine, and the education of the snarky contingent versus her dad’s, could be whittled down to quantity versus quality.    

In the Workplace  

Much to my shock, I began quoting my dad to fellow tenured employees, when I was well into my thirties:

“Everyone has a boss,” and “You can learn everything there is to know about the world from books, but the two words most conducive to success in life are going to revert to either: ‘Yes sir!’ and ‘No sir’.” 

I loathed those words for much of my young life, as they implied that even after escaping my dad’s management of my life –a level of authority that turned out to be far more macro than I ever considered possible– I would always have a boss. The bosses who followed my dad incidentally taught me the true difference between his level of macro management, and their definition of micro when I was out on my own, and out from under his totalitarian thumb. I would also learn that my boss’s moods would forever dictate whether my day would be a good one or a bad one, in the same manner days under my dad’s moods affected me, only tenfold.

Dad’s advice derived from his experience in the workplace, but that experience occurred in an era that required absolute, unquestioning reverence of a boss. Thanks to the new age ideas of boards and panels conducting arbitration cases for those who have been fired, the various wrongful termination lawsuits, and the threat thereof that gave life to the Human Resources department, the reverence requirement was no longer as mandatory in my era.

I would also learn that my newfound level of freedom would contain a whole slew of asterisks that included the idea that no matter how much free time I had, I would spend a great portion of my life in a workplace, under the watchful eye of an authority figure, compromising my personal definition of freedom every step of the way. “You cannot talk to your neighbor on the job, and you are required to stand here, sit there, and always look professional. Why, because that’s what we’re paying you to do.” So, if I want money to be free, I must surrender my freedom in the workplace? “Of course not. You are free to follow whatever rules you want, but we are free to fire you too. At that point, you can seek employment elsewhere and follow their rules.”

Throughout the course of my life, I’ve met those who never went through through these stages of rebellion. If you find this as incomprehensible as I did, all I can tell you is I’ve met them. They said rational things like this, in their twenties, “I never thought my parents were perfect, but I know that they always tried to steer me into doing what they believed to be the right course.”

As soon as I picked myself off the floor from laughter –believing that I was on the receiving end of a comedic bit– I realized they were serious. The fact that their upbringing was so much healthier than mine, caused me to envy them in some ways, but after chewing on that for years I realized that all of the tumult I experienced, self-inflicted and otherwise, defined my character and my current individual definition of independence.

We are our parent’s children, and at times, we feel trapped by it. Therefore, we focus on the differences. We may mention some of the similarities, but we take those characteristics for granted, and we think all parties concerned should too. Even when we reach a stage in life when we begin to embrace some elements of that trap, somewhere in our thirties and forties, we cling to the idea that we’re so different. The answers as to why these dichotomies exist within us are as confusing to us as the fact that they are a fait accompli.

When immersed in the tumult of the younger brain, trying to make some sense of our world, we may fantasize about what it would be like to have other parents. Our friend’s parents seem so normal by comparison. We think most of our problems would’ve been resolved by having their parents, or any other normal people as parents. We might even fantasize about what it might be like to have been free of all patriarchal and matriarchal influence. We consider how liberating it might be to be an orphan, until we recognize how confusing that must also be. Those without parents must lack a frame of reference, a substantial framework, or a familiar foundation from which to rebel. When we consider this, we realize that much of our current identity is comprised of various pushes and pulls of acquiescence and rebellion to our parents.

While there is some acknowledgement of the ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ dictum when we receive advice from our parents, our rebellion operates under the “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” principle when we process that advice and apply it to our era. When we acknowledge that knowledge of innovations and pop culture are superfluous that removes a substantial plank of our rebellion, until politics takes its place. We then sit down at our proverbial dinner table to resolve the political and geopolitical problems of the day, for our nation, our state, and our locale in a manner we deem substantial. It fires us up. We deliver nuke after nuke, until we realize that the effort to persuade our parents is futile. We also recognize that nestled within this effort is our juvenile, sometimes snarky need to prove them wrong. While a more substantial plane than pop culture, political discussions can be just as silly for us, as it was for our parents when they discussed such issues at their parents’ dinner table, and they considered their parents to be bumbling fools who offered nothing new to the discussion and stubbornly resisted the winds of culture change. The one import that they may have taken from their discussions with their parents, as we will with ours, over time, is that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and human nature doesn’t change as much as we may believe it does with innovations, cultural advancements, and social awareness. A kiss is still a kiss, a boss is still a boss, and the fundamental things still apply, as time goes by.

Epilogue

One final piece of advice this former-rebel-turned-individual offers to the provocative, parent-hating rebels is that we should all thank our parents for raising us. Thanking them could be one of the hardest things we ever do, as we may lose most of the provocative, parent-hating points we’ve spent our whole life accumulating, but it might turn out to be one of the best things we ever did too.

I thanked my dad for everything he did for me, and I did not add all of the qualifiers and the but-I’s I would have added years earlier. I managed to put all of my grievances behind me for the ten seconds it took me to thank him.

Was it hard? I will not bore you with the details of my rearing, but suffice it to say my dad could be a difficult man, and he played a significant role in the anger, frustration, and the feelings of resentment and estrangement I felt for much of my life.

I could go into further detail to ingratiate myself with those currently struggling with the idea that I don’t understand their dilemma. To display my empathy, I have a quote that served me well through the traumatic years: “Not every person who becomes a parent is a good person.” Modern media has made this quote much less provocative than it was when I was a kid. It’s no longer the tiny light-turned-epiphany in the darkness it was for me when I first heard it. I realized I wasn’t the only problem, and that my dad might be 50% of the problem. He was wrong as often as he was right, just like every other human on the planet. He was flawed, at times, misguided, confused, immoral, and as uncaring and narcissistic as the rest of us. Yet, we are people too, and we’re just as susceptible to being all of those things, especially in our view of them. If we were able to shake that view, most of us will see that our parents were essentially good people who tried to move past their limitations to make us better than they were.

As I sat in a pew staring at the pine box, it dawned on me that no matter how obnoxious, uncaring, self-serving, and angry my father could be at times, he was a member of an ever-dwindling, endangered species of those who truly care what happens to me. Others say they care, and some of them do, on a conditional and limited basis, but those who care comprehensively and unconditionally, I realized that day, are so few that when they’re gone, they’re gone. 

As sad as that day was, it could’ve been so much worse. If he died of the heart attack he had, in the midst of our tumult and turmoil, I would’ve been an absolute wreck. We managed to heal all wounds in the aftermath of that, and as I said I thanked him for taking the role he didn’t have to take in life, my father (he was my step-father).

Some might not be able to forget or forgive right now, because the wounds are too fresh and raw, and they might never reach a place where they can thank them. I empathize on a relative basis, but all I can tell my fellow angry offspring is when I sat before that pine box, I was glad I didn’t wait one more day. I thought about the number of people who truly care about me. I knew my friends care about me, but they have their own lives to live, and those lives will go on regardless what happens to us. We know our parents care, but some of them have a misguided, confusing, and completely wrong way of showing it. As impossible as this is to believe today, expressing some level of gratitude in whatever manner your relationship with your parents requires might be the best thing you have ever done. We might not see it that way today, but my guess is that even the most obnoxious rebel will see it one day, and my hope is that this epilogue will convince someone, somewhere that waiting one more day might be one day too late.

I dedicate this epilogue, and this near-complete compendium of my experience on this subject, as oppose to one of scholarly research, to those who need a tiny light in the overwhelming and all-consuming darkness. If this article provides some small spots of clarity for those who are confused, frustrated, and raging, then it will be worth all of the effort I put into writing it.